I have been blessed with the opportunity to watch my two-year-old niece a few times a week this past month. Like Alice slipping through the looking glass, each experience provided a wonderland of characters and introduced me to this world of childhood in the millennium. This two-year-old bundle of comedy has provided the following stops in this journey. Join me as we go down the rabbit hole to the retelling of adventures, my friends…
Adventure 1-Playground Protocol: After taking my niece to a local park where the mothers were rocking Gucci purses and Chanel sunglasses while their little Liam’s were decked out in Burberry and eating sand, I took note of the social mores. Plans for future play dates between their children were made between the mothers who more resembled each other. The list of events for one of the children included reading group at the library twice a week, gracing certain playgrounds with their presence two other times of the week and language lessons for the other odd day. Mind you, this woman’s child was barely three years old.
I just don’t know if I was perturbed because I wish I could spend my weeks like that or if I was just coveting her Prada sandals…
Adventure 2-Language Creation: I realized we were creating a new language when I decided to take her to one of my complex’s swimming pools. While getting her in her bathing suit, she insisted we were going to “Go paddle!”. I just nodded, thinking swimming was a word she did not want to say. My sister provided me with the Rosetta Stone to my niece’s language once she told me that the instructor in my niece’s swimming class taught her to “Paddle-paddle, kick-kick”, when in the water. Thus “swimming” = “paddle”. Now, our conversation to go to the pool is:
Me: “Wanna paddle?”
Niece: “Sure! Paddle!”
Adventure 3-Enjoying Children’s Cartoons: I have been introduced to the world of ‘Wow! Wow! Wubbzy’, ‘SpongeBob 
SquarePants’ and ‘Yo Gabba Gabba’, to name a few. Since my niece is two and her attention span is not much longer than it takes to sneeze, I would find myself getting caught up in the story lines and wanting to finish the shows while she was ready for something else. And yes, I laughed out loud multiple times to some of these cartoons. I am not ashamed.
Now, after some long and fulfilling days of auntie/niece bonding time, I wanted to take a nap. I could never get her to fall asleep and feelings of dejection became familiar when she would leave for home completely awake while I was ready to pass out. It came to be that I would measure the success of how fun the day was to how tired I could make her. After a few eight hour days of jam packed events including walking for an hour, “paddling”, coloring, playground antics, watching movies and cartoons, she would still be bouncing awake. As of this week I can now declare success: I got her to nap. My work here is done.
