Teresa turned 2 in August, and I didn’t have a celebratory post for her. Not that we didn’t celebrate. We did, of course, and there’s a lot about Tess to celebrate, I just didn’t document it here. But there are so many Tessisms that I want to be sure to record that I need to do a post now.
Tess has always loved music. She can sing the tunes to a whole bunch of songs now – and she’s getting to the point that she can sing the words to a lot of them, too. She also makes requests, and since Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah is one of her favorites, we frequently hear her asking, “Sing Hallelujah Doris?” That one’s a bit trickier than Happy Birthday, but some of us can do some of the parts.
One of Tess’s favorite new pastimes is playing the songs from the playlist on Michael’s electric keyboard. This is somewhat old, so the selection is interesting. There’s a very jazzy Swan Lake that has quickly become a favorite, and there are many schmaltzy 80s songs that she likes. DJ Tess is in the house.
Tess has been experimenting with not napping on some days. These are not my favorite days, but I must admit that she’s getting to the age when my other kids also quit their naps. I’m not interested in giving up my nap, though, so I think we’ll need to reach a compromise…
Tess has many people who like to talk to her, and as a consequence, she talks a lot, and can say multisyllable words without trouble. The other day I noticed that she had something of Hannah’s, so I asked her, “What are you doing, Tess?” She looked up and said, “Lookin’ at Hannah’s vocabulary notebook!” It was very clear and really cute. She also has any number of useful phrases, like, “What’s happening, Mama?” or, “What you doing, Mama?” and, “What’s wrong?” Sometimes when I ask her a yes or no question and she wants to answer yes, she’ll say, “Of course!”
Tess has adopted Naomi’s doll (with Naomi’s blessing), St. Rose of Lima – she of eyepatch fame. St. Rose of Lima no longer sports the eyepatch, but Tess doesn’t seem to mind that, when she closes her eyes, the right eye rolls to reveal a socket with some inner doll eye workings. Also, Tess is not a doll name purist, unlike Naomi, and has given the doll the nickname Lima. She carries Lima with her pretty much everywhere. I finally designated a basket in the dining room as the basket where Lima sleeps during meals because she was in grave danger of getting extremely dirty with Tess’s food. And you can’t just set Lima down on the FLOOR! Good grief! What a suggestion! You can see Lima in the first picture of this post, and you can see she’s being clutched in the photo below. No need to set babies down for piano playing.
Lima, now on her second young mother, is definitely a bit worse for the wear. She’s got the eye problem still – now without a patch – and her once-white undergarments are now a medium grey. Tess objects strongly to Lima wearing clothes for longer than 30 seconds or so. Despite piles of potential doll clothes, Lima travels about in her grubby undergarments.
Lima’s plastic parts are also pretty dirty. Tess doesn’t worry about this at all. What she does worry about is Lima’s whereabouts -- “Where Lima go?” is a frequent (and dreaded, if we don’t know the answer!) question here. We went on a daytrip without Lima one time, and the number of times we had to sing Happy Birthday in order to distract Tess from her absence was a large one.
More phrases Tess knows now: “I don’t want it.” “YOU get it for me.” When Michael got home one day recently, he asked her how her day was. She thought for a moment, then replied, “It was good.” She’s also taken to asking him how his day is. Okay, that’s really incredibly darling.
When asked how old she is, she either admits to being two, or says, “I’m ten.” Yeah. Small for your age, aren’t you? She also says things like, “I’m not a baby, I’m Tessie!”
Tess is the boss of her siblings. They can’t seem to stand up to her toddler persistence. They can’t take it when she cries.
They are spoiling her rotten. They got used to Tess the Inexorable before she could really understand, and they’re still working within that framework.
I have to coach them to talk to her, since now she can understand almost everything that’s happening. Here’s my line: “Instead of screaming MOM GET TESS SHE’S GOING TO GET MY PENMANSHIP,
you say to Tess, ‘No thanks, Tess, please don’t touch that.’” I know, it sounds crazy – she’s two! – but it actually works most of the time.
It is really, really, amazingly cute to see her growing up, though. Despite her sometimes destructive inexorability, her siblings love, love, love her, and she feels the same way about them. Each one has a special relationship with her, and often her first words on waking up are, “Where Hannah? Where Mimi? Where Simeon?”
I could go on and on and on, but I should probably stop here so that there’s a chance that someone will actually read to the end of this post. We love Tessie!
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