Toddlers Are Demons But They're More Fun Than Babies

Why I'm actually kind of enjoying the toddler phase

Toddlers are better than babies. This might be a controversial statement, but, in my experience, it’s true. 

I didn’t dislike parenting a baby, per se, but looking after an infant was hard on my physical and mental health and put a ding in almost all of my personal relationships. Anybody who tells you that having a baby will not fuck with your life for at least a year is rich enough to hire full-time help or lucky enough to live near people who will give them full-time help for free.

I still get choked up every time I have to go through my 15-month-old daughter’s clothes and put away the ones she’s outgrown. I still look back on photos from when she was only a few months old and get emotional at how quickly time has passed. She’s stopped using pacifiers cold turkey, and I’m delaying putting them in storage even though they’re cluttering up my house because I don’t want to uncork more wistful emotions.

However: I’m enjoying my daughter as a toddler much more than I enjoyed her as an infant. There’s simply more to like— she’s funnier, more interactive, and less confusing. When I take my toddler to the doctor, the doctor isn’t like, “Make sure to put her to sleep on her back, because if you don’t, she might randomly die. Don’t fall asleep holding her on your chest even though it feels good and right, because if you do that, she might randomly die. Don’t feed her honey, because she might randomly die.” 

Toddler care is more intuitive than infant care. The things that might hurt my 15-month-old would also hurt an adult. It’s refreshing, in a way, to finally feel like I’m taking care of a human and not a fragile little alien. When Juniper was a baby, my primary job was to keep her alive. With a toddler, my main job is to keep her from hurting herself. 

What can be done about this? Nothing. That’s another great thing about toddlers– things happen on their own timeline. We can lead them to water, but we can’t make them not dump the water out onto their pants.

I can read my daughter books about how important it is to brush her teeth every day or share or learn what sound a cow makes, but she will continue to smack the books away and unroll entire rolls of toilet paper until the thunderstorm of her brain calms down enough to process what it means to sit still and pay attention.

I can dress her in clean, warm clothing and the second she has a few unsupervised seconds she will rip her socks and shoes off and army crawl through a random piece of squashed fruit on the ground. Eventually she will learn not to do these things, but I can’t force her. 

I can prepare her a hot nutritious meal and she can take two bites and pour the rest directly into the dog’s mouth and refuse to eat anything but Yogis for the rest of the day. I can’t force her to eat. Is this frustrating? Yes. Is it funny? Also yes.

I can speak to my toddler in complete sentences and point to things and say the words that go with the things, and she will learn some of the words and forget others, and still other words she will only use when she feels like it. I know that she knows the words “water” and “aqua.” I also have witnessed her, dozens of times, insist that the wet substance that comes out of the faucet is called “AH-pmm.” She’ll stop using made-up words when she’s ready. 

Juniper is talking, but I don’t understand most of the words she uses. The confidence with which she rattles off smooth strings of nonwords leads me to believe that she thinks that she’s speaking complete sentences. When she waves her hand in the direction of several objects and says something like “Teeka amomm a la doo dut. Kabah. Tee ta.” and I fail to give her what she wants, she looks at me like I’m the idiot. What can I do about this besides pick up each individual object and slowly pronounce what it is? And then watch her look me in the eye and repeat her nonsense sentence again? And then start hitting her high chair like a judge trying to restore order in the court when I don’t understand her? Nothing! 

Is this frustrating? Yes. Is it funny? Also yes.

Juniper has been taught how to use some basic baby signs, like holding her hands up on either side of her head and rotating her palms slightly several times to indicate she’s “all done,” tapping her fingertips of both hands together at chest height to indicate she wants “more” and touching her mouth with her fingertips of her right hand when she is hungry. The “all done” sign, in particular, gets a lot of play. She uses it all the time when she doesn’t want to be doing something anymore, and acts furious when the command isn’t respected. She uses it while she’s in the middle of having her diaper changed, when she doesn’t want to be in her stroller anymore, when she’s mad at one of her toys. All done! The longer “all done” is ignored the more angry she gets. At least “all done” indicates that we’re heading toward a tantrum and that if we’re, say, shopping, now might be a good time to head toward checkout. 

One thing I didn’t fully grasp before I became a parent was that there is no stopping toddlers from doing anything apart from their physical limitations and caretakers’ ability to restrain them. My daughter cannot walk down stairs— she can’t walk at all, yet— but that does not stop her from making a beeline to our front porch if I set her down in the yard and turn my back for a second. She covers so much ground in such a short period of time. The other day I caught her at the top of the stairs, positioning herself to crawl down head first, with absolutely no concept of how poorly that would work out. I don’t know how she made it halfway across the yard and to the top of the stairs in the moments I had turned my back. My toddler moves faster than a haunted doll. 

How do you stop a toddler from trying to hurt themselves? You don’t. You apprehend them before they’re able to pull it off. Frustrating? Yes. Scary? Yes. Funny? Yes. I appreciate the humor inherent in all of the very ill-advised ways my daughter who doesn’t understand gravity throws caution to the wind.

How do you stop a toddler from crying? You don’t. When Juniper is in a bad enough mood, the only way to stop her from screaming and thrashing around is to physically remove her from whatever circumstances are upsetting her and hope the change of scenery distracts her from what set off the crying. Sometimes I just have to remove dangerous objects from her immediate vicinity and just wait for her to get bored of crying. Sometimes when she’s having the worst time that anybody has ever had, ever, I’ll text my husband about what preceded the tantrum.

“She’s crying because I won’t let her play with a plastic dog poop bag.”

“She’s angry because I wouldn’t let her climb her chest of drawers.”

“She wanted to eat dog food and I took it away.”

Sometimes I look at my toddler and I think, with awe and appreciation, Wow, I made her. Other times I look at my daughter with fear and think, Oh god, I made her. That’s what’s so great about toddlers. You love them and fear them at once.

Like many toddlers, my child is a terrorist and a demon, and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anything. She’s funny while she’s terrorizing me and/or acting demonic, in much the same way house cats are funny when they pretend they’re torturing and killing a wad of paper. It’s the futility for me. Both house cats and toddlers are too little to do all of the evil they intend. If we woke up one morning and the house cats and toddlers were the size of refrigerators, we’d all be dead by noon.

Toddlers are little people, people with no ability to regulate their emotions and limited ability to communicate their needs, and as a result they spend most of their time in states of elation or rage. Understanding that toddlerhood is something to be withstood and not overcome has been freeing. Eventually, Juniper won’t throw her shoe across the back seat in a rage when I don’t let her hold the car keys while I’m driving the car. But for now, it’s kind of funny that she does.

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