Two-year-olds are stubborn, irrational, demanding, bossy, and have hair-trigger tempers. That’s why they call them terrible, of course. But what you don’t hear about quite as often is how CUTE these little devils are. Like, cartoonishly cute sometimes. This is why we don’t have bands of feral two-year-olds roaming the streets: they earn their keep by being fiendishly adorable.

They are in between babies and big kids, which is what makes them so sweet and so frustrating. They want to do everything themselves, even the things they can’t and shouldn’t do themselves. One moment they look like your familiar little baby, and suddenly the light shifts and you see some new creature – who’s that kid? When we’re at home, Miles looks like such a big boy to us and seems to grow another inch every night. Then we get to the playground and realize that he is still pretty small next to the real big kids.

I am loving watching his imagination begin to bloom. He is taking more of an interest in stuffed animals and little figurines. He makes them kiss each other on the mouth, which is seriously cute, and I have no idea where he picked up that idea because I didn’t show it to him! I love to catch him in those moments of solitary play, pressing the plastic face of a 3″ high Elmo into the mouth of a big fluffy stuffed puppy dog.

He still loves to draw, and now varies the marks he makes, doing big loopy circles and little staccato dots. He asks me to draw a face for him over and over again, always requesting that it has “teeth,” and the other day I talked him through drawing his first first face, complete with eyes and hair. I swooned.

He is really into baking for real (we make cookies and muffins) and pretending to make dinner. He loves to help clean the floor (I let him take a turn at the steam mop with the steam turned off) and do the dishes (close the dishwasher door and press the start button). He is enamored of the home movie playlist I made for him on youtube and he reenacts his favorite ones, complete with dialogue – he loves it when I play along by saying my lines.

He’s also adding a lot of words and phrases to his vocabulary again, and I adore the tentative way he floats a new word – “more pine… apple?” and grins when I confirm that he did it.

He even makes me laugh sometimes when he’s being naughty, because he has figured out how to sneak around, VERY un-sneakily, behind my back. I shouldn’t find this funny, but all parents do, right? It certainly shows creativity. He knows he is not allowed to open the dishwasher, so when I catch him doing it, he pushes me out of the kitchen so he can do it when I’m not watching. As if, kid. As if.