Up, Up and Away
Posted By jayna on March 18, 2011
“Everything you can do, I can do . . . too.”
That seems to be the motto between the girls lately. If E jumps off the bed and crashes to the floor, MJ must follow. If MJ starts stacking canned goods from the pantry on our easily cracked tile floor, E must build a rival tower next to her. Totally expected, total pain in the rear end.
Siblings. First you expect them to entertain each other, and then you wonder why someone got hurt.
E’s newest thing, now that we’ve been able to venture outside without freezing to death, is learning to climb trees. Unfortunately for her, our neighborhood only has a small green space in the middle that is filled with pine trees. Pine trees, for the record, aren’t the easiest things to climb. But, she tries her little heart out, emerging sticky and covered in bark and pine needles. Surprisingly, she has learned how to climb extremely high – almost made it to the top today – and loves to find a perch far up and call out to her sister that she is in the tree.
MJ is often unamused.
“Up!” She’ll demand, yanking on my pants and throwing herself at my legs. At first, I thought it was cute and propped her up on the first branch. I held her waist as she stood up and grabbed the next one. Up she pulled, and started climbing away, all 23lbs of her, hauling butt up, up and away. There she went, nearly out of my reach, hanging on for dear life as I tried to pry her hands off the branch.
There was screaming and kicking and tantruming. Sap covered and scraped by branches, we emerged. I set her down, she glared at me and immediately made straight for the trunk of that tree.
I have three inches before she can reach and I have to really panic.
Yes, we are going through the whatever you can do I can do too phase and it is hard to watch sometimes but inspiring too. My one year old likes to show us how he can count (like his big sister) (and his numbers are all over the place but we’re kind of in awe that he’s memorized them), how he can walk down steps (even though his legs aren’t quite long enough) and how he too can climb trees (when we hoist him up).
Meanwhile my daughter is having a hard time with it all because all the big sister worship is not easy. She has to be pretty firm with him when she needs space and this leads to squabbles.
Anyway, I wanted to comment that the photo didn’t show up in the post for some reason.