Boxing Match

There is no limit to the amount of excitement one can glean from the humble cardboard box.

A plane, a bed, a boat, some form of car, a postbox, a racetrack. A seesaw, if not entirely deliberately. Less imaginatively (but no less gleefully) a place to explode out of screaming, like a moll in a gangster's cake.

I'd plumb forgotten what fun boxes are. Two years of annual house moves had rather jaded my view of boxes. I could take or leave them. F has thankfully reinvigorated my love affair with their possibilities. A whole hour of this afternoon vanished inside one today. Then we tried finger painting.

Not so successful - too tired to engage, and F is also amazingly fastidious about keeping her hands clean. "Oh no!" she said, holding up a dripping red palm and looking horrified. It's not her first impression of a murderer, either. Tears followed shortly after. I guess we should have stayed in the box.

She says "Oh no!" a lot at the moment. It means something has gone awry and needs fixing. Food falling on the floor, cars rolling over the edge of things, lego farmers not staying upright when rammed with a tractor, F herself toppling over, mummy or daddy not doing as they're told. Crumbs, just crumbs in general, are "Oh no!" when observed. When I hear it, it's usually a summons to action in some form. Now and again it's just narrative for whatever scrapes her tiny plastic Peppa Pig is being put through, but you can't take that on trust.

There is a slight hint of the storm to F at the moment. She's not been well, with a nasty cough for a week or so. It's kept her awake at night and she's not been eating as well as she usually does. The days find her tired and temperamental.

Or is it just the approaching monsoon season of the Terrible Twos? She's point blank refused to have a bath for the last two days, something she's usually a big fan of. Trying to scrape a yelling and paint-spattered infant into the tub, as we did today, is quite the feat of stamina. F beat us. Also a white jumper and two duck-shaped flannels.

Generally, any attempt to balk her increasingly clearly-manifested will result in outright fury now. F will tell me what she wants to eat, and when. If I don't agree that half an hour after breakfast is the right time for a large handful of pretzel sticks, for example, I'd better have a pretty good reason to back it up.

Our current fix-all no-you-can't-eat-that-now excuse is 'We're saving it for later'. F accepts it as tolerable. We had a bag of crisps the other night, and after eating some, we put the rest 'away for later' (i.e. we were going to eat them once she was asleep). Grudgingly, F took this at face value and left to play in her room. Mummy rustled the bag, to pinch a final one, and was immediately confronted by a screaming personification of moral outrage, tears in her eyes, accusing finger pointing at the bag.

Oh good. She can smell our lies. I can feel the next few years getting increasingly complicated, and it feels like migraine.