Hopers the Destroyer

She's been called that name before. It was a loving nickname blessed upon her as a baby by the ladies in the gym childcare. She learned how to move about early, often and quickly. Hopers went after toys and other children with little regard for safety or cleanliness. Her zeal for action and mischief brought about this label.Of course in those days, she was much smaller, though certainly not any less....um, vivacious.

Now she's two. Ohhh yeah. TWO. Two-year-old. The mere grouping of those words causes a stab of fear in the heart of any parent. Now my vivacious but sweet little darling has once again become...

Hopers the Destroyer. Part TWO.

Just yesterday, I decided to clean up her very messy and toy-strewn room. This involves putting the blocks back in the block bin, the dishes and food back in the dishes and food bin, etc., etc., you get the idea. Hopers wanders in just as I am finishing up, a toothy grin on her face. "Help keen up?" she says to me in her sweet voice.
"All done," I say, and stride out of the room in search of another disasterous section of the house.
Moments later, I hear several crashes and the familiar "clink, clink, clink" of plastic toys whooshing across the carpet. Not only has she dumped out all of her toy bins and smeared them into every corner, but she has climbed up on top of her play kitchen and pulled the books and toys off of the wall shelves, too. The space on the wall over her bed where I lovingly painted the Bible verse from Jeremiah 29:11 and hung block letters of her name now says "H-P-E". The letter "O" is crookedly dangling from a screw underneath.

I think I just noticed a gray hair.

That evening I sat down in the front yard to plant some more seeds in Noodle's and my little garden project. We have several small containers with potting soil and a variety of herbs and flowers planted in them. Only, just after we planted them the first time, Hopers dumped them out. We re-planted them and, just as the tiny green shoots were popping through the dark earth, Hopers decided to dump them out. Again. So this time, we re-re-planted. New seeds. Moments later? Hopers steps on them, trips, crushes the few plants that were still alive from before, and dumps out the freshly sowed seeds.

And...there's another gray hair.

There's more to this eventful day, of course. You see, I had decided to create these fun little charts for the girls. For encouragement and as a way to document their progress. For Noodle, I made a Reading Chart. For every book she reads to me, she gets to place a sticker on her chart. Then, for every sticker, she earns 15 minutes of game time, either on the computer or the Wii. She was instantly excited by this and read 3 books to me in the first day. I thought Hopers would be jealous by all this sticker-ing and such, that I decided to make her a chart also. A Potty Chart. She had been having issues the in past two weeks with multiple accidents, and so I thought that putting stickers on a chart might motivate her. I got a large piece of paper and drew the lines in bright marker colors with flowers for decorations. I proudly taped it to her door, helped her use the potty, and then gave her a cute sticker to place on the first square. Moments later (is this phrase starting to sound familiar, or is it just me...), she rips the chart from her bedroom door and tears it into four pieces, declaring, "I don't wike it!"

Sigh. I'm gonna need more tape.

True to her two-year-old nature, today she does "wike it" but will only put stickers on it where she chooses (this includes directly on top of other stickers and never placing them in the square designated for that day).

And then there's my little darling who once went down to sleep oh-so-easily, but now beats on me when I try to rock her, shouts the words to Rock-A-Bye Baby while arching her back and kicking as I hold her, and takes her Pull-Up off sometime in the night to pee in her bed.

I suppose if she were a boy and I were a different parent, I might shake my head, smile, and say, "Boys will be boys!" But she's not and I'm not. She's Hopers the Destroyer. And I love her.