The Toddler who cried, "MOM!"

My baby girl has one of the sweetest voices. She can melt your heart with her little, “night, night Mommy.” And I can’t hear her say, “Elmo cake.” Enough. I kept asking her, “What kind of cake did we get?” However, when I am recovering from a migraine I can’t help but compare her voice to one of the chipmunks.

I was sitting on the couch recovering from one such migraine (a whole other story) and she kept repeating over and over, “Mom, color on paper?”

“No Sammy do not color on paper.”

“MOM, color on paper?”

“No Sammy, put the marker down.”

“MOM! COLOR ON PAPER!

“Fine!” I reply in my best parenting moment.

All I wanted to do was sit on the couch and nurse my still throbbing head. Although she is now coloring on the paper, she has not stopped talking. I manage through some Zen parenting to tune out the particularly high pitch of her voice so I can finally relax.

After a while I notice that the squeaking is coming at a much more rapid pace and the volume has increased. I look over at my Mom who is sitting on the couch next to me, “What is she saying?” So we stop, and try to make out the latest ranting. Soon it becomes clear what she is wailing,

“I’m STUCK!”

We both look over in her direction and notice that in her attempt to get down from the barstool where she was coloring paper, she got her little body lodged under the armrest. Her feet are dangling and her arms are thrust up over her head. My Mom ran over and disentangled her from the chair.

I wondered to myself, how long had she been yelling to me and how long had I been tuning her out. If only she could save her precious words for when they really mattered this would not have happened. It seemed to me a classic case of the toddler who cried, “MOM!”