Stan and Tooter

Jack and Kitty really enjoy playing with each other. Not all the time, but a great deal of the time they see eye to eye on what is fun. Like pretending a laundry basket is a boat, as an example.
I was thinking yesterday how Kitty's interests really are her brother's interests... the firetruck shirts, playing with playmobil, watching the Backyardigans. Recently, she has adopted another lovey. This time a dinosaur named Tooter. So now Stan has a buddy in lovey-land. The only thing about this is that now when you lose one, you've usually lost both. Yesterday I was combing the house high and low looking for them. I finally found them in Kitty's room, hanging out together by the bookcase. Thom commented that they were probably trying to hide the evidence of whatever they were doing when they heard me coming up the stairs. You know, fanning the air to dissipate the smoke or something like that.
Kitty has become quite the opinionated toddler lately. You have to play a subtle game of reverse psychology with her to get her to do anything remotely in line with what you want. She's also taken to throwing minor tantrums. Yesterday at the end of the day, I handed her the entire bag of pepperoni because I just couldn't stand another argument about how much pepperoni she could have. She was surprised and said, "Whole bag of pepperoni... my favorite!" Thom got home soon after and having more parenting energy in that moment took on the challenge of getting at least some of the pepperoni back for future use... Kitty was quite unhappy about it. The other tactic that sometimes works is the abrupt change of topic. She'll be upset about something and then you interject with, "I'm going to sing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep." and she'll say something like, "No. Sing 'Our House!'" Thus making her forget about the circular conversation we were previously having about not being able to draw with sidewalk chalk when it is raining. I remember this stage with Jack, and Thom is really the master at redirection of topic/energy changing. I'll have to observe his techniques closely to brush up on what I've forgotten. Jack is just so amazingly reasonable about everything. I forget and think that he's always been that way.