Miss Richter

My mom and I share a lot of things in common. One of them is the fact that we have very high highs and very low lows. It's not like being bi-polar. It's more like we get really excited about things like happy little puppies and then one little thing happens and we briefly flip out. And we have this remarkable ability to go from one end of the extreme to the other in about 12 seconds. It has earned my mom the nickname Mrs. Richter.

t's probably real annoying for the men in our lives. Well, I KNOW it's really annoying for the men in our lives who try to problem solve when we just want to vent. And annoying as our freak-outs are, they are pretty fleeting, as neither of us like to stay down for too long. And we're worth hanging around for the high parts!

Apparently, in addition to dark hair and butt-white skin, this is a very strong genetic trait. Dani, who looks like a mini version of me and my mom, has now been showing us that she might want to live up to the nickname, Miss Richter.

Dani's generally the happiest little girl in the world. She is so easy to make laugh and smile and, as I have said numerous times before, loves to be with people. But sometimes, out of nowhere, she freaks out. Just today, she wanted to grab the tablecloth and pull it down. When I took it out of her hands, she started to protest and scream. I put her on the ground, she looked up at me and, completely forgetting how I ruined her life, gave me a gaping grin. This has happened so many other times. Miss Richter.

Also, she tends to get easily frustrated when something doesn't work the way she wants it too. Not that Jack didn't, but he would tend to assess and observe the situation and figure it out. Not Dani. She thinks that by screaming at it, she can get what she wants. She is very determined to get things and I predict that she will either crawl earlier than Jack or just get really pissed off about it and scream when she can't. When you remove her from the situation, she quickly gets happy again.

She also gets overwhelmed when she is overstimulated. She will grab a toy and, as usual start to try to eat it. She makes all sorts of happy noises as she plays until, in an instant, the gurgles and shrieks of delight morph into anger and screams of frustration. We pull the toy from her death grip and she complains that we are taking it away. When we remove it from her line of sight, she slowly she takes a little while before she calms down and is happy as a clam.

Our little Miss Richter is (mostly) a whole lot of fun. The highs are beyond great and the lows are brief. She lights up our lives. And she's going to drive some poor guy totally crazy!