By Tom Lutzenberg

Raising a toddler daughter is supposed to be every parent’s greatest delight. The reality is you survive the experience looking like Wiley E. Coyote after he fell off a cliff and the Roadrunner just dropped a giant rock on his head.

Toddler‐hood, or better known to many as the ‘terrible two’s,’ is complete with every growing emotion from naughtiness to the use of new words in the funniest situations. And similar to other children, my daughter is developing her language skills by leaps and bounds, often trying out multiple new words at the same time. Thus she’s learning to be part of the bigger world and to live with people around her.

One of those sources unfortunately is the common television. It’s now a regular occurrence that I am unable to sleep in any day of the week, including the weekend. My daughter has a schedule programmed into her now that at 6:45 am she wants a bottle of milk. Then she climbs out of bed, drags her miniature couch chair in front of our bedroom TV, plunks down, and watches the Wiggles musical show. After that comes some cartoon of Higgly‐town wobblepeople, and if she’s lucky the Micky Mouse Fun House show.

“MEESHKA MOOSHKA MINNI MOOTH,” She sings along every time.

And she get so engrossed in watching at times, that she forgets to blink and starts crying as her eyes starve for moisture. I literally have to stand in front of the TV and block her view to get my daughter to blink and re‐moisten her eyes.

“DADDY! MOOOVE!”

But the most noticeable thing about my daughter getting older is her temper tantrums. Like most children her age, she comes complete with an ear‐shattering crying that she can fake on a moment’s notice. It’s at just the right pitch to annoy her parents, and probably shatter glass if it went through an amplifier. And she uses this talent frequently.

TV’s turned off? Scream.

She has to eat food she doesn’t like? Scream.

Her baby sister takes her favorite toy? Scream.

Even the family cats are acting a bit neurotic now with all the high‐pitched octaves trading spaces throughout the rooms and the house. My daughter even managed to scare one of my cats so bad with an unexpected scream the poor feline fell out of his cat stand unexpectedly and got hurt. It wasn’t a graceful fall either.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel from all the eardrum shattering coming soon?    I hope so.

But then I have to remind myself, I still have my daughter’s baby sister growing into her own toddler years as soon my older one leaves them. So I’m probably looking at another three years of hearing loss before I can get back to being normal. That will be just enough time to then shift to a cardiac arrest as my girls get older and more creative in how to torture their old man.