A week ago I said to Christina: "I don't even know why they call the twos 'terrible'! Olive's doing great: she's happy, bright, doing way better than expected with potty training, and a she's joy to be around. She's way more fun now than she ever was as an infant."

As true as it all was, perhaps it's never wise to announce your hubris to the world.

In the last week, we've had:

• three days in which Olive was too sick to go to daycare
• on one of those days, we had to go to the US Embassy and deal with the security there
• insistence that she has to wear a dress over her normal clothes, every day, on pain of tantrum¹
• complete refusal to wear a jacket outside, despite single-digit temperatures
• at least one unpredictable tantrum a day, mostly about unsolvable Toddler Problems²
• a new interest in hitting people in the face, coupled with extreme sadness when we tell her no, she can't do that
• the incident when she dropped her tablet and broke the touchscreen, depriving herself (and us!) of the simplest way to distract her for an hour

It's been a stressful week! But you know what? Despite all that's happened, I stand by my statement. Parenting a two-year-old is more fun, more interesting, more rewarding than parenting a little child, even if it's also more stressful and occasionally more insane.

Olive is a great kid in a lot of ways. One of these is that she really is that one-in-a-thousand child who required almost no active potty training from us. What little technique we have came from a book called Oh Crap, but really, Olive had been letting us know she was ready before we started, and then she was super into it once we got going. There have only been a handful of accidents in the month we've been doing this so far, and it's taken more effort to clean up Olive's emotions after each of them than to clean up the laundry. She's very proud to have taken to this like a big girl right away, so there's a lot of shame and embarrassment when she loses track.

She loves to play hide-and-seek now, primarily as a seeker. This can be a bit tricky, because her preferred way to initiate the game is to tell me to hide, and then start chasing immediately. I have to run, then get her momentarily distracted, then ninja-vanish while her eyes are off me. I'll admit, this is pretty fun for me as well, particularly as she's still not all that observant, so I can get away with hiding places as simple as "behind the door of the next room".

She knows the names of all the numbers from 1-10 in both English and German. She's less sure about the proper sequence in which they appear, and how counting works: she'll sometimes point to objects in a group one at a time and count them as "one, two, F, O, F, O". That said, when she's not actively attempting to count something, I've heard her recite the whole sequence in order with only a few extra instances of the number four³.

She's developed a real interest in doing things all by herself. At least, if she wants to do something, she wants to attempt it on her own. For menial chores like the routine donning and doffing of various articles of clothing, she's more likely to hold her limb out imperiously and demand "Daddy help".

Of all her recent behaviors, though, the one that touches me the most is that she's becoming increasingly actively managing her own emotional state. There have been a few times when she's been sad for one reason or another, and instead of just crying, she's come to me very gravely and asked for a hug. When she does this—when it successfully helps her calm down and cheer up—my heart melts.

This week has shown me why someone might call a two-year-old terrible. I think they'd be wrong to do so, though: there are difficult moments to be sure, but they're embedded in the context of a kid who's cooler and more fun every day. I feel lucky every day.