We know drama in this household. And while it’s occasionally funny to see the sheer amount of fury and rage that can be contained inside a tiny body, I sometimes fear for the future. There are just over three years between the two girls. At some point in time, they will both be volatile, hormonal, freaked out teenagers (like I once was) and I could just weep thinking of those days. Already, Breanna has learned a little phrase from Hayley: “Go ‘way”. We hear it regularly.

One of the most frustrating things in her life is that she wants to do everything herself but can’t actually do them all and so she lives with the internal battleground. She’ll start getting frustrated because, for instance, she can’t get a shirt on. She start stamping a foot or grunting angrily. I’ll bend down to help her. And then I hear, “NO NO NO! Go ‘way!” and she runs away. Then she gets angry because I leave her alone and she’s ticked off that I’m not helping her. Round and round we go in the endless circle of I-can-do-it-no-I-can’t-no-don’t-help-me-why-aren’t-you-helping-me?!

Eventually she hits peak tantrum level. And that’s when it’s hard not to feel a combination of amusement at the drama and terror at what that will look like at age 15. Because right now when Breanna has a tantrum, it usually ends with her running away, possibly shrieking, and then she will throw herself across something – the couch, a bed, or even onto the floor. It’s not so she can continue tantruming, rather it’s done in that teenage drama queen huff, and then she just lies there, head buried in her arms, and possibly thinking that there is nothing in this world as horribly unfair as a very lame PARENT.

I believe that particular photo was after I refused to let her have chocolate ice cream for breakfast. I am an oppressive mother, what can I say?

I look at her and I look at Hayley with her own brand of high drama flair and I can see the future with one or the other rolling her eyeballs mightily, huffing, “Mo-oooom” and flouncing to throw herself across her bed, pissed off that her damn mother won’t take her to the mall to get her bellybutton pierced like all her friends are doing.