My boy is 2

So, you're 2. You're more than 2 now - 2 and 3 months, and convinced you are not only the centre of the universe but controlling it too. It's your job to tell people what to do, when to do it and if they're not doing it exactly right. You are our self-appointed policeman. You're always on duty - from 7am until you finally give up after an hour of talking to your toy dogs in bed you don't stop talking: 'What's that mummy?' 'What's that lady doing mummy?' 'Where are you mummy?' 'What you doing mummy?' 'What does that do mummy?' I answer all your questions, so aware that this is building your world. Every question has an answer and each answer is stored away carefully, to be brought out when I'd forgotten all about it and marvel again at your memory, at your capacity to learn. You literally soak everything up, even things I don't think you're taking in. I have to remind myself sometimes that although you can't always uphold your part of the conversation you definitely understand everything. I creep in to make sure the duvet is over you at night when I go to bed, and sometimes you stir as I tuck you in - you shoot your head up and shout out 'yep!' or  'tractor!' then lie back down and sleep again, it makes me laugh that you're still reporting for duty even in your dreams.

You're aware of the dark suddenly, not necessarily scared of it, you'll sit happily in your pitch-black bedroom still, but just aware of it, the absence of light. One night I wasn't allowed to turn the light off at all, and for another hour you played in bed in the light, until I had to go upstairs and tell you to lie down as I switched the light off and gave you darkness back again. You accepted it then. At some point in the last month your imagination suddenly switched on, perhaps that's linked to the wariness of dark - before that, the world was all that you could touch and see, but now there's that extra dimension of imagination, and there could be things in the dark that you can neither see nor touch. The upside of this is the imaginary games; every spoonful of food is an aeroplane, every chair a tractor. We make journeys of thousands of miles a day to visit 'Mark and Saja', and reenact stories again and again. You are often the doctor and I'm the patient, and you earnestly consult your imaginary medicine cupboard for the right medicine before pouring it, complete with sound effects, into an imaginary spoon to make me better. 

Earlier this morning I bent down to your level to talk about something, and you held my gaze absolutely throughout our conversation, you forget how little eye contact adults give you until you talk to a toddler on their own level. You stared at me intensely, your eyes telling me the bits your vocabulary didn't stretch to, then you considered for a moment and hurled yourself at me for a hug, flinging your arms around me, but only fleetingly. Everything you do is still done in short intense bursts. A hug may only be a few seconds, but those few seconds hold the world.

You use car journeys and the time before sleep to categorise your world, put it all in order. You list your family: mummy, daddy, dog-dog, midge. Over and over - building us around you. You like boundaries too, like your baby sister.