The Great Orange Meltdown of 2015

We are a little over a month away from having a 3 year old in our house.  Which means only one thing.

We are smack-dab in the middle of the so-called "terrible twos." 

I say "so-called" because she hasn't been consistently "terrible."

But she has her moments.

Each and every day Jackie learns the hard lesson that she is not the center of the universe.  This lesson apparently needs to be learned over and over and over until it finally starts to sink in.  It still hasn't sunk in.

Which was made abundantly clear on one cold Saturday morning in January.

For weeks, Jackie and Kat have been devouring those little Halo/Cutie oranges.  I can't peal them fast enough.  Luckily they are easy to peal :)

It was a normal Saturday morning.  Jackie was up at 6 AM and ready for a snack. Never-mind that the previous morning saw me trying to drag a sleepy, cranky child out of bed at 7 AM so we could make it out the door on time.   Everyone else was enjoying the fact that it was Saturday and were sleeping.

Anyway, as per her normal request, Jackie asked for an orange.  Rarely do I refuse this request, because...it's fruit!

I did what I always do.  Pealed the orange while those little brown eyes watched and she sucked on her little thumb.

After throwing the peal away, I broke it in half so she can pick off the individual sections herself.  

Again, this is the way we always did it.  I pealed it, broke in half and she enjoyed the citrus-y goodness.  

Oh no.  Not today. Because sometime between Friday night (her last orange) and Saturday morning at 6 AM, Jackie decided that she did NOT want me to break the orange in half.  

That was now to be her job.  

I had no prior knowledge of this change.  No memo.  No warning.  No previous reason to think I might be making a GIANT mistake.

But mistake it was...

She proceeded to scream and cry like I had just cut her baby doll in half and fed it to the dogs.  She REFUSED to eat that orange, and just sat in her chair and cried, screamed for me to get her another one.

You know what doesn't mix well with a screaming, drama-filled toddler?  

A stubborn mommy.

She did not get a new orange.  I put the "inedible orange" in a baggie for her sister to eat later and she learned the all-to-common lesson that "Jackie is not the center of the universe." Again.   

Although, now I had received the memo; oranges are NOT to be broken in half from this point forward.  I gladly shared the news with Ethan as he poked his sleepy head out of the bedroom to see what horrible thing could have possibly caused Jackie to become such a sobbing "hot mess."

"Seriously, an orange??"