The amount of happiness that Juniper packs into her day boggles my mind. She is constantly bubbling over with smiles and giggles. She finds joy in the simplest things - a weed, a bird flying overhead, a fork between her teeth, an unexpected sneeze, an old sticker, a silly hat, a good book and a Juni-sized chair. She greets every one of her stuffed animals with a big bear hug and a snuggle and perhaps even a nose kiss. Sometimes Mama and Daddy get that lucky as well.
But of course, being of a toddlerish age necessitates a certain tempestuousness of temperment, a mercurial moodiness that strikes without warning. And, on occasion, Juniper obliges. Suddenly she is overflowing with opinions and preferences and demands. Gone are the days of the helpless, blissfully compliant baby, content to be moved thither and yon at my will. These days, if her opinions are not considered, her preferences not heeded, her demands not made manifest forthwith, she will unleash the Angry Face. No tantrums. No screaming or pounding of the flooring or gnashing of the teeth. The Angry Face. Eyes harden, brows lower, jaw stubbornly sets into infinite displeasure. This is not the woe-is-my-life, sulking in the corner look that can accompany rainy days or truncated naps or blocks that just refuse to stack properly. No, the Angry Face is directed AT a person. The eye daggers of her contempt fly straight into the sentimental goo that is my heart (her own existence being the very cause of that goo in the first place).
Yet before you can say Dr. Jekyll, the seething, footie-pyjama'd volcano of toddler rage is gone, and she is giggling over the booger she has wiped on my leg, leaving me to vaguely question the parental wisdom of that which angered Her Toddlerness - removing that choking hazard from her grasp, feeding her a green bean, turning left instead of right, bringing her into a world in which she can trip on her own feet and bump her head.
But the self-doubt is short-lived, because she is insistently shoving a book into my hand (a means of communication that we had to practice after I got whapped upside the head one too many times with an Olivia board book) and if that book is not read this instant, there will be hell to pay. And apparently hell involves a lot of whining and quivering of the lower lip.
For the past several weeks, I have tried to capture this extremely elusive Angry Face with my camera. However, while extraordinarily effective, it is notoriously fleeting and camera-shy. Here is the moment just after an Angry Face (this particular one was prompted by my callously allowing her to shove dirt in her mouth,which it turns out, tastes yucky). While the chubby cheeks have relaxed and a smile is already dancing around the lips , you can see that the brow hasn't quite unfurrowed yet, the eyes are still flinty and judgmental.