My 24-month-old is now 2

Last weekend was one of the greatest because my precious Sofia Simone Van De Voorde finally turned 2 on Saturday.
The best thing about this birthday is that generally accepted parental accounting principles no longer require me to stand like a dummy in grocery store checkout aisle when the cashier says, “Awww, how old is she?”
By the time my brain could convert her age into months, an embarrassing amount of time would pass, and then I’d have to incorporate packs of Dentyne Ice to help me tally.
And you know what? When I’d get back to the car to check my math, I’d usually discover that whatever figure I came up was wrong anyway, and the cashier was never the wiser.
Calculating her age for strangers may be the only thing that’s easier about having a 2-year-old. Her mother and I have already seen signs of “the terrible twos” creeping into her once pleasant disposition.
Right now, everything is “mine, mine, mine.” Unfortunately, when she’s referring to the national debt, the problem of our decaying environment, and the responsibility to take care of her mom and dad when we become incontinent, she’s absolutely right.
Then there are the tantrums. You do not want to be witness to the scenes she makes when the stock market drops a couple hundred points or if I don’t put enough olives in her 3:00 p.m. martini.
People always say they grow up so fast, and that is definitely true. It’s an unstoppable fact of life, but I want to do my best to avoid contributing to any premature growing up.
I took her to McDonald’s once, but when her mother informed me that the hormone-injected chickens they use to make their McNuggets could be contributing to the early onset of puberty in American children, I stopped.
I know I can’t protect her from every bad thing in life, but what’s the harm in trying?
Take for example the following absolutely true story: We took her to her first political rally a couple weeks ago in Asheville because she’s obsessed with Barack Obama. When she sees his campaign stickers on cars or hears his voice on the radio, she yells, “Obama, yeah!” or “Obama, USA!” We thought it would be fun to take her to see him in person.
It was pretty hot that day and we had to walk a long, long way up and down mountainous North Carolina terrain to get to the stadium where 15,000 other people were already waiting to hear the senator speak. It was a crowd amazing in its diversity. There were young families and old families; black, white, latin and mixed families; teen-agers in hand-painted T-shirts, veterans in leather, and blue-haired senior citizens. It was the type of America I want for my daughter.
Along the way, there were a few people holding up John McCain/Sarah Palin signs and yelling at the throngs of Obama supporters making their way into the venue. Most of them were just fine politely exercising their civil liberties, but one of these “protesters,” an earnestly dimwitted teen-ager, spotted my sweaty little family and yelled, “Obama supports the murdering of infant children!”
I wanted to cover my sweet little toddler’s ears and shield her from the lunacy. What type of person, no matter what kind of bull honky they believe, would yell that type of thing around a child?
All my wife would allow me to do was give the kid a dirty look. And I gave him all I had in that look.
Sofia, on the other hand, showing dignity and grace beyond her 23 months and three weeks, responded by throwing her arms above her head gymnastics-style and exclaiming, “Obama, yeeeaah!”