Will and I just spent the long weekend in a mountain house in Shasta with an 8-month-old, a 2-year-old, and their respective parents. Between this trip and hanging out with my 2-year-old niece for a week at Christmas, I have now spent more time with young children in the past three weeks than I did in the entire decade before that.

As an armchair-expert-kid-free adult with sample size n = 3, I’ve observed some universal rules of pre-toddler life. As a small child:

  • You are not allowed to walk anywhere. You must run, ideally as loudly as possible, especially if anyone else in the house is trying to sleep in. Bonus points if you finish with a long jump.
  • You must accept the fact that every time you get upset, someone will pick you up and sniff your butt or look at you directly and ask, “Did you shit your pants?”
  • Since you are the same height as the dogs and thus exactly at face-licking level all the time, you just have to scrunch up your chubby cheeks and deal with it.
  • Every baby, no matter how small, has an even smaller baby they like to tote around.
  • “Puss” is a good universal name for your stuffed purple platypus, and your purple cat, and your purple octopus, and it’s obvious that the octopus is the child of the platypus because otherwise why would they both be purple?
  • You are liable to be picked up at any time with no warning. You must be prepared to leave everything you knew behind.

Those are the takeaways so far, although the small sample size may confound the results and I’m sure there are some rules I missed. To be fair, it’s been a while since I was two years old and the details are a bit fuzzy, so I think I get a pass on this one.