A little while ago, we mentioned on Instagram we want to bring you more of the real, behind-the-scenes, lives of the Babiekins moms-turned-editors. See, among the mamas on our editorial team, we have enough children to fill a small classroom. They range in age from in-the-womb to teenager, and as you can imagine, there’s a whole lot of craziness that extends far beyond the editorials and the photo shoots. And we’re going to start sharing more candid snapshots with you — the kind of scenes that we capture on our phones and then text to friends.

Here in my world (I’m Gina, the Copy Editor) I share every day with a feisty little person often referred to as “the human pogo stick”. She’s pretty great. She’s also very two.

This week, she didn’t just draw on the wall, she drew on the window. (“I colorbook a f’ower, mummy!”) She mistook the grapefruit at the farmers’ market for “fro and catch balls”. She jumped on the bed, stood up on the seat of her tricycle, hula-hooped in her underwear, sang loudly throughout her nap-times, turned a potted cactus upside-down, ate lots of mandarins and spilled one or two or five cups of milk. 

Every week, she makes me cry and makes me laugh and makes a lot of messes and makes me gasp, “How on earth did you manage to do that so fast?!” 

This wild-child-raising, it’s the most wonderful and the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Every day, I interact with a tiny opinionated human who has the most profoundly confusing logic I’ve ever observed. Children are a paradox: stubbornly independent, and yet completely dependent.

It’s not easy.

But it’s also a paradise — a very loud, messy, colorful, and chaotic paradise.

And in the eyes of a two-year-old, that’s pretty much perfect, isn’t it?