By NICOLE CARTRETTE
Staff Writer

A lot can be learned from a 2-year-old.

Trust me.

Over the Christmas holiday my little girl gave my husband and me a run for our money in the parenting department.

First there was the church Christmas program and my little angel who tried desperately to shed her gold robe and loose the sparkling garland halo just before begging to hold the baby Jesus in the manger.

All the other angels, wise men, Mary and Joseph were perfectly content singing.

Looking like an angel doesn’t equate to being one.

Then there was the incident with the broken candy dish.

She pulled the old I’ll-pretend-I-don’t-know-what-no-means –trick.

With a sneaky grin and hands going like magnets to a refrigerator door she snatched up the ceramic Santa, only to send him tumbling to his shattering death.

Some things are best left alone.

How could I forget the tempting torture of everyone else’s gifts screaming out to her cry for me.

Resist the presents on other side of the tree that don’t belong to you even if they look more interesting.

Most memorable for me is the fact I was suckered not once but twice in the freedom of expression department.

There was the multicolored crayon mural that stretched across two walls of our dining room that seemingly appeared overnight.

My husband and I still don’t agree on when our little Picasso started her first work.

I remain adamant that it was when he was supposed to be watching her. He insists it must have been sometime the night before when we were all in the living room.

Nonetheless, it was there and as a mommy often does, I had the daunting task of cleaning it up.

“No problem,” I thought, patting myself on the back for spending the extra $3 on “washable crayons.”

The only problem was an army of regular crayons had infiltrated our stash and this was definitely not the work of a washable crayon.

Plan B was a Magic Eraser that actually worked. Thank you Mr. Clean.

One would have thought I would have rounded up every crayon in our house—that I would have searched high and low for the destructive little pieces of wax but I didn’t.

This was a lesson to be learned the hard way.

I’m cooking dinner one night while Kaylee is cooking up a surprise for me in the living room.

This display put the dining room incident to shame. Giant free flowing strokes of brown, yellow and black rippled across the living room wall.

Only this time it was the washable crayon. Thank you, Crayola.

Learn from your mistakes – preferably the first time.

While there is nothing quite like a 2-year-old to test your patience and your paint job there is also nothing like a little one to teach you the more important lessons of life.

Lessons that teach you it’s okay if your toddler forgets every word she was supposed to recite during a Christmas program, that you really can’t judge a book by its cover, and that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

It is important to know things that are breakable may get broken, sometimes you have to clean up other people’s mess, and most importantly, spend the extra $3 for the washable crayons.