Probably because she is the second child, Evie really knows how to turn on the tears. When Anna was younger and would get hurt, we'd try to convince her that it really didn't hurt by yelling, "yay!" But from the beginning, most of Evie's hurts were caused by Anna, so when she cried, we usually reacted by comforting her. Anyway, she now cries all the time.
The other day, I was in Joanne's with a friend and Evie was asking to get out of the cart. I've started buckling her into carts because she'll stand up in them and I'm really worried that she's going to fall out and land on her head. Anyway, we were getting in line to pay for our stuff and so I told Evie that she needed to stay in the cart. The bottom lip started to quiver and she scrunched up her eyes before letting out a wail. My friend said, "oh, poor Evie," but I noticed that despite her scrunched up eyes, she kept peaking at me to see if I was looking at her and paying attention to her tears. When she didn't get much of a reaction out of me, she stopped crying.
She's pretty good at getting sympathy from other shoppers too. Twice now people have offered her food. When we were in Macey's last week, she started crying in the produce section because once again, I had buckled her into the cart after she had run away from me twice. The produce manager asked if he could give her a banana, which was fine with me except that now it's becoming a pattern. Today in Costco she was crying again and a lady asked me if she could give her some M&Ms out of her trail mix bag. I don't remember this happening with Anna, or maybe I was just more hard core back then and told them no.
In fairness to Evie, I should probably also add that she gets attention for being just plain cute too. Lately she's really been in to saying "hi" and "bye." When my friend, Dawn, got in the car the other day, Evie started yelling, "hi" until she got a response from Dawn. Yesterday I was trying to take a nap on the couch while Evie and Anna were crawling all over me. Evie kept sitting on my side and leaning over so that her face was right in front of mine and then she'd say, "hi." I was just waiting for her to start saying, "eye" and then stick her finger in mine. And after that nice lady gave Evie some M&Ms at Costco, Evie did calm down. While we were waiting in line to check out, she kept waving at the guy behind us. She had that beauty queen wave down pat, holding her arm out and just twisting her hand at the wrist. He was nice enough to wave back several times and she kept it up for quite awhile. I guess all those beauty queens at the Swiss Days Parade we went to that morning made an impression on my baby.
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