Why We Love Our Toddlers

Most parents would agree that the comedy stylings of a toddler are difficult to top. Whether giggling as they run away on uncertain steps or acting as your sous chef and inadvertently spilling half the ingredients, there's no shortage of ways 1- and 2-year-olds crack us up.

"Where do I even start?" says Canadian mom Jennifer Zelovitsky. "My 2-year-old daughter, Madeline, does a hundred funny things, but my favorite is when she 'tricks' me into giving her something—like when she says, 'Mommy, I want a cookie,' to which I reply, 'You want a cookie?' and she immediately says, 'Oh ... OK!' It's so sweet and funny how clever she finds herself."

One has to be careful, of course, with a toddler's emerging linguistic experiments, which often produce unusually creative results. "When he was just getting his words, my son, Marcus, used to call his work bench a ... well, the technical name for a female dog," says Toronto mom Francine Gerstein. "He would hammer away on it and say, 'Mommy and Daddy, I'm banging on my [blank] and he'd say that word, with great emphasis. I'm just glad we were the only ones who heard it."