Signs that today was not a happy toddler day

1. While shopping, child refuses to do anything she's told, then completes the tantrum trifecta by throwing a 2-pound bucket of play dough at her mother's head, then flinging herself on the floor and screaming like she's being eaten by wolverines.
2. After collapsing next to the car and rolling around in the parking lot, screaming because apparently 10 minutes of running around in the restaurant's patio area wasn't sufficient in her opinion, child absolutely loses it when deposited into her car seat. "I want do myself!" reverberates inside the car for the entire 15-minute ride home, melting small plastic pieces in the car's interior. Once home, child climbs out of the car, then insists on climbing back into the carseat by herself. Child looks smug.
3. Child goes down for a nap, after only popping out of bed once to use the potty, and only requesting different covers twice. Thirty seconds after leaving the room, mother hears the lightswitch turn on in child's room, and the closet door open, and the cheerleader pom-poms come out. Several minutes later, child starts opening and slamming the drawers under her bed, then jumping on her bed until she bounces into the walls (repeatedly). After more than an hour of various banging, clanking, thumping, rapping on the door, whining and screaming to be let out, then begging sweetly and using please, mother relents and lets her out.
4. "He gets home at 5 pm, right? Okay, so I only have to last three more hours before I have backup. Only three more hours. I can take anything for three hours. Where's that remote control?"
5. Child spends an entire episode of "The Bear in the Big Blue House" alternating between a glazed-eyed stupor and frantic jumping up and down on the couch, culminating in a flying kick to her mother's sternum that almost propels a knitting needle into the mother's lungs, followed by draping herself across the injured parent and slurring, "hugs, mama, hugs!" while attempting to impale herself on the same knitting needle.
6. Child runs around playing aimlessly while mother is up to her armpits in raw pork during dinner prep time. After several minutes of silence, child materializes at the kitchen door clutching a pair of training pants filled with poop. "I'm running around naked!" Mother has to shut off dinner prep, get new pants on child, rinse out training pants, start a load of kid laundry, wash out and sanitize bathroom sink, then wash up and go back to the raw pork. Which the cat probably hadn't been snacking on. Much.
7. Manic child races laps around the kitchen/living room/dining room circuit, giggling and gibbering like a lunatic, instead of eating dinner.
8. Actual statement made during dinner: "Mama, Liza door - help open - bite finger. Kiss finger ... feels all better now, okay?"
9. All attempts to secure child's cooperation on menial tasks (like cleaning up the blueberries that were scattered across the floor) are met with either slack-jawed incomprehension, or whining and shrieks that can make an adult's ears bleed at 20 paces.
10. Mother muses that it's lucky the kid picked today to pull this, because if it was seven days later in her stupid birth control pill cycle, she would have already strangled the kid and been a couple of states away from the scene of the crime by now.
11. Crazed look in adult's eyes as she contemplates how quickly she can pack a change of clothes, a bottle of bourbon, a knitting project and a good book - and head for the hills.
12. "I think she just kicked herself in the face," father says, exiting the child's bedroom after putting her to bed for the first time tonight.

This whole thing started a few days ago, and her behavior has been going downhill ever since. Good thing I just recently reread sections of some of our parenting books, so I know this is all astoundingly normal. I guess it typically doesn't hit until around 30 months, so Liza's a few months early, but other than that, it's textbook two-year-old tantrum behavior. I just keep chanting under my breath This will all improve in a few months. This will all improve in a few months. And if it doesn't, maybe we can dump her at my in-laws' house and move to the West Coast.

It's a shame, because she was such a joy to be around for the past few weeks. Guess I can just look back on that with nostalgia and hope she'll get back to that point again soon.