Asserting independence (AKA "Becoming a two-year-old")

I SWEAR Kate knows she's turning two in a few weeks and she's gearing up, practicing to live up to all that is said about two-year-olds. I mean, she's had the art of the tantrum down for awhile, but suddenly her willfulness (of which she has an incredible abundance) has accelerated dramatically. So, I did what any desperate parent would do: took cousin Cindy's great recommendation to read "Love & Logic" hoping for the magic cure to the terrible twos. Okay, so I KNOW there's no magic cure, but some insight would be nice. I've been trying the book's techniques and I do wholeheartedly agree with its philosophy. One big thing is to offer kids lots of choices and give up some of your parental control, so that when you do need to make a choice for them, they're a little more agreeable to it. This is how Kate ended up wearing one polka dot shoe and one red shoe yesterday. I generally give her the choice between two outfits, but the shoe arena is all hers. Man, does she have opinions about shoes (as I've said before, it's her only nod to girliness). So, we're doing the choices thing. Another idea in the book is to give empathetic responses and let consequences do the teaching, as opposed to lecturing and saying "That's one, that's five, that's 250..." Instead, you just say something like, "uh oh, how sad, looks like it's time for a little bedroom time" when things are really going awry. Then you take them to their bedroom, tell them they can rejoin you when they can be sweet again and then shut the door. Kate's had two bedroom times now. I kept asking her if she was ready to be nice and, for a good while, she'd say, "NOOOOOOO!" At least she got it. When she'd calmed, I went in, hugged her, told her how nice it was to have my big girl back and that was it. I like this technique (and am hoping, probably to little avail, that we won't need too many bedroom times.) Just when I was getting a bit more confident with this whole discipline thing, though, Kate again showed me that sometimes she's just too smart. We were playing outside yesterday and she was throwing toys around when I'd asked her not to. Before we could get to the "uh oh" stage, she looked at me and announced, "Olivia's mom says: you really wear me out, but I love you anyway." Olivia being a book about a precocious little girl (well, pig) who's mom DOES say that to her. After this announcement, whenever she did something she knew she shouldn't do, Kate looked straight at me and said, "You love me anyway." Yep, outwitted by a toddler again.