The Stunts Kids Pull

It's come to this.

It's now a daily occurance that our toddler son will pull a fast one on us daily.

A real doozy.

The big shebang.

I guess you could call it living in 3-D, because before a day is over, he's either going to do something dangerous, devious or destructive.

I feel very much like my MIL did when she commented once that with her older son (my hubby's brother Butch) was a tot, she might as well have just spanked him first thing in the morning, because within minutes of waking up he was going to need it.

For instance, today's dangerous:

Leaping off our dining room table and landing on his feet.

It didn't appear to bother him, but it sure makes mama's heart skip a few beats. Especially given that the table top comes to about his nose when he's standing beside it. I don't know how kids can do this. If I jumped off something proportionately high, I'd probably end up in the hospital, having broken something important to my daily functioning. You know, like my back or a femur or something.

Not him. He springs up like Tigger, and just keeps on bouncing around the house.

Then there was yesterday's devious:

I left him in the kitchen to finish his breakast of cereal while I folded laundry in the next room. I could still see the top of his head from where I was standing, and was chatting with him as I worked.

Suddenly, I heard the telltale slosh of milk on the kitchen floor, and walked in to find him silently but rapidly spooning bite after bite of soggy Cheerios into the garbage so he wouldn't have to eat them.

A recent destructive:

After dinner a couple of nights ago, I went to clean off the table, and was horrified to find that markers had been used to draw all over one of the oak chairs.

Not surprising was that it was Judah's chair at the table. With Judah's telltale marker abstract work done all over the seat.

"What is this?" I asked sternly, squatting down to get a better look at the chair.

"My maf home-erk" he tried to tell me, as though I were going to buy that that one.

He does like to sit at the table each evening when big brother is working on his homework, but Judah's 'homework' usually involves jabbing the tip of a marker over the surface of the paper a couple hundred times.

"I don't think so." I replied. "What did you do to the chair?"

"My cee-we-uhl?" he asked hopefully.

"Uh uh. That's not cereal, Judah. What is on the chair?"

"Um, my juith?"

I was beginning to see that trying to get him to own up to drawing on the furniture might be an exercise in futility.

"What did you do on the chair?" I asked, pointing specifically to the marker lines drawn all over the seat.

A flash of brilliance lit his countenance. ""I dwahed da hthhnake-th" (that's nasal toddler-speak for "snakes").

And yep, I guess that IS what he was drawing.

Lots and lots of colorful snakes.

Oh, well...now the chair just matches our table better.

From the incident a couple of months ago when big brother was drawing a Florida Marlin's picture using my spanking new package of assorted Sharpie colors.

Except that in his case, it was permanent markers which sunk through his masterpiece and stained the top of the old oak table in my kitchen.

The same table that graced my mom's kitchen, and her mother's before her.

Yes, the antique heirloom oak table.

*sigh*

Guess I'm going to have a refinishing project to add to my list of to do's this summer.