Whoever coined the phrase "Terrible Twos"...

did not have a child that lived to be three!

I wrote this after a lovely April day with my three-year-old:

Everyone thinks Ryan is so cute! And he is cute, too—my little blue-eyed, tow-headed three-year old. For the most part he has a personality to match his looks and everyone loves him.

But recently his Mr. Hyde side—the side outsiders never see—has been showing through. In the first place he has figured out that in a large family there is a definite pecking order: the big kids pick on the younger kids. I suppose it’s only natural that with four older siblings who regularly assert their superiority over him, he should do the same to his little sisters (Kaylie, who is two and Rachel, who is almost one year old). Unfortunately Kaylie is the nearest and most frequent opponent, and when she’s upset her screams are deafening. Kaylie often tries to retaliate as well, thus causing Ryan to scream nearly as loud as she does. But this bickering and sibling rivalry is not really a new thing in our house.

The real horror started when (I’m guessing) Ryan started getting bored. In just one day he caused me more grief than I care to think about. The first thing he did was to go into my room and jump on my bed. Now, you must understand that my bed has a brand-new, cream-colored, dry-clean only bedspread on it; there were also about four loads of laundry neatly folded and stacked on my bed. But the laundry was tossed all over the floor to make room for his morning’s entertainment and the once neat and tidy bed was a wrinkled-up mess. In that same morning he emptied an entire tube of cortisone cream on the bathroom rugs, smeared the bedroom wall with Desitin diaper-rash ointment, and then used up most of a box of baby wipes to clean up the wall. (The clean-up didn’t start to happen until he heard me coming in the door to see what he was up to.) At some point he also managed to scribble all over both living room doors with pencil (then tossed the incriminating pencil into a nearby houseplant). All of this was interspersed with his usual fights with the little girls, which included hitting Rachel on the head with toys a few times. And he managed to do it all before lunch time!

After lunch he didn’t take his nap, but spent his time yelling at Lindsey and Brandon who share a bedroom with him. Later he managed to find (after making a thorough search for interesting things in Bruce’s toolbox) a chalk line; he opened that up and dumped the blue chalk dust all over Kaylie’s head—and the basement floor. Because he was tired and angry—and I was too—we really didn’t get along well for the rest of the evening.

At last bedtime came! Bruce went to tuck the kids in while I collapsed on the couch. Soon I heard him asking, “Who ripped up this book?” Of course, it was Ryan (who is still too young to try to blame someone else). Well it was a brand-new library book, the loss of which made Lindsey start crying because she could “never have enough money to pay for it!” The replacement fee will probably cost me a good $20, so I feel kind of like Lindsey did.

The fun didn’t stop on that day though. I really couldn’t keep track of all the things this busy boy has been doing (except for emptying the salt shaker on—and thereby killing—the sprouted plants that were a science fair project, and dumping an entire can of baby formula all over the kitchen floor early one morning—another $10 down the drain!). He has just been a supreme nuisance.

On the other hand, he spent most of this morning singing, “I love mom because she’s so nice!” to the tune of the Star Wars main title. And he frequently comes to tell me he loves me because I cook dinner, or because I made good lunch, or because I bought him some candy—or sometimes it’s just, “Mom… I love you.” Now how could I not fall for that? He really is a cute little boy!

April 2003