Mother of a Terrible Two

 My baby is almost two.  And by "baby" I mean the shortest boy at our house--all of whom are tall, skinny, full of personality and independence, and plenty of their own ideas about "the way things are."

 Wyatt is something of a little terror.  He jumps on the little piano like ten fingers just don't quite make enough noise for his purposes.

One day he removed all the spice jars from their rack and stuffed them into the toaster oven--and turned it on.  We were tipped off by the conflicting olfactory sensations of fragrant warm herbs, and melting plastic lids. 

He recently pulled a Texas Sheet Cake from on top of the stove, and found to his satisfaction that the fall caused the lid to pop off giving him full access to the sheet pan of cake.

Some days it's a bit hard to take.  So I get a really big kick out of the book "Love You Forever", by Robert Munsch--you know the one: 

I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
my baby you'll be.

. . .that book that makes everyone cry because of how special the love between a parent and their child is.   Well, I like it for a different reason.  This passage is one of my favorites.

The baby grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was two years old, and he ran all around the house. He pulled all the books off the shelves. He pulled all the food out of the refrigerator and he took his mother's watch and flushed it down the toilet. Sometimes his mother would say, "this kid is driving me CRAZY!"

Those words could only have been written by a parent who has lived in the trenches, and survived to tell the tale.  If someone who at one point had children who were as "misbehaved" as mine usually are, and felt those parental feelings of frustration, could still go on to write an inter-generationally beloved book about the great love between a parent and child--then surely there is hope for me. 

Jeremy made an observation this morning.  He said that the reason we don't have girls is probably because we would be the PERFECT parents of little girls--we would do everything right.  But since the point of life is to learn and grow and develop then God has only sent us little boys, because we have the most to learn from being parents of a house of little boys right now.  It sounded like a great theory to me--so for now I'm going to accept it.

I've long tried to embrace my household of little boys, to appreciate the things that only come with little boys-- and I feel like I've done pretty well with that.  Though I'll still freely admit that sometimes my favorite interactions with my boys are the ones in which they are sleeping.  And I can allow my heart to be filled with love alone, and have those feelings deep inside to get me through the next day.