the terrible... ohmygoshheisn'teventwoyet!!!

This has been a bad week with my little baby boo.

I used to joke when Elizabeth was small that she was in the terrible two's... or three's or four's.... I had no idea what life had in store for me.

I was so smug. I really was!! All my friends seemed to have boys and secretly I was horrified at their behavior. I would say to Marty, "I don't know that I am going to let Elizabeth play with little Freddy anymore. His mother just lets him run WILD and has absolutely no control over him." Not like I do... my child is an angel and that is because I am a good mother.

To me, Elizabeth's "terrible two's" were when she cried for a toy. And her cry was not an angry, out of control I-am-going-to-hurt-you cry, it was just a little sad cry. "Oh, pardon her. She is two." I would say to passers-by, shaking my head.

Someone decided to show me the light.

Karma's a bitch.

Now I have little Misser Colby. He was such a sweet baby. Just played quietly by himself, slept 16 hours a day, was content to sit in his bouncy chair and look at his hands for as long as you let him, until you started feeling guilty that he was just sitting in his bouncy chair looking at his hands, and you made him play a game with you.

That child snuck away one night, and I don't know if he will ever come back.

Instead, the aliens have dropped off this ... well, hell. It's my blog and I can say what I want. They dropped off this wild animal. With rabies. I believe that the dog that played "Cujo" in the Stephen King movie has been reborn into my son.

God knows I love him to pieces. But God also knows that I sink to my knees gratefully at 8:31pm every night and say, "Thank you God for sending me this baby boy that I yearned so desperately for, and thank you God that it is his bedtime. And thank you God for making it possible to make Vodka out of potatoes. Thank you God for potatoes."

I dread even having to leave the house with him.

A perfect example - Elizabeth's school hosted a "Donuts for Dads" breakfast this morning, and moms and mean baby brothers were not invited. So, instead of wandering walmart and trying to keep Colby from pitching a fit in the store, I decided just to take him to McDonalds and get him a McGriddle (yes, I know. They aren't healthy. That was the point. It was supposed to be a bribe.) and take him back to my office.

He was happy for the 10 minutes that it took for him to inhale the McGriddle. When he was finished, he promptly threw the remaining breakfast sandwich on the floor. While I was on my hands and knees picking that up, he threw his sippy cup down and hit me in the head. That, and my abrupt, "Ow! Shit!" broke him into hysterics. Real funny.

Now I am cleaning splattered milk off the wall, (who the hell makes these damn things LEAKPROOF any damn way?? They should be fired.) and he climbs out of the chair and answers the phone. (We share office space with a real estate office.) "Heh woah?" he says, cute as a button.

"Who is on the phone in the conference room?" one of the realtors yells out.

"Oops. It's me! I knocked it off the hook!" I yell. I take the phone away from Colby who begins screaming and banging his head on the floor.

I am now trying to wipe the grease of the handset, while picking him up with the other arm, and he pulls his latest trick. He headbutts me in the nose.

I see stars and wonder if I can take off with a broken nose or if my boss will bitch about how much work I am missing.

I haul Colby to my office, unplug my phone and give him my chair. "Have at it Colby. Do some filing while you are here. Earn your damn keep."

"Heh woah?" he says into my phone, punching buttons and then laughing uproariously at something whoever he was pretending to talk to said.

I run back to the conference room, to clean up the rest of the mess before someone headed in there and started bitching.

I swear to you, not two minutes later, one of the realtors (the same one bitching about the phone) says, "Hey Nat? Your kid is about to be electrocuted." and then in a lower voice, he says, "Hey bud, don't do that. Those things can bite you." I run back to the main office and Colby is sticking his fingers in the outlets that some contractor stupidly put in the floor in the middle of the room.

I pick him up, and he starts screaming and bucking again. I move my head as far to the opposite side of my body as it will go, without looking like the girl in The Exorcist to protect my throbbing nose, and any other part of my face that he might hit. I try to play "The Distraction Game" that works so well for my mother, and carry him over the the picture boards where they showcase the houses that are for sale.

"Look here Colby! Look at this house!! It has a pool. See the pool? That pool is an inground pool. Ohhh! and this house has cathedral ceilings and costs two hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars! That is more than mommy and daddy makes in five years! Isn't that something?"

It's not working. He is still pissed. He is trying to slap the picture boards down from the wall. Maybe he is pissed at the fact that his parents are poor and will never have a house with a pool or cathedral ceilings.

I take him over to the front door and show him the mail slot. He stops crying at least. Then I show him how to take ink pens and push them out the mail slot. This is fun for about two minutes. Then that gets boring too.

I take him back to my office, but he doesn't want to go there. I shut the door to keep him in, and he starts in with the screaming and the banging of the head again.

We have been at my office approximately 22 minutes.

This was not an "off" day for him. This is typical everyday Colby.

He is mostly fine at home. If he is surrounded by his things, and everything is going his way, he can be a doll.

However, he is starting to show jealousy over me and his sister. Last night, Elizabeth and I tried to get him to play Lego's with us, and he refused. He just wanted to play cars. So we decided to use all the square lego's and see how high of a tower we could make. The minute he saw that we were having fun without him, he came over and deliberately crashed the tower. Not for fun, he didn't laugh. He immediately went back to his cars. His mission was complete.

This happened about 57 times before we gave up. If Elizabeth and I are laying on the couch together, he will crawl up and sit on her chest and start beating her in the head, while trying to shove her off. If we are reading a book, he will rip it from our hands and throw it across the room.

I don't know what I am doing wrong. I feel like the absolute most pathetic, horrible, mean mother in the whole world. I don't know what to do to make my son happy, to make him love me. I feel like a failure, like someone is going to come and get him and tell me, "You have really fucked this up," and take him away. At this point if someone told me that the only way he was going to behave was if I slathered my naked body in peanut butter and ran down the street, I would do it. Joyfully.

Marty laughs and says it was born into him. Marty was, by all accounts, The World's Most Bratty Child. I have talked to many older ladies who laughed and told me that they babysat my husband ONCE when he was a child. By the time he was 4, no one would keep him. He also banged his head on the floor, on occasion so hard that he knocked himself out. His mother said to never believe those doctors that say they only do it hard enough to get attention, not to hurt themselves. She kept a glass of water right under the blower in the fridge so that when he started the pitching-of-the-fit, she could just reach in and throw it in his face.

And now Marty is the sweetest, calmest, most loving, even-tempered guy I have ever met. So maybe he got all his evil out as a small child and there is still hope for Misser Colby.

Thank God for potatoes, in the meantime, though.