A few days ago my two year old son woke me up by whomping me over the head with a large pizza box he’d gotten from the fridge. He’d figured out how to open the child-safety lock and he really enjoyed the pizza we’d had the night before.
One minute I’m warm and cozy in dreamland, then:
POW!! “Can we have pizza for breakfast?”
No complaints though, there are worse ways to wake up.
My cousin and I are six months apart, and when we were children we decided that we were going to help my mom clean the basement floor. So, he got the bleach, and I got the ammonia and thank the gods we started on opposite sides of the room. We ended up with bleach in our eyes and had both moms hysterical thinking were would be blind.
Also once while supposed to be napping I guess I took a whole nursery sized tub of Vaseline and rubbed it in my hair.
I also had a thing for lipstick and pretty walls that mom just painted.
My cousin and I also painted an antique rocker that my aunt had set out to refurbish. Till this day she has that rocker and never did a thing with it. To her it has become something special from our childhood, and one or the other of us will end up with it.
As for my kids…all only 12 to 10 months apart (two at a time) 11,10,9,4,3.
When 10 and 9 were 3 and 4 they were kitchen wonders.
Cereal, eggs, oatmeal, and flour. On the living room floor carpet. We also had a bout with pudding.
And one night when my husband was working a really crappy shift he had stopped by the store and brought himself home a cherry cheesecake. Was too tired to eat it right away, so he put it in the fridge for later on.
Well, the then 4 and 5, got up and decided to help themselves to dad’s treat.
He came out of our room and caught them by suprise just taking it out of the fridge. So suprised that they dropped it…yep, it landed the only way it would have in any situation. Face down.
They also fed my fish for me. Chex mix and Michalob caps.
Our 3 and 4 that we have now have shoved sugar waffer cookies in the hard drive, painted each others finger nails and toe nails clear up to the knuckles.
Cut each others hair, after scalping Barbies.
I had a friends son whose dad went to check on him because he was being a little too quiet, and when he was asked what he was doing he replied “well, I wasn’t painting the dog dad” I think he was 4 at the time.
Hmm… I do believe, that if I ever had children, I would be arrested for beating them, after reading about some of these things. They are making me laugh, though… and laugh…
Let’s see… when I was little I (or at least they say):
I used to get on my hands and knees and rock back and forth. I still rock back and forth, only sitting up. Anyway, one night I ‘rocked’ my crib out of my room and down the hall into the floor furnace;
I used to feed my Mom’s fish when she would get on the phone. Once they got coffee, once hershey kisses.
One time I ate some black paste shoe polish.
I swiped my sister’s paints out of her oil paint-by-numbers kit and painted a spot on one of the bricks on the back of our house light blue. I remember doing this. I do not know why.
My cousin’s toddler recently got out of bed, got a glass of water from her nightstand, and poured it on his sleeping mother. I have not met this child. I am not in a hurry to do so…
We had this coffee table with a drawer that used to collect the usual junk like pens, paper & stuff like that. Once when my son was about 2 1/2 I left him sitting on the couch while I went to the bathroom. When I emerged about 15 minutes later I found the little one sitting on the floor in front of the drawer being very very quiet. I looked and found that he had his penis stuck in a small pipe fitting, we had been doing some plumbing work. Well I removed the piece of metal and was shocked to see that his penis was horribly discolored, all blue and purple with what looked to be deep dark pink scratches on it.
I was simultaneously thinking “oh my god, what has he done to himself” and “how am I gonna explain this to the doctor” when I noticed the blue, purple and deep pink felt pens laying there. It seems he had colored his penis with the felt pens before sticking the pipe fitting on it in what I can only guess was the final touch on his masterpiece. After a close examination revealed that his skin was intact and his manhood was unmangled, I laughed and thought “I’m not scrubbing that, it’s gonna have to wear off.”
I’ve been following this thread thinking that I don’t have any toddler stories. My two didn’t get into much, except when the younger one decided to cut her hair on her fourth birthday (it was her hair, after all).
But yesterday I did some serious spring cleaning. I decided that I needed to do something about the front door, since the wood is starting to look worse for wear, so I got out the Murphy’s Oil Soap and went to it. When I got to the bottom panel, I noticed purple scribbles all over! Someone scribbled on the front door with a crayon! Seeing that they’re 11 and 8 now, it looks like the culprit got away with it.
Some kids give up naps easily. Flodjunior was not one of these. For months when he was about 1 1/2 (yes, I said one and a half), he wouldn’t be tired enough to take a nap, but he would get overly tired if he didn’t get one.
So one day when things were really bad, and he had been a pain in the rear for two, three hours, but still refused to even consider settling down in his crib, he just fell asleep. In the middle of our bed. I was so grateful, I just left the room and closed the door. Now, we lived in a one-story row house, so I figured I’d hear him when he woke up, so I lay down on the sofa and read the paper. After a while I thought I’d better check on him before getting dinner started.
Oops.
Seems fella bilong missus flodnak had forgotten to put the little bottle of sewing machine oil away after he’d oiled the wheels of flodjunior’s stroller. Flodjunior had found the oil, opened the little spout on the top, and discovered that, if you turned it upside down and shook it hard, little drops came out.
All over his hair. All over his face. All over his clothes. All over his father’s pillow. All over his father’s comforter. :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
I think the first thing the people who answer to poison control hotline are taught, is how not to laugh. “Did he swallow any?” “I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I thought he was asleep-” “Smell his breath, do you smell any oil on his breath?” “I can’t tell! He smells like a gas station all over!”
All’s well that ends well. I tell this story to flodjunior, who is now 7 and past the suicide prevention years, whenever his little brother is getting into mischief…
I began reading this thread with a smile on my face.
Then, reality struck. Doodlebug is nine months old.
Toddlerhood approaching.
The horror. The horror.
you’re missing the big picture. I have survived toddler hood. But notice not a single person took me up on my offer of a nearly housebroken teenager.
wring, I’ll take your teenager in trade for two starting-to-get-surly pre-teen girls. They come complete with pictures of NSync and cute kitties and a roll of tape guaranteed to pull the paint off the walls.
They can each empty a 50-gallon water heater with one shower.
Neither of them can fix themselves something to eat or clean up after themselves, though.
Perhaps you didn’t read carefully? My son has his driver’s license. and, in addition, I’ll see your NSync and raise you the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit calendar, cindy Crawford in short shorts poster, and variety of phone numbers written on the wall.
The 50-gallon water heater is no problem for the 6’1" shaved head, but likes to dye his hair when it’s grown, so we have a wide assortment of towels that have unintentionally intersting patterns them, as well as wide variety of hair gels etc.
smart enough to scam a weekend w/o parental supervision, still not quite smart enough to not get caught defacing the pop machine at school.
phone (with call waiting) for his personal use, tends to take food into his room, we don’t know what happens to it, sometimes it magically reappears, but the dishes seem to only come out as I’m drying my hands from washing the prior bunch.
Since he’s a handsome guy, we get a variety of giggly teen girls calling at all hours.
Did I mention that he’s into sports? as in Swim practice a 5:45 am? soccer (the world’s dirtiest sport) etc?
And music? comes complete with a bass guitar and amp, keyboards and saxaphone.
::gazes over with pity at Kinsey in the corner whimpering::
I thought so.
Some of us parents of pre-teen boys cherish our naive ignorance! Stop telling us about what we’re in for!!
:Ralf puts his fingers in his ears, and chants loudly, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”:: 
My high-school English teacher told us how she and her brother set fire to their house when they were tiny children. Her father, it seems had a big stack of old 78-rpm records on a shelf. I forget how the fire started, but it climbed up to this shelf and the records, as they caught fire, flung themselves off like flaming frisbees, starting new fires all over the room. I believe the house was a loss.
When she was 15 months, my lovely daughter annihilated my proxy server. She was standing at my desk, randmomly clicking at the mouse and banging away on the keyboard. I was on the phone, indulgently watching my girl acting ‘grown-up’. When I went back to the desk, I was horrified to find she’d managed to bring up a ‘find file’, get a list of *.DLL, and delete about 2/3 of them.
I sat down and tried to work out just how she’d done it, more challenged than pissed. It took me almost an hour to work out the sequence, on purpose, that she’d managed, at random. Oh, and the installation was a total loss. I had to re-build the install (note to self: BACK-UP your #@%&#$ work!)
She’s also done the usual items: Colored the walls; Broken various dishes, shredded the occaisional book, and so-on.
My recent scares involve climbing: She’s a regular mountain goat. One recent early Saturday AM, I hear her calling me from the front room. She’s supposed to be in her bed, sleeping, at 5:30AM! I stagger my half-blind way into the living room, to find her perched on top of one of my bookshelves, 6 feet off the ground. One more grey hair…
jadaily wrote:
Ah, jeez, that reminds me. We weren’t toddlers, but my brother and I started a fire when we were about 9 and 10. We climbed to the top shelf of my closet, shut the door, and lit a piece of paper on fire. Had to drop it and it started the carpet burning. Brother went and got dad, who put it out. I don’t remember what he did to us…
I’ve been trying to potty train a 3 year old for about a month now. She now thinks it the coolest thing in the world to sit in my lap while I do my business. She also thinks the toilet is a toybox. I think I need to buy one of those little net for fish tanks in order to retreive some of the things. If there’s no toys around, apparently she’s versatile. All my make-up? Hey, that goes in the toilet! All 37 bottles of nailpolish I have arranged neatly in a box? SPLOOSH. (Of course this is only after she opens the reddest red I have and paints the faucet in the sink with it). Hey look, a brand new roll of toilet paper, and the last one in the house to boot…better put it in the toilet so we won’t lose it! When anyone loses anything in this house, the first place I look is the toilet. “Honey, I found your keys/wallet /toothbrush/lighter!” Kids, gotta love em…
Well Persephone you’ll love this. This happened before I got custody of my boys, but they were over for a visit.
Saturday morning I’m up before the kids (so I thought, I was foolishly waiting for the sound of cartoons) so I called the future mrs. stuffinb. We’re chatting it up nicely when Jock (the tattle tell) burst in the door and says “Dad, Chris left foot prints all over the house” To which I say “Ok, let me get off the phone, I’ll be right there” I make my apologies and step out into the living room. Sure enough there’s a trail of brown foot prints leading around the coffee table heading back towards the kitchen.
I find Chris. He covered in Hersheys’s chocolate syrup, sugar & flour. Not only that he’d methodically taken everything he could reach from the freezer and lined it neatly along the wall (I suspect he was in search of the ice cream we had the night before). I was laughing too hard to punish him.
This one happened last month.
The kids had been bugging us to take them to the rat/pizza establishment (shh! don’t say the name aloud). So my wife and I decide to take them one fine Saturday. The day in question my wife picks them out really nice matching outfits (anyone who has children close in age knows why) and tells them not to get messy while we change. I’m of course a much faster dressor. I’m sitting on the couch when Jock (who’s recently on a cryptic kick) comes in and says “Guess what?”, “What” “Do you know what Chris and Stef are doing” “No, what?” “Come on, I’ll show you”
We head out of the building. In the back of the building I see Chris and Stephen and they have white spots, all over, face, arms, clothes. They were busy flinging a white liquid shoe polish bottle at each other. laughing up a storm. Believe it or not, they actually said “nothing” when I asked what they thought they were doing.
:::wiping tears of relief from eyes:::
Oh, it feels SO good to know that I’m not alone! These stories are positively priceless!
My daughter got some new markers as a gift the other day (NOT from me!). Sometime during the day while I was at work and my husband was in charge, she decided to color with the markers. Now, she’s done this before, and we’ve given her stern warnings as to where she can and cannot color (paper OK, brother NOT OK). Of course, she completely ignored our warnings, as she is wont to do. Husband caught her after she’d colored herself and her brother with pretty much every shade in the box.
Sigh. At least it wasn’t the walls this time.
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Same thing, different pictures. Still paint ripped off the walls.
I’ve stained a few towels myself, because I dye my own hair, trying to get rid of the gray.
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Okay, I’d have to think about this one.
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Same thing here, plus the GP’s bought all the kids TVs and VCRs last Christmas. They could live in their rooms forever.
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Well, my girls are only 11 and 12, so I’m used to the giggly girls calling. Boys are still less maintenance than girls. The lip gloss and hair spray bill alone is killing me.
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He just got his license, right? He can drive himself to the early practice. And laundry doesn’t scare me!
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I have a detached garage. 'Nuff said.
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You Can’t Scare Me!!!
I am NOT looking forward to junior-PMS time.
By the time that rolls around, you will be a quivering mass of terrifed goo, just BEGGING for someone to kill you now.
Junior PMS is worse than adult PMS in one very important way–the teenage girls experiencing simply do NOT have the coping skills that us grown women do (and I respectfully request that you refrain from the “you call what you guys do COPING??” jokes, or I’ll cram my Industrial-sized bottle of Midol right where the sun does not shine).
Grown women recognize the symptoms before they happen. We read the calendar, note that it’s the Wednesday before “that time,” and begin our active stockpiling of chocolate/evening primrose oil/condoms/Guns & Ammo magazines. Teenage girls don’t have enough experience to know quite what will relieve which symptom.
They’ll learn, though. But it won’t be until long after they’ve moved out from under your roof. If you haven’t moved out first.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Persephone *
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Persephone, are you implying that my darling little girl who, as mentioned earlier, enjoys filling the toilet with everything but what she’s supposed to, and who, 15 minutes ago came walking out of living room butt nekkid and wiped the huge mud pie she made out of a load of freshly formed poo-poo on my arm, is going to mature into a mood crossed little bitch from hell?
Anyone want to trade a little sister for a little brother?
Anyone? I’ll throw in a little dog too!
Please?