A friend’s kid discovered an ink pen and evidently thought it worked like a straw. He sucked the ink right out.
Red ink.
Imagine the horror when he toddles into the living room looking like he’s been chewing on razor blades. I think the reaction of the three adults scared the hell out of him.
Sypathy, brother, sympathy. Your girl and mine are of an age, but mine want’s to hide her poo-poo, even to the point of denying that she need to go potty RIGHT NOW, as she relieves herself on the carpet.
Ah, parenthood. And puberty yet to come…
Turbo Dog: I’m not implying anything. I’m telling you, straight up, yes.
Sorry, man. 
Oh joy of joys! Ours doesn’t hide it, but the 6 year old boy collects the dog’s leavings. I learned this last week when the girl (or the poltergeist, as I’m still giving her the benefit of the doubt) decided to pull everything out of the dresser and her toy box, then spread it all over upstairs. Then she or it found two packing boxes in a closet and opened them up and scattered 72 cubic feet’s worth of styrofoam peanuts around. Then between her, it and the dog, gutted a huge teddy bear and shredded and scattered the dacron around. Then she or it found what looked to be the boy’s garbage bag full of old dog turds and scattered them around. (TM and I had both assumed that the dog was going outside and each of us were cleaning up the occasional “cigar”. Took me 8 hours total to clean everything up, then do all of her laundry.
I sympathize with the red pens. Two days ago the girl came in after getting ahold of TM’s tube of “Screw-Me-Silly” blood red lipstick. I freaked at first, also thinking that she found a razor blade someplace and stuffed it into her mouth and shredded her hands.
Yeah, this PMS thing just looks worse and worse all the time.
A few weeks ago my mother got fed up with the sheer number of dishes that had vanished in my sixteen-year-old brother’s room so she worked up the nerve to enter the Black Hole. Imagine her surprise when she finds a small cache of dirty dishes in the laundry hamper in his closet.
WTF??? Can any men explain why it is easier to stick dishes IN THE HAMPER than to run them downstairs to the kitchen? Please? He’s a good kid, but he’s a strange one.
I don’t remember any really funny toddler stories though. There was the time when he was a young baby when we had all gone to get our pictures taken. We are standing in the store when he lets loose with the biggest damn crap ever. It went all over him and my mom. Good thing we were in a department store so she could go buy them new clothes on the spot. sigh
Junior PMS is not for the faint-of-heart!
My daughters are now 24, 22, and 19. The puberty years were Hellx3. My oldest daughter would wake up in the morning, and decide that she hated everyone in the house, and wished we were all dead. She would scream at my little poodle until he shook like a leaf. “What are you looking at, you stupid dog!?!”
She would declare her intentions to ‘leave this stupid house’ and live elsewhere. She stamped around the house like a Thunder Lizard, and slammed doors so hard the windows rattled. Her high school graduation present was luggage…and it was PACKED!!
If I had to do it over, I would invent a bazooka that would launch chocolate and St. John’s Wort from a safe distance.
Hard to believe that the same demoness was a toddler once. When she was about 3, I was puzzled because I kept finding snakes in the house. We installed new thresholds and insulating strips to the bottom of the doors, to no avail. At least once a week, I would have to release a snake back to the great outdoors. Hmmm, maybe the cat was bringing them in? Nope. When I caught the next snake, as it was trying to get underneath the washing machine, my daughter said “Oh, there’s Bill!” “Bill?” I said. “Yup, that’s Bill, he’s my pet. All the other pets are gone, but I still have Bill.”
She had been collecting snakes from the yard, and keeping them in the toy box. We had a discussion about herpetology, and decided to settle for a goldfish. She named him Bill.
When she relates how vexing her son, the toddler, can be, I just cackle like a demented chicken. RUBE!!
Ah… THIS is why I have dogs and cats instead of kids. Thanks for reminding me…
In reply to the OP, I have to say that your methods were entirely appropriate, and very well thought out. Kudos to you on not losing your temper and making hasty emotionally-charged decisions.
Also, very, very good idea of using the idea that she is a teacher to the younger child. Excellent. That will make her feel like a role model, and make her want to continue in that role.
Lastly, making sure she understands that food costs money was excellent.
You sound like you are going to have two very emotionally-stable and respectful children with sound judgement and morals.
My hat comes off to you.
Stupendous Man!
Why, thank you, Stupendous man! I must admit that I wanted to hogtie her and hang her by her toes from the ceiling fan, though. Oh, boy, did I ever.
truthbot: My dear, loving mother, whom I love as much as I love my children, does this same thing. LAUGHS at me! I called her at work once, to tell her some outrageous thing my then-10-month-old daughter had done, and she started laughing so hard she had to hang up the phone. When she called me back 15 minutes later, her laughter had settled down to the occasional chuckle & snort, and she had told all her friends.
And when I ask her why she didn’t try to warn me or talk me out of this, she just says “Oh come on. Would you really have listened?”
Sigh. Regardless of what I used to think, my mom pretty much was always right.
We have two toddlers, our son will be 3 in May and our daughter will be 2 in June. Our son is a gem, but our beautiful little girl is a troublemaker.
Saint Zero was heading out to get me recently, and he heard this “WHEEEEEE!” coming from the back seat. He thought nothing of it. Then he turned around. Didiroo was standing up in her car seat (apparently car seat surfing), arms outstretched, yelling, “WHEEEEE!!!”
Then there was the day we caught her in the toilet. No, not on the toilet. IN the toilet. Just standing there, grinning from ear to ear. Hilarious.
I’m enjoying this. My husband, however, is about ready to pull the rest of his hair out…
Persephone, m’dear; we grandmothers are a bit evil, aren’t we? We listen to the petty torments our grandchildren (Grandma’s Angels) mete out to their parents, and yes; we laugh!! Grandma’s little angel stuck a crayon up his nose, and it required a visit to the emergency room, where a specialist had to vacuum extract it?? Awww, how cute! It’s been over a year, and I still chuckle when I think of that one…
When my daughters were 5, 3, and 1 we were just getting ready to leave for San Francisco to visit my mother. She hadn’t seen the girls for a while, and I wanted them to look perfect! I had sewn matching jumpers for all three, and had their blonde ringlets beautifully coiffed. I went to the bathroom just before we went out the door, and when I came out SHRIEK I found that the oldest girl had chopped off middle girl’s bangs to the scalp. I was furious!!
The first thing I did when I got to my mother’s house was wail about how awful oldest daughter was for cutting her sister’s hair. My mother (rather smugly, holding back her laughter) pulled out the ole’ photo album. There I was, the same age as oldest daughter, with MY bangs cut to the scalp.
Yeah, she still laughs about that one!
I guess it’s just payback for all the sleepless nights and grey hairs that our children gave us. And I’m still ticked about that Mikasa casserole dish you broke, oh yes; YOU know who you are!! Not only did you break Mommie’s favorite dish, but you tried to hide the broken shards in the cupboard. You cut your little hand so badly doing so, that I had to take you to the emergency room for stitches. How could you not know that I loved YOU much more than some stupid dish? Sheesh, you’re 22 now, and I still kiss the scar on your hand.
I do miss the days when my girls were little. I miss making them breakfast, finding lost homework, brushing their hair with one hand while driving breakneck to get them to school on time. So I indulge in spoiling my grandchildren rotten to lessen the pain.
At age 5, my cousin and I managed to pull a huge toyshelf off the wall and down upon us. I remember my father and uncle digging us out as if we had been in an earthquake.
My mother loves to tell about the time when I, around age 3, discovered the cupcakes she had left out to cool. She came in the kitchen a while later to find them lined up neatly on the table… with one bite taken out of each.
truthbot, I must admit, I do enjoy telling my mom about these things. Mostly because it cracks her up so hard.
I recall asking my mother once if she’d ever put “The Curse” on me–you know, “I hope you have children just like yourself.” The conversation went something like this:
Mom: No, I never did.
Me: Really? You didn’t?
Mom: Nope. Sure didn’t.
Me: But I thought all parents did that.
Mom: I didn’t.
Me: Why not?
Mom: It wasn’t necessary. I just knew you would.
Have I mentioned that I really, really love my mom?
Persephone, I can tell that you truly love your mom, and it’s funny but I shared the Lemon flavored Pam story with my mother-in-law and we both got a good laugh out of it. And then she went out and bought some.
OMG, I forgot about the crayon up the nose bit. My eight year old pulled that one when he was three. I freaked! Thank Goddess one of my friends was there and he happened to have a habit of doing that very same thing as a child so as he finally stopped laughing he got the crayon out of Joshs’ nose.
You guys can’t leave out the tall tales either. I know their are some lurkers, reading and getting more terrified of parenthood by the minute, so you cannot leave out the wayout excuses children have come up with to get out of trouble.
Example…When we were younger my mother had a pair of thermal curtains on the sliding glass doors that were old and sun rotted, but she never got around to taking them down.
Well, she came home one day and they were shredded. When she asked my brother he told her that a band of robbers came in and shredded the curtains and he could do nothing to stop them. And then they left. Shredded her curtains and left, can you believe that?
My son, who is now ten, was a perfect baby and he’s a perfect kid now, but when he was a toddler I seriously considered changing my identity and running away. A few things he did:
Our old house had a wall heater in the living room. Jeremy couldn’t resist the temptation to pee into it, filling our house with noxious clouds of steam. Our home always smelled like scalded urine. We could not get him to stop.
We were at some fancy car showroom, talking to a salesman friend, and Jeremy wanted to play inside the most expensive car. I thought this was a bad idea, but the salesman insisted it would be all right. Within a minute or two, Jeremy had chewed off a chunk of the car’s leather upholstery.
He ruined our CD player, his grandma’s CD player, and 2 VCR’s by inserting pennies, crackers, and other items into the slots.
He dumped a large bowl of macaroni into the bathroom sink and tried to wash it down with a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid, causing permanent pink stains on the new paint and wallpaper.
He got hold of my prenatal iron pills and ate them all, necessitating an expensive and traumatic day in the ER.
He dumped nine dollars worth of cheese slices onto the gas heater to watch them burn. We told him fire is dangerous.
He blew out the pilot light in the wall heater because fire is dangerous.
He decided in the middle of the night to make a snack. He gathered up all of his favorite foods, all still in the packages and plastic bags: a pound of carrots, two packages of cream cheese, a dozen eggs, bananas, and everything else he could find. He placed them all in the (brand new) oven, turned on the heat to 500 degrees, then lost interest and went back to bed. I was awakened by loud explosions, the sound cans of biscuits make when they blow up. The plastic wrappings were melted to the oven racks.
My other two kids have never done anything approaching the mass destruction wrought by their older brother. After having him, crayon scribbles on the walls don’t faze me at all.
After reading these posts and laughing hard, i’ve come to the conclusion that if I EVER EVER have kids I will pray for boys. Who can’t go through pre-teen pms. I went through it myself and I know I was like a spitting cat at times. But after reading some of these I’m seriously thinking mom doesn’t want grandkids that much.
Kids are so funny.
Wring? I’ll take up your offer of your 18 year old son…but you can have him back after I’ve finished with him, if you get what I’m saying 
I’m 18 and never went through that really bad pre-PMS stage…probably a good thing for my family.
When my sister was a toddler, she used to run away, stark naked, to the nearest KFC which was across a main road. The neighbours used to tell my mother to tie her up to the clothesline, but my mum refused. One day, however, my sister ran across the main road, naked [of course] and into the KFC, where some newspaper reporters were having lunch. She appeared in the newspaper the next day.
My older brother once got a baked bean stuck up his nose when he was a toddler. But apparently he was a terribly bad child. Knocking things over, tormenting animals etc…
Ahhh, kids…can’t shoot 'em…