The Terrible Three's

    This year, my youngest son, Ethan, turned three.  Little did I know that his birthday would mark the beginning of the near total destruction of my home at his little hands.  Never, in my wildest dreams, could I ever have imagined that such a little person could cause so much destruction in such little time.  It has really made me wonder whether the "terrible two's" were even that terrible at all compared to being three years old.

    The carnage began shortly after his third birthday when I came home to find my new Sealy Posturepedic mattress adorned with artwork that was clearly done using one of my favorite red lipsticks.  As if he didn't express himself enough, there were matching hieroglyphics on the wall in my bedroom in the same shade as the artwork on my mattress.  I cannot even begin to tell you how angry and frustrated I was that he had vandalized the house in such a way.  He definitely spent quite a bit of time in "time out" that evening.

    As a result of that little fiasco, I banned markers and paints and proceeded to keep better guard of my makeup should he feel artistically inspired once again.  That did not work at all.  I'm not sure how he does it but he always manages to find something to write with and my house is his canvas.  I currently have drawings on the mirror in my room done with crayon and dinosaur pictures drawn on the front of his white dresser.  Also, he took my business stamper and stamped all over my glass coffee table in the livingroom.

    It is not that he is not being supervised, if anything, we watch him like hawks because we know how he is.  The problem is that he is so sneaky that he manages to do these things in the split second that it takes one of us to answer the phone or go to the bathroom.  Recently, I even discovered that all the pieces are missing to my 25th Anniversary Scrabble Edition.  I have only found one solitary tile letter from the game so it is quite possible that the rest of the letter tiles have been flushed down the toilet, thrown out in the garbage, or hidden inside some toy of his.

    I don't understand where he gets this from at all.  My older son has never been destructive and I never had to worry that he was going to write on the walls or damage things.  We teach both of our boys to be appreciative of what they have and to take good care of their things.  Unfortunately, this message seems to have been lost on my little one.  He has absolutely no boundaries and no respect for other people's things, no matter how much I try to teach him.  This behavior, coupled with the fact that he is extremely stubborn and defiant, makes for interesting parenting moments.  The most recent one included him telling me that he is not a little kid and that I shouldn't call him a little kid.  I immediately asked him what I should call him if he wasn't a little kid to which he promptly responded, "I am a man."  HELP!