Double Trouble

The boys have figured out that if they work in a tag team fashion they can have twice the destruction with half the beatings.  For example: Jack dumped water on my night stand.  The night stand is full of books that are in queue for next week's reading, and the paperbacks took the worst of it.  After he got in trouble and helped clean the water up, I spread the books out on the floor on towels to air dry.  My mistake was in leaving the room, because Mitch moved in and immediately started making confetti out of them.  See?  Double whammy and only one spanking each.  The bad part is that I used what was left of one of the wet-torn books to smack Mitch's behind once.  I instantly felt guilty and had images of interrogators using phone books on prisoners, and wondered if he would have life long trauma going back the the wet book incident.  The guilt (and worry) didn't last long however, because five minutes later I found he had pushed the stool up to the counter to rub a stick of butter onto a pineapple.  Obviously I hadn't made as much of an impression on him as I had thought, so I tried again (not really, please don't call social services).

As I'm typing this, Mitch is standing next to me in his diaper with his baby laptop, frantically hitting the buttons with his little sticky fingers trying to be like mommy.  He is angelic and adorable and I wonder how he knows exactly how far to push me before I run away screaming.  The rolling around on the bathroom floor in Wal-Mart moment was a close one.  Also, stabbing his brother with a fork over a dinosaur (that we have 3 of), unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet, and smearing ketchup on the tv screen are all prime examples of pushing to the limit situations.  Then he throws on the charm long enough for my blood pressure to return to normal, wraps skinny little arms around my neck for a kiss and runs off to start the process again.   He's got great survival instincts, and I count down every night until bedtime so I can breathe again.  I make sure to go in after he's asleep however, to gaze adoringly down on his cherubic form and take that image to bed with me so that I don't wake the next morning still thinking of how much butter we go through at our house.