Max is 9 now, way past toddlerhood. But I have written documentation of his terrible twos in my journals (I can’t believe I had time to write anything), which exhausts me just reading it.

Here is one Saturday’s list of events as Max’s dad lay passed out till 11am.

1) Max has insisted on donning 4 pairs of underwear (1 with trucks, 3 Thomas the Tanks). He’s put them all on BACKWARDS, of course, so that he can see the designs.

2) After a painful session of cajoling him to eat more of his breakfast, I spend an unsuccessful half-hour pushing potty propaganda. He won’t have it.

3) I am calling to Max from the bathroom, asking him to come brush his teeth, but he says he can’t because he’s “making pee pee and poo poo!” And when I get to his bedroom, there he is with all 4 undies halfway down his legs and he is standing in front of his toy cubbies in a giant puddle of urine. “I can’t take them off,” he says. I can’t get him to help me wipe up the puddle.

4) I mop up the urine, hose Max down with the hand shower (of course he’s decided to dump the whole bucket of foam letters into the tub, determined that he wants a bath, not a shower), spot clean the rug.

toilet tomato5) As I am rinsing out the rags and underwear in the tub, in comes Max with a rotten plum tomato that he has fished off the kitchen counter.
“Look! I have a surprise!” he says.
I am unimpressed. He looks at the toilet, eyeballs the opening in the potty seat, and half a second after I realize what he is THINKING, he tosses the tomato into the water.

6) Mad, I slam down the shower head. It shatters.

7) Time out. “Because I threw the tomato in the toilet.”

8) After agreeing to “stay out of trouble,” Max comes into the bathroom where I’m picking up pieces of shattered shower head. He is coming to get me so he an show me the entire roll of plastic bags that he has unravelled onto the kitchen floor.

9) Max’s dad gets out of bed.

Mama and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Saturday
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