What did you just call me? No, really, what?

"Children: you spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk, and the next 17 to sit down and shut up"

I've never really agreed with the statement as a whole, but I can most certainly understand the sentiment. Little kids can be obnoxious motor-mouths that run in circles screaming and jabbering on and on and on and ON. And then there's the teenage years, where I personally learned to speak so quickly that no adult could understand me. Believe it or not, that was only partially on purpose. I just had SOMUCHTOSAYTHATIHADTOGETITOUTWITHOUTTAKINGASINGLESOLITARYBREATH.

We all remember those days, yes? Ah they seem so long ago, yet not so far off to live through again.

Somehow with Holden we got pretty lucky in the obnoxious category. For the first 3 years anyway. I always said that his mild temperament after the infant stage must have been Karma making up the first 6 months of reflux hell to us.
There were no terrible twos- just an easygoing, yet somewhat gigantic, goofball of a toddler. His vocabulary may have been slower to expand than all the mommy braggers going on and on about how their precious offspring of Einstein was speaking in full sentences in a second language, but the shit he DID say? Was hilarious. It was enough to fill a good number of blogs with, even enough to make it a little bonus in the back of my book.
Holden was the kind of kid that RUINS other kids for you... at 2 anyway. Once that turd hit 4 he went balls to the wall trying to make up for all the opportunities to tantrum like a little baby when he was a baby that he missed.

That's not the point, though. The point is that at 2 years old, all the junk that fell from his trap made me HAPPY. He never even told me no. I'm pretty sure he was broken.

When I jammed Parker out of my crotch and into this world and it became abundantly clear that he might as well be Holden's identical twin, two years too late, I suppose a part of me assumed the temperament would be the same as Holden's as well.
Yeah well, if you've been around long enough- you know that NOTHING about Parker is normal, predictable, expected, or anything other than totally weird when it comes to milestones or typical parenting ideas of how kids 'should' be- whatever that even means.

It has been a LONG (and at times ridiculously frustrating) road to get language out of that child. Language that sounds English, anyway.

For some reason other another, the goofball gene appears to be a recessive one and it smacked Holden in the face but skipped Parker. Don't get me wrong, he IS my child, and therefore is horribly fucking weird- but just not in the same way.
I haven't been able to put my finger on it, because again, unlike Holden- he is RAGING through the terrible 2s like it's his mother-badword job, and due to the decibel breaking level of asshole he exudes- it's hard to really notice any other part of his personality.
Yeah, that's right, I said my kid's an asshole. He's two, what the hell do you expect? He's an ass. A loveable, dimple-cheeked, screaming weasel of an ass. I love him to pieces, but it is what it is.

Still, every day I have wondered what is going on inside that angry little toddler head of his. What is he thinking? What is he feeling? What would he say if he would actually SAY something?
I really feel like a good portion of a person's personality is expressed in not just how they express themselves, but how they speak and the way they speak it. We were missing all of that.

Instead of wanting my kid to sit down and shut up (which I often feel like with 4 year old dictator Holden), I was begging him to do the opposite.

And now i'm wondering if perhaps that was a mistake, because I was not mistaken when I said that adorable little child is a giant raging asshole.

When he's not screaming NO, MINE, ME ME ME, swatting at people furiously while insisting they GO AWAY, or the frequent times he comes down a case of the ME TOO's, he's calling you a "LOWBLAY"

Now, I have no fucking idea what on earth a LOWBLAY is, but I know you don't want to be called it- because it's meant as an insult. And lil' man finds it absolutely hilarious to insult people. Probably even more hilarious that we don't know what it means.
"Give mommy a kiss goodnight!"
"NO! LOWBLAY!"- and then he runs away laughing hysterically. Or he can be angry, he really doesn't discriminate with the handings out of the title of "LOWBLAY"

The child is the insult king, only... you never know what the insult is- you can only tell by the tone in his voice that he is in fact insulting you. And that's how he likes it. He speaks other words JUST fucking fine, but when it comes to saying things that would most likely get him in trouble? He makes it a cutesy two syllabled gibberish word that can't honestly be punished.

So I have the goofball... and the diabolical genius.

I'll be lucky if I make it to the teen years. Mother lowblay.