The BoneBlog

Everybody says boys are easier to raise than girls.

Everybody lies.  They lie, lie, lie.  It's a vast conspiracy of the same ilk that causes so many mothers to tell a mother-to-be how AWFUL labor is and how PAINFUL delivery is, and how TERRIBLE newborns are. 

My experience has been that toddler boys are way more ornery than toddler girls.  Observe:

We have an unopened box of Bud Select with 20 12-oz bottles in it.  Each bottle, full of beer, weighs approximately 19 oz.  The entire box (not including the cardboard itself) weighs 23.75 lbs.

My bull moose of a son has the strength of his daddy.  He scoots the box around the house like so:

Then he climbs atop it in order to wreak havoc on everything we own.  Examples:

Notice he has learned to turn on the faucet in that first photo, and he is pulling things from my desk and flinging them to the floor in the second.  And he is proud.

Greg had to install hooks on our storm doors last night because Ethan has learned to unlock the front door, open it, unlock the storm door, open that, and run off into the sunset.  We couldn't allow this to happen because someone would eventually call the law on us for having a toddler at large.  Unfortunately, they don't make invisible fences with shock collars for toddlers.

Okay, sheesh, that was a joke.  It was.  Really!  We've never even considered such a thing, I swear!

Ahem.

Anyway, Laurel never did this stuff.  I didn't even have to childproof the place for her, because she LISTENED to me when I told her not to do things.  Not that she does anymore, of course.

Tonight I'm going to beg Greg to put yet another hook on our last remaining door through which Ethan can escape -- the garage door.  He's already figured out he can't open the others, so I have chased him into the garage at least five times today.  I lost count.

With all these locks, I'm starting to feel like a prisoner in my own house.  FedEx and UPS must think we're nuts because we have to go through such a rigmarole just to unlock our doors so we can accept delivery on anything. 

So I don't care what anybody says.  In my life, my toddler boy has been MUCH more challenging than my toddler girl.  Ethan has been Laurel's opposite in many ways, in fact.  But perhaps as he gets older he'll mellow out, to counteract Laurel's path of becoming more challenging with age.

One can only hope.

Please, please, pretty please post pictures of Ethan figuring out how to climb to the hook locks! ;)

That shouldn't be too challenging.  We put the hooks too high for him to reach but kept them low enough for Laurel to reach.  So now we wait until he figures out a kitchen chair will give him the height he needs.