Remember...You love Your Kid

It's been one of those mornings. You know the kind of morning where you are tempted to go back in time and undo that conversation with hubby when you said, "hey, are we ready to have a kid?" Since he's gotten closer to approaching that fateful birthday (2), he's decided his new favorite word is, of course, NO! It's made today, especially annoying, difficult, and terrible.

He rambles it off in response, not only to questions, requests, demands and other such essentials; but also at random, even if no one is even talking to him. It seems he wants to make sure that, just in case anyone happens to be listening, his opinion is still out there, in the air, just hanging about, and it is clearly, NO! He'll just be mumbling it to himself as he plays with his animals, his trucks, anything. To combat this annoyance, I ignore him. Consequently, he gets into trouble. Like this:

Collin...are you getting into your sand toys in the house? No, of course not. I'm a complete angel. What's that? I'm irritating you today? Why? Oh, Daddy's gone again? He's always gone, what's your problem? (Of course, I'm joking. He's allowed to play with sand toys in the garage...kind of. And, I don't really "ignore" him. At least only long enough for things like this to happen):

Collin says, "If only I could find more trouble to get into...that's it! Under the beds! There has to be all kinds of tresures under here! What do you mean, no! That's my word." He likes to hide under various beds when it's time to do ANYTHING, like say, go to the vet. It's friggin' hillirious, I tell you. To him. Only to him.

Ahhhh, what a perfectly angelic shot of my sweet boy. What you can barely see is that he's holding a pink crayon on his shoulder that he's just broken to smitherines and he's plotting either throwing it at me or breaking it again. Actually, he hugged me. I'm giving him a bad reputation today, aren't I? But, he did break his crayon...on purpose!

The no thing though--Conversations that used to be perfectly normal have been ruduced to things like this:

Me: Is that a truck? (it is)
Collin: No
Me: Okay. Well, let's put your shoes on. We have to go.
Collin: No. (as he hands me his shoes...no one said he was good at this "no" thing)
Me: Okay. Too bad. We're going anyway.
Collin: No. (as he walks to the door)

This exact conversation happened as we prepared to go to the disaster, oops, I mean vet this morning. While there, I discovered that the vet across the street is perhaps a sadist posing as a vet and that I will never take poor Eddie there again; but that maybe I'll take Homer there, since he did destroy my shoes last week. I also learned that I should always check my purse for my wallet before I leave the house. Grrrrr. And, I learned that hearing "no" four billion times before ten a.m. despite how cooperative (at least 70/30) the kid saying it is, can wear at some essential part of your brain that you didn't know you were using before it finally fails in a small exam room of a sadistic veterinarian's office where you are sitting, without identification, means of payment or any weapon to slit your own wrists with.

Needless to say, the dump truck, books, piles of toys and gaggle of other crap the kid brought into the exam room from the waiting area stopped entertaining him and the worry both he and I had over the fact that sadist vet refused to examine Eddie in our presence and whisked him away to a place where he'd be more "cooperative," added up to a stressful morning. Coupled with the fact that Collin kept saying "NO!" and then melted down into a freakishly loud temper tantrum the moment he saw Gracie and Kari come and go with my wallet, I am pretty sure that the fact that I made it out of there without wiring the place to detonate when I walked out was impressive, especially considering how mad I was at how they treated my other baby, Eddie.

Seriously, I've had Eddie at more vets than I can count over the years and no one's had to take him to "the back" before or called him "uncooperative." And, when they brought him back, he was all wet and shaking! Why would he be soaked from getting a rabies shot and a typical exam? I picture him all chained up and muzzled or something back there. I tend not to cooperate either when someone tries to jam a thermometer up my pooper, but hey, that's just me. I generally get a bad feeling from a vet if no one scratches my dog's head or calls him a good boy, not even once. Aren't the people that work at a vet's office, including the vet, supposed to like animals? Don't ask Collin. He'll tell you no. Poor Eddie says, "please don't take me back to the mean vet!" Eddie's mommy says, "no problem," since it cost almost $400 anyway for them to be horrible to you. Blech! Good toys in the waiting room or not, we are not going back. Oh yeah, and I think their scale was wrong. I know that us gals can be self-conscious about our weight, so maybe I'm projecting my feelings onto Eddie but I don't think he gained almost 15 pounds since the last time he was weighed, that's a pretty large percentage of his body weight, don't you think? That would kind of show a bit more than it does. It doesn't say much for them if their scale is that far off, especially considering that at first, they said he weighed 24 pounds. Huh?