3 A Boy and his Dog

When you've got an almost ten month old, you hit the ground running as soon as you hear him yelling and pounding on his wall at 6am. He's a terrible napper, so most days the next time I catch a break is 6:30 pm. Christian rules our house. I used to judge people like that. He has started shouting at me. How do I fix this? Umm, how in the world do I know? I think I say, "In this house, we speak nicely to each other" about 9 billion times a day and he gives me a look that makes me feel like the biggest idiot on the planet.

His favorite activity is dumping the dry dog food into the toilet and then splashing in it. I've seen him elbows deep in pee (that's as far as I'm going on that one), last week I saw him straight up eating a retired birds nest like you would eat a hamburger, he's thrown Sean's iPad right into his poopy diaper, about half the time I find him, his lips are covered in mulch and he has dog food just chillin in his cheeks and this morning he got an old milk jug out of the recycle bin and poured sour, curdled milk over his entire body. Yum.

My lucky mom and mother-in-law get hourly updates of his antics, pictures usually included. They laugh. I laugh. I literally have no clue what I'm doing or how to keep him even a tiny bit under control. I think if I started to try to keep it all together, I would lose my mind, so I'm mostly just like, whateva, all day long.

If you want to give me advice, I'm down. If you want to come babysit, I'm totally freaking down with that.

But today, I seriously had a 20 minute break. Christian is obsessed with our dog Lola and thinks she was born just so he could gnaw on her ears and try to pancake flatten her. If you know Lola, she's literally the biggest brat on the planet. Like, she mostly just goes by Lil' Miss Hot Mess or Suzanne Somers at our house. I think if I took her to dog school, the dog trainers would bawl their eyes out and hit the bar afterwards. Anyways, she's horrible. EXCEPT she is soooo nice and patient with Christian, like Mother Teresa status, so I usually just think, "Okay, you have another night of room and board."

A lot of mornings Lola is doing her typical naughty behavior and shredding up something valuable under the couch. When Christian wakes up, he likes to look for her there. It's pretty typical for her to not want to come out and be tortured by him, but most of the time he just grabs her by an ear or limb and tries to pull her out. This morning though was really different, he was so patient with her. He waited for over 20 minutes for her to come out.

He would scoot his head closer and closer when she realized they were both being just as stubborn.

He tried to share his binky with her. He even tried to put it in her mouth.

In the end, he settled for petting her nose.

I love my little boy. Maybe he's not the quietest and maybe he's exceptionally horrible at sitting still, but he's really really really fun and keeps me on my toes! I loved watching him be so gentle this morning and I love anytime I get to see new little sides of his personality come out that I haven't seen before. Especially in those rare, calm moments. We are learning and growing together. We probably laugh our heads off about 90% of the day, at least we try. He is my buddy and he forces me to be reeeeeallly chill. This mom thing is totally the best and I'm so glad I have such an entertaining partner for the ride.