Comedy à la Toddler

Warning: If you are not interested in reading about bodily functions involving a toilet training toddler, skip this one.

Life with Iain is a pretty wild ride. He is able to make me laugh hysterically and then do something to drive me around the bend within seconds of each other. He is inquisitive, joyful, serious, introspective, stubborn as heck and expends a crazy amount of energy. He can melt my heart with his “I love you, Mommy” before bed time and almost cause an aneurism any other time of the day when he jumps off the toilet, throws open the door (I’m not allowed in there for the most part anymore) and runs screaming towards Mudder’s nice cream coloured couch before I’ve had the chance to wipe anything.

His vocabulary and sentence structure amazes me as does his elephant-like memory. The boys and I are not in NS helping with the move because Iain still wants to go to ‘Iain’s house’ in Nova Scotia. He remembers it and the toys it contains vividly and gets quite upset when we mention that we are moving to a new house in Movieland (Iain’s word for Newfoundland). We were afraid that a visit back would cause too much confusion for him. I guess the decision for DH to retire from the CF so that we would stop moving was a good one especially in light of this little piece of Iain’s personality that we are just getting to know.

Here are some cute (I think) Iain stories that I do not want to forget and want to share.

While at Dominion in August, Iain, Aidan and I were in the paper products aisle picking up toilet paper. In his toddler voice, which is just a shade below 'bellow', Iain says

"Toilet paper! That's for wiping my penis!"

I smiled and agreed with him. And I’m pretty sure the man a little further up the aisle didn’t hear… (I decided this one was blog worthy after all, ML!).

While at home (currently Mudder and Fadder’s house in Upper Gullies), Iain can usually be found in his birthday suit. Luckily, he is a bit reticent about meeting strangers at the door at any time so, by and large, I do not mind his streaking around. He tells me that he wants to be cold when he is covered in goose bumps and I have tried to cover those goose bumps with clothes but, frankly, it is not worth the fight. Sigh. Besides, he rarely has an accident and almost always tells you when he needs to go to the toilet. Sometimes he even goes on his own. That can be very exciting let me tell you.

He was sitting at the kitchen table for breakfast with Grandma awhile ago and dropped whatever he was eating on his chest. As he was wiping it off, he said to Grandma,

“Uh oh. I’m going to have to change.” Mudder told me I had my work cut out for me when I got back to the kitchen.

During a bathroom visit when I was wiping Iain’s rear end, I commented on the fact that he must not have had a BM because there was no, ahem, evidence on the toilet paper despite the fact the he told me he had. Puzzled, Iain’s little head peered into the toilet bowl for a minute. He then looked at me and said, quite seriously,

“It’s hiding.”

Grandma (what am I going to do without her when we move???) was folding laundry the other day. That is a chore neither her nor I enjoy doing around Iain. Months and months and months ago, DH taught Iain a fun game involving throwing dirty laundry in the air on the way to the washer. Unfortunately, toddlers cannot distinguish between fun games and clean versus dirty laundry. Therefore, he has been a bit of a nightmare with respect to clean laundry and dragging it all over the house ever since. Iain noticed that Grandma was folding laundry and ran over to help out. Nothing but nothing pleases Iain more than to be helping out (bless him!). Mudder was trying to convince him that helping her was not a good idea and finally said something to the effect of “but you don’t know how” to which he responded,

“Maybe you show me?”

And tonight on the telephone he said “I love you” to his father for the first time.

Thank you so much for spicing up our lives, Iain.