Prelude to "The Twos"

Over the last few weeks Kubus has been generous enough to give Jordan and I a taste of whats to come when he turns two, which is now officially 9 days from today.

1. "The Drama Cry" Kubus has mastered what I like to call the "drama cry" - basically when we tell him off he'll burst into tears, cover his face with his hands and start to wail. Anything from telling him to not do something (i.e. opening the pantry) to not giving him some diet Coke when he catches a glimpse of it in the fridge, can trigger the "drama cry". And it doesn't help that its so ridiculous that we usually just end up laughing, which of course intensifies the cry.

2. "The Tantrum" Even though he loves it, I really hate taking Kubus to the park now a days since we invariably we have to leave and at which point Kubus will pack an absolute crap. He'll start to flail around kicking and screaming,"drama cry" in full force - the works - when I try to get him into his stroller. I turn red and just focus on getting at least half of him strapped in and then speed walk away from the judging looks of the other parents. Though for some reason Kubus does this only for me -Jordan says he is not too bad for him when he takes Kubus to the park.

3. "The Runaway" - Kubus has suddenly decided its absolutely hysterical to run away from us now, and thinks its especially funny to run towards the street. He'll get this look in his eye and then just bolt, laughing hysterically, leaving Jordan and I to have to sprint after him screaming STOP! or COME BACK HERE! at the top of our lungs, praying that we'll be able to grab him before he gets struck by a car (or trips and skins his knee which I guess in the scheme of things would be preferable).

4. "The Invalid" - When we tell Kubus to move out of the way (i.e. when he's in the middle of the kitchen or trying to get stuff out of the pantry) and he ignores us, we are forced to move him ourselves and lately Kubus has taken to tucking his legs under himself so as to make it that much more difficult to place him on the ground. Jordan has taken to just dropping him (which is usually also followed by the "drama cry" along with a chorus of "DADA MEEEEEEAAAAN!"), while I am still at the placing him on couch stage. I may graduate to the dropping phase soon though. Its getting freaking annoying.

However, today he did something which has topped all the others. I made the mistake of turning my attention away from Kubus for a few seconds to check something online and then I heard a horrible sound - the sound of scribbling. And knowing that Kubus was not in his highchair with a coloring book, my heart stopped, knowing it would be bad. It was worse. Kubus somehow found a ball point pen and started to scribble on our white leather couch. He managed to get a few good loops in before I ponced on him and wrested the pen away.

Now I guess its partly our fault for being stupid enough to buy a white couch, but nonetheless we were able to make it almost a year before this incident and had naively thought we had a good system (we took great pains to keep all writeables well out of Kubus' reach and only let him color when sitting in his highchair).

Anyway, Jordan and I both freaked out (Jordan more than me) but after we calmed down, I Googled "how to get pen off of a leather couch" and came up with over 1,000 hits (making me feel better that we weren't the only idiot parents who buy white furniture) of how to clean it. One of the suggestions was to use rubbing alcohol. However, we didn't have any BUT one helpful person online also didn't and said she used her husband's cologne. We didn't have any cologne either, however I remembered I had gotten a perfume gift set for Christmas last year and ran to get it.

Lo and behold, along with one of Jordan's socks, we managed to scrub off most of the pen! You can still see a faint scribble, but its no where near as bad as it was. Now the only issue is that our couch reeks of Dolce & Gabanna's Light Blue (which I happen to like a lot, but Jordan claims the couch now smells like "a gay Italian").

Ah well. I guess we should have expected this sooner or later. One woman I work with says she managed to avoid the Terrible Twos with her son, but is now going through the "Feral Threes" (by the way, feral is the new Aussie favorite word - it means wild, and I'm not kidding I've heard it used like 5 or 6 times by different people in the last week alone). Anyway, Kubus isn't ALL bad. There are some really cute things that he does - but I'll leave that for a blog for another day (like tomorrow during my "lunch break" ;) at work.