Lucas at Terribly Two

My son's name is Lucas and he is a precocious and cutie-pie of a two year old. My wife and I have been dealing with the challenges of the onset of the terrible twos, as of the last 3 and one half weeks. That's how quick the transition was. From a cute, sweet, and fairly quiet 1 and 1/2 year old, to a terrible two year old occurred exactly three and a half weeks ago, over the course of about 24 hours. By the end of that day, Lucas had become a demanding, obnoxiously independent, seemingly suicidally fearless, screaming, pounding, early to rise and never quietly to bed, ultra possessive, pugnacious, (and did I say demanding?) and demanding mass of toddler nerves.

He's still cute, when he slows down for about 30 seconds each day, those 30 seconds being distributed out in random 2 second increments throughout the very long, LONG day of parenting him.  My wife, who only just took a new job, largely to get a break from being MOMMY! all of the time, has been pulling her hair out trying to keep up with him. We both know that this is just normal two year old behavior, after all we went through this once before with his brother Liam. But when you're living through it, it's like trench warfare. Nothing exists except surviving the next day of impossible demands.

Now, that's not quite true. Lucas is still our baby and he does have, just as his brother does, a very sweet temperament. It's just currently buried under about 20 newfound layers of toddler self-awareness. And all of those layers tell him, any time he looks at anything, just one word . . . MINE!!!

And any time he talks to his mother or to me, there is one other word that is always present these days, and that's the instinctive NO!!!! Usually yelled at the top of his lungs . . . repeatedly. The odd thing about this latter fact is that he does it instinctively even when he actually wants to say yes.  "Lucas" my wife will ask, "would you like some ice cream?"

"NO!"

Followed immediately by five minutes of screaming and crying, that that entire container of ice cream is, in fact, all his.

Behing a human being is very weird.

Although the brunt of this is currently falling on my wife right now, I do try to help out with the difficulties as much as I can, and I certainly do get in the line of fire quite often. ("Not enough!" my wife would grumble at this point.) But I have earned my purple-marker-scribbled heart in the toddler wars.  Both of us often just look at each other as we collapse into bed after the boys are in their beds and think, "What did we do to deserve this?"

But having a precocious two year old does occasionally have its merits. A rare and wondrous thing can occasionally occur. My wife has witnessed this particular one on several occasions and it never fails to bring her near on to tears. It happened to me this morning as I was getting ready to leave for work.  My wife was still asleep in bed, but next to her, staring obsessively a the TV in our bedroom, was an absolutely transfixed Lucas watching his obligatory 7am cartoons. Neither my wife nor I are morning people. Whether or not Lucas is a morning person is unknown. When you're a terrible two year old, any chance to disrupt Mommy's sleep is an opportunity not to be wasted, such as waking up in your crib at 2am and screaming at the top of your lungs for 45 minutes before someone can finally convince you to go back to sleep and NO, it is NOT time to get up yet.  And then he wakes up at some random point between 5:30 and 7am every day, every god-blessed day of the year. (Including, most damningly to my wife, Sunday mornings . . . her normal day to sleep in.) But such is normalcy in our house on weekday mornings these days. So we roll with it.

This particular morning, Lucas looked relatively content, and very involved in his programme, so I risked it. I sat down next to him on the bed, leaned over and gave him a hug and a kiss, and said, "I'm going to work now, Lucas. Have a good day."

He turned to me, looked at me square in the eyes with a very sincere, sweet look on his face and said, clear as a bell . . . "I love you, Daddy."

I don't know if there's a better feeling in the whole wide world than that.