Dealing with the terrible twos is like living with Genghis Khan. A tiny, adorable Genghis Khan. Oh, he’s slaying, riding horses (well, a pig with wheels) and he has weapons- tons of weapons. Just give him something- he’ll turn it into a weapon: cat toys, washrags, spatulas. He’s really been into fly-swatters lately, and cries when I won’t let him have ours. It’s coated in fly guts, but he doesn’t care. It’s a terrific weapon.

Not that he needs a weapon. No, no. He also likes to hit. I tell him “don’t hit mama.” He replies, “I want to hit mama.” What do you with that? The interwebs tell me to benignly ignore him after he hits, as hitting is a bid for attention. No attention=not hitting. This is a particularly challenging tactic to take because Boychild likes to hit me while I’m changing his diaper. He’ll smack me in the middle of the change, and if I step back and ignore him, he’ll flip over, spilling little poops all over his changing table. What do you do with THAT? Yeah. It’s not working.

Don’t worry, though. He doesn’t always hit. Sometimes he turns into a soccer hooligan and I get an accidental headbutt in the throat, lip, cheek, etc. Ya know, kids’ heads are huge for their bodies. I mean, they’re almost 90% full grown, those heads. And Boychild has what one friend calls a “chowdah head,” meaning his head is very large and maybe full of soup. When you take a giant noggin and propel it through the air with manic energy into soft tissue like a nose or a throat, it hurts.

I’m not the only recipient of toddler violence. When BC was small, I’d sometimes hear Husabnd yelp with pain while he was holding him. “Aah aaagh aaaaagh! He’s got my chest hair!” he’d say, with tears in his eyes. He was just learning to grasp back then. But he’s growing bigger. Now, when you hold Boychild, his legs are right at crotch level. Any kick or swing plants his foot right square in Husband’s dangly bits. Good thing we only want the one kid!

I’m full of mixed emotions these days. How can you love someone who hurts you so joyfully? Is there a hotline for this? He is insanely cute and apparently sadistic. Will he become a murdering psychopath if we don’t teach him not to hurt us? I will say this in closing: if we are killed in our beds, you know who the prime suspect is, right? That adorable little chowdahead with the flyswatter riding a pig.