On Having A Man Child

People ask me all the time if having a boy is different than having girls. It's funny because how could it not be different? I wondering if they are asking secretly hoping that I am having the trials and tribulations of a young man child and they want to be sure their boys aren't the only ones. Haha!!

Even though I have what is considered a tom boy, my sweet little Berlin who I frequently find has been laying in the neighbor kid's sand box and will come home with a scalp full of sand, a little man child is still very different.

It's not just the fact that his favorite things are trucks and balls while the girls liked dresses and dolls. Perfect example? We have had the same garbage can, a tall silver contraption with a pedal and a flip lid, since Tryn was Kye's age almost exactly. Well, I recently realized why they sell locks for said garbage cans. Neither of the girls cared one bit about the darn thing, but not a day goes by without Kye and I having a "discussion" about whether or not he should open the lid. Worse than that, he likes to put things into the garbage...and pull them out. I'm starting to consider that lock.

Another way I noticed that Kye is completely different from the girls is when he ate a mouthful of sand. All kids do it at some point, sitting at the beach or in a sandbox they take a huge fistful of sand and pop it in their mouths. Well, when both of the girls did this as babies world ending cries and lots of spitting and drooling ensued. The man child? Well, he popped the sand in his mouth, paused, and then looked up at Steve and I with a big sandy grin and started laughing. Steve had to dig it out of his mouth so he didn't try to swallow it all.

Don't even get me started on taking this kid to the store. Wow. He is a pain in the you know what. Let's just say that most of the time involves him screaming because he is trying to turn around in the cart seat and gets stuck or falls over. Or he spends his time trying to wriggle out of the strap so that he can stand up. I basically have to walk around with my hand on him to keep him in the cart and he treats it like torture. How dare he be confined! I used to think the girls treating the store like a playground was a lot to deal with...at least they were laughing and having fun and not screaming like their fingernails are being removed.

And then there is the whole diaper changing situation. I recently read this thing that a mom wrote to her son, 25 Things I Want to Tell My Son (who was three). I can't find it now, but number 18 was something like, "You do not always have to touch your penis. It will be there for the rest of your life. You will have lots of opportunity to use it, you don't need to grab it all the time. It is not a toy." I just want to second that. Every single diaper change...every single time.

There are, of course, the things that are easier too. I finally have a kid that loves to eat. The girls treated food like it was a chore or something and would always eat the smallest amounts possible. Kye can already out eat them most of the time. That will probably never change. 
 
Don't get me wrong, I love this kid. I think he is the cutest little baby boy on the face of the earth right now and I am enjoying him immensely. But the answer to the question is YES. Yes, having a baby boy is much different than having a girl, in some ways at this age it is much more difficult. I have heard this is true, that boys get easier as they get older and girls get harder. That remains to be seen.  

Oh my, this could not have happened at a more ironic time. As I finished up this post Kye walked past me into the kitchen and this is what I found two minutes later:

Yes, next to his t-ball bat on the floor are banana peels and coffee grounds that he pulled from the garbage. And yes, of course I just swept and mopped the floor less than 30 minutes ago. Yes, I forgot to put the tray back on his chair to block him from climbing up. And what you can't see in this picture, and what alerted me to the trouble, is the fact that he also had a beaded necklace around his neck that he pulled and broke. I heard the beads landing on and rolling all over the floor. Thank goodness it's nap time.