Wrath Galore

I am still finding age 3 to be a bit of a trial.  There’s so much fighting!  And anger!  Seriously, Owen will get angry at me five times within fifteen minutes, and each time there is a bit of spitting/raspberry blowing (which is hard not to laugh at), and hitting (ditto), and hair-pulling (not as funny).  And then he’ll get stuck in fight mode and start fighting no matter what my response is – that is, even if I agree with him, he gets mad at me and tells me to Go To Work.  By Yourself.  He’ll also say, “You’re not my friend!” and “I don’t like you anymore!”  Oh woe!  He mostly can get re-directed away from his disappointments, but in addition to being 3, he’s also a stubborn fellow, so sometimes it is hard to get him off-topic. 

He likes to make piles of his toys, and woe be it to the person who tries to clean up the piles before he is done, which is basically never.  He will clean up his own mess if he’s in the mood, although it is more fun for him to deconstruct said pile and re-build it in another room.

When his anger reaches a critical peak, he’ll tip over into regret and start crying for semi-real and ask for “a Mom Hug” (no longer a Mommy Hug!).  Then he’ll tell me, “I sorry” a few times, while we hug, and then in a few minutes it will start all over again.

I suppose on the flip side of 3 are the loving moments, and the hilarious things he says, and excuses he’ll come up with (when I started to clean up one of his piles the other day he told me I couldn’t because it was “for Daddy’s birthday” (which happens to be in January; nice try, kid)).  He’s very imaginative, and he’s started asking the equivalent of “why” questions, although his tend to be, “What are bears for?”  “What do bugs do?” 

I’m very fond of the little fellow, of course, but it will be nice to make it to the other side of this period of wrath!

After I wrote the above, I had two housebound weekends in which all went quite well, for the most part.  But basically when I think of 3, I think of the nursery rhyme:  “And when she was good, she was very, very good.  And when she was bad, she was horrid.”  That is 3 in a nutshell.  I’ll be at my wit’s end, and then Owen will say (his new favorite phrase):  “I love you with all my heart.”  (I don’t know where he heard this phrase – perhaps a book?)  He will then follow it up with a list of what he loves to do with me, which always starts with:  “I love to make chocolate with you!... I love to make cookies with you!....  I love to play trains with you!....”  etc.  It is very sweet.  (I don’t think we’ve ever “made chocolate”, for the record, but all lists of love items start with chocolate.)  It is always tempest, followed by the eye of the storm, followed by tempest.  And hurricane season ends at age 4, right?  Right?!