The terrible twos, the aaaCKK%*%^&$!! threes

Forgive me, I am a blogging failure. We went to Costa Rica in FEBRUARY and now it's halfway through March and I still haven't posted pictures.

But you see, it's not my fault. See, I have a three-year-old. Yup. See? Airtight excuse. Cause as you all know (especially those of you who have already had three-year-olds, and lived to tell the tale but somehow managed to avoid letting ME know), having a three-year-old is WAY WORSE than having a two-year-old.

Seriously, he was pretty bad before. Tantrums, boundary-pushing, button-pushing, nap strikes, hitting/biting/clawing. But nothing compared to now. We were starting to wonder if he picked up some horrible good-behavior-aversion disease in the jungle in Costa Rica, but then our friends (thanks Sonia) and pediatrician (thanks whatever your name is) let us know: three can be worse than two. Thanks for the advance warning, y'all.

Let's just review this evening, randomly chosen from an entire series of other similar evenings, purely for educational purposes. Tonight, P taught us the invaluable lesson that you cannot leave a three-year-old on their own for even a second (mind you, both of us were home, and our apartment only has three rooms), or he might:

a) Eat the entire tube of toothpaste AND use the saliva that generates to soak through his bed and stuffed animals on the bed and then start shrieking uncontrollably because his stuffed animals are "too wet";

b) Take his cup of lemonade (only grudgingly allowed after the toothpaste incident) and the 3-foot-long flexible plastic tube attachment that inflates the guest air mattress, sit on mommy and daddy's bed and try to use the tube to suck the lemonade out of the cup, spilling (of course) all of it on the bed;

c) While getting a timeout for the lemonade incident, scream "I need to PEEEEEE", thus ensuring that his parents let him out of the timeout to go to the potty (no dummy, this kid);

d) While peeing (or hopefully, a little afterwards), grab a spray bottle of degreaser (don't ask me how it got there, I don't know) and proceed to spray the floor, the toilet, the walls and the toilet paper roll;

and
e) Just for good measure, take his shoes off and spit/drool/slobber into them until they're thoroughly soaked.

Keep in mind this was all between dinner and bedtime. That is, between 6:30 and 7:30 at night. P-roc wants to know: what did YOU achieve in that hour today?

To end on a more upbeat note, here's a picture of le petit prince enjoying himself in Costa Rica. It's a lovely country and we hope he survives his parents' wrath long enough to visit there once again some day. On his own.