Terrible One

My little Muffin turns one a week from today. It's been a great 51 weeks with the little one. I'm all gooey about him especially now as I remember last year this time and I recall throwing bricks into the sky because I was so frustrated that I hadn't gone into labour.

The little baby has indeed morphed. He was an easy baby ( I recall looking after him all by myself through CNY when he was a week old and wondering what all the fuss was about because he would feed and sleep for the stretches between his feed). When he got older, he was cheery and cheeky but content to just sit on your lap or play by himself in his cot. The true metamorphosis seems to have taken place in the last two months or so where he and we have discovered a still charming but decidedly feisty side to himself.

We suspect that he's had to develop it because he does have two older siblings who, while they love him very much, don't give way to him as much as he or we would like. So he has learnt to be protective over his toys, fight for what he wants, engage tug-of-war techniques when he doesn't get his way and when all else fails, throw himself on the ground and wail so loud you expect the gnashing of teeth to follow.

As of this morning, we also discovered that he has learnt to retaliate. When Jordan refused to give him what he wanted and when he realised that no amount of screaming from him was going to get her or his Mommy to budge, he stopped, toddled off to where her beloved stuffed bear was, picked it up, looked her in the eye and flung it on the ground before toddling off to lead our helper to the scene of the crime. All the while jabbering about what he'd done and the injustices that had been committed against him and how it wasn't really his fault that he had acted the way he did.

In many ways, he has grown up the fastest. He weaned the earliest, toddled off on his own legs fairly early on and now, we suspect he's entering his Terrible Twos ways ahead of the curve. While I am very wistful about him growing up so quickly, I'd be happy for him to snap out of terrorising his siblings and twirling everyone round his little finger.

Thing is he does it with such a big grin on his face that it takes a lot of effort to keep a straight face and chide him although chide him we must.

This is a video of how he tosses his whole box of books willy-nilly and does it with such glee and charm it is difficult to tell him off. And he even surreptitiously drops some under the table in the attempt to disguise the destruction he is causing. The victoriously raised arms at the end are hilarious although I only chuckle at it in the privacy of my room when he is asleep.



In front of him, it is the evil eye and the stern "no" that he has learnt to downturn his mouth to and switch on the waterworks the minute it leaves my mouth. Like I say, cheeky little chilli padi.

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