My son the counterfeiter

I wrote this title and stuck it in my draft box a few weeks ago. So today as I lay in bed feeling guilty about my one lone post last week I thought I would drag it out and for once, finish a thought. Here goes nothing.

My oldest son is many many things. I am going to assume that you all know that I love him, that he's amazing, that he's eerily smart and intuitive, and that he's tall and oh so handsome. Also he's 6 and only the oldest by 54 minutes. With those facts out of the way let me share with you his other side.

His other side is something many people don't think exists. His teachers have stared at me in disbelief as I discuss my concerns about him. My family and my husbands family both shake their heads and say, "not our little boy!" You see he is a natural leader (at home), he is sneaky, he is cheeky and he is forceful. Honestly, it scares me a little bit, in a good way and in a bad way.

At the age of 8 months old he climbed on top of his twin brother in his crib and almost smothered him to death. At first we thought he was a baby and didn't know what he was doing, now we know better. Not even a month later he was a crawling fiend and, using that practice he had gained in the crib, got his brother to lay next to the front door, crawled up on top of him, opened the front door and crawled out into the condo complex parking lot, dragging his full dirty diaper behind him.

Looking back, this should have been a clue. But I had yet to experience that strong sense of foreboding.

At age 2 he took his diaper off and used it to paint the playroom walls, every toy within reach, and his brother. Once the gag reflex passed I thought it was sort of funny and decided it was time to potty train.

At age 3 he began the disappearing phase. At the beach park he would disappear. In the store he would disappear. In our own house he would, you guessed it, disappear. There was always some logical reasoning behind it, it made a sort of sick sense. This is when the foreboding kicked in.

By the time he started Kindergarten I knew our twins needed to be separated. The younger one is smart and got the older one to do everything for him, I felt this would wreak havoc in a classroom setting. I wrote a long letter to the older ones Kindergarten teacher explaining my concerns. He has asthma, he has allergies, he had been very sickly the past year and a half and oh yeah, his behavior could be a bit erratic.

I feared for nothing, he is generally an angel at school. He daydreams and lacks focus but he is usually willing to try and quietly follows directions. He has a lot of confidence and is sure he knows everything. Also, he doesn't need to show you he knows, he doesn't care what you think. I guess those angel wings get heavy at school because last year he would get home everyday and cry and yell and say that we all hated him and talk about running away and just generally act like his life was over. Do 5 yr olds get depression? Because I was worried. Yet this same son was also the one I could trust to use the bathroom alone, leave in charge of our little one for a few minutes, who followed directions and who was always ready to help me with any project. This tempered my concerns and in talking with his many doctors we decided that his many meds probably had something to do with the behavior. Also he discovered how to use nail polish to write his name on everything in our house and thus destroy any bit of value it may have had.

That all figured out we headed into his sixth year of life. In this year he has peed into his own mouth, gotten into a fight at school, created a mud wrestling pit under the front porch, written his name on more pieces of furniture, hidden food in his room, and yes dabbled in counterfeiting. We have this reward system called Mallars (Mallo + dollar=Mallar) that our boys can earn and lose based on their chores and behavior. They are yellow and they are printed from a secret file so that a certain someone could not make his own. He somehow found the original a few weeks ago and got a yellow  marker and colored them. He went to redeem some last week and as I was wondering how he earned so many my husband turned one over and saw the white back. It was hard to be mad about the cheating because there was some serious thought and effort that went into it. But like I said, he is sneaky.

This weekend the vog was off the charts awful and he woke up Saturday and Sunday with allergy bags under his eyes and you could tell he was in for rough days. He take rough days to another level and spent the entire day Saturday being disrespectful, crying, yelling and just acting like his world had ended. We made it through the day and as my husband and I were discussing what to do we started discussing what he might be like when he gets older.

He already has a lot of the traits that people dread in teenagers and I am not afraid to admit that he is way smarter than me. So I am filled with both dread and excitement. If he finds his niche, his thing, it could be amazing to watch him grow. If we continue this way he will always be a step ahead and I will be exhausted trying to figure him out.

Now the only way you can say these things if you sandwich them between compliments so I am going to end by telling you again that he is a genius, adorable, funny and extremely creative young man.

And that is my oldest son, I am sure this blog will have more stories about him over this year, a lot of the funny that happens in my life comes from him :)