Hilarious Hurricane

I have decided to add another regular feature to my Blog, titled, quite appropriately Hilarious Hurricane...welcome to Volume 1. Many of you who don't get the pleasure of spending a lot of time with the little gaffer, may question why his nickname is Hurricane. This should clear things up for you....

Allow me to start from the beginning if you will. After 9 long months of all-day sickness (morning sickness? that's for wimps!) a grueling couple of days in the hospital on bedrest, being induced, then a wild ride that lead straight to an emergency c-section early one Father's Day morning I shall never forget, and a little bit of ressecitation required in the OR to get my beautiful baby breathing, I thought the struggle was over and we could take our bundle of joy home and enjoy him! Little did I know that I would also be forced to learn to enjoy many personality traits I never knew existed! Here are some of my favorite Hurricane Harrison Hilarities that I am convinced only exist in my world...I have yet to meet anyone who has as many wild and crazy moments that rival ours so far!

He was very particular about what he wanted and how he wanted it, right from the start, which is why I also nicknamed him Prince Harry from about week 2, long before the Hurricane actually hit! He would scream in the car anytime we travelled less than 50km/hr and you didn't dare stop for a red light for fear of never getting him to settle down again! He had to be held and burped a certain way or else he'd cry until YOU got it right! He prefered to nurse off the right side only and I would practically have to starve him to get him to nurse off the left side. He never took a bottle or a soother. (the pic up top is him pretending to be a baby more recently!) It was up to the rest of the world to fit into his schedule, NOT the other way around.

At 18 mos he fell out of a shopping cart head first, onto a concrete floor, splitting his lip open and bleeding all over me when I picked up his stunned little self off the floor! Don't worry...he was fine, just a little bit scared to go shopping after that! Later that spring, at about 20 mos old he went on a real spree over a 3 week period, and we seemed to be constantly doing damage control after he'd been through somewhere. He called 911 while my dad was babysitting him and had Calgary's Finest storming the house, guns drawn, 2 at the front door and 2 covering the back!!! Next was what I refer to now as the Perfume Incident, where he got hold of one of my perfume samples, got the lid off and managed to drink it all down before I could even get within arms reach of him! That was followed by a call to Poison Control and a lot of Puke Patrol clean up for me!!! The following week he flushed the toilet over and over so many times that it backed right up, flooded the bathroom floor and leaked through to the basement! Not long after that, he ran out in front of a van on me in the alley, narrowly avoiding getting hit and severely injured. The kid's got speed!!!

We've had a few other incidents along the way, most of which have been much tamer than those! However last year while still living out on the farm, he and the dog took a stroll down the 1/2 km driveway, across the gravel road, where we found them playing happily in the neighbour's ditch, all covered in mud, just as the sun was goin down. I was in such a panic, thinking we would not find them before dark, and terrified that he would get hit by a tractor since he set out on his adventure during seeding, when we experience the second highest volume of traffic on that road next to harvest.

Now come the potty training adventures! If you've been keeping up with us on this Blog, you know by now that I have stopped buying diapers in an uphill battle to get my nearly 4 yr old son potty trained! Well...like I said, it is not without accidents that we will achieve this great goal, but with patience, persistance and positive parenting. (I think...I don't know anymore!) After a week of doing so well, he came upstairs from playing hockey in the basement, only he wasn't wearing any pants. UH-OH. I knew something was up, so I immediately let him lead me back downstairs (to the scene of the crime!) only to find that he had pooped and peed on the floor, then taken out his hockey stick and used his own poop as a puck! YUP. There was poop everywhere!!! I felt angry, discouraged and frustrated...now come on...even the world's most patient mom (which I am NOT!) would begin to crack under that kind of performance!!! It's a delicate balance between coming down too hard and giving him a Potty-Complex, turning him off using it even more, and being had by a 3 yr old and allowing him to think he got away with something! I only slightly freaked out, just enough to scare him a little and to make myself feel better, then I regained what composure I had left, cleaned it up with his help and carried on. That was 2 days ago. Things in the potty department have been a little shakey since then to say the least. Today he peed his pants and told me, "I decided it's OK to pee my pants!" YOU decided? Like I said, this is a child with his own agenda, and nobody, NOBODY is going to tell HIM to use the potty or do anything else their way! I refuse to buy more diapers, so I guess he's going to have to get used to walking around in wet pants, until HE decides it's OK to pee on the potty, and not in his pants!

Now...does any of this leave any of you with any other questions as to why he is famously known as the Hurricane around here?!