Banshee Boy

I was going to write about my second day of school, (which went well, thank you very much,) but this morning The Boy threw a tantrum of such epic proportions that it really merits it's own post.

The issue was getting dressed to go to school. We were for it; he was against. It wasn't really the clothes or even the going to school part so much as the getting out of bed to do these things that he had a problem with. "Want to sleep a little bit more," he wailed over and over in that ragged voice of toddler desperation, while AR and I wrestled with his flailing limbs in our own desperate attempt to get him out of his pajamas and into a clean pair of underwear.

The scene was all the more gut-wrenching because, in fact, AR and I wanted to sleep a little bit more too, and how many mornings have we been woken by him and tried to explain (to no avail) that the best thing for everybody would be for us all to go back to bed? (Answer: all of them.)

But there was no reasoning with him and no calming him down either. I think AR bore the worst of it, having to listen to him scream, "go away, Mommy! I don't like you!" and plaintively cry "want Ima," while he reached for me from her arms. She said she felt like the worst mother ever, but she held her ground better than I was able to, and she was the one who managed to get him into the car. Once there, he quickly returned to his relatively reasonable self and the ride to school was subdued, though it took me a while to get over the feeling that someone had taken an egg beater to my internal organs.

Ah, the joys of parenting.