I haven’t been around many toddlers in my life. I’d actually never been around a baby until I had my own. I was the first out of my generation in the family to have kids and even while growing up, there were never many babies around. The only experiences I’ve had with toddlers before having Andrew came from things I’ve read, things I’ve seen in public for brief amounts of time or things I’ve heard about the few toddler girls that are currently in my extended family. The only real experience I have is with my oldest son who is now 2, but since I’m new to this, it’s been a learn-as-you-go process.

Even with my little experience, I can’t help but feel like my son is a lot more difficult than the typical toddler. This doesn’t really surprise me since he sure as hell was a lot more difficult than the trypical baby. Andrew definitaly is a toddler who has his mind made up. He wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it and there is no stopping him. No amount of saying “No”, removing him from the situation or ignoring him can stop him from doing what he wants. Saying “No” usually results in him laughing and proceeding to do whatever it was at an even faster pace so that he can get the next reaction out of us even quicker. He makes a game out of it and it’s So. Damned. Frustrating. He listens to no one and I feel like I spend all day trying to get him to not open kitchen drawers, grab things off of the counters, play with the remote, throw the pillows off of the couch, pull books oot of the bookshelf, climb on the bed, dump clean clothes out of the laundry basket before I put them away, climb on the drawers to his dresser, throw every toy out of his toybox even though he doesn’t want to play with any of them, etc. He knows he isn’t supposed to do these things, but after a year of trying to teach him not to with zero success, I really don’t know what to do anymore. It’s come to the pount where I feel like I can’t have anything nice anymore because he’s just going to undo or destroy it. Here are two recent examples:

I bought a cubby/toy organizer thing for Robert’s room (where they play) so I can keep the toys off of the floor. I use 3 of the cubbies for books and larger toys and 3 more cubbies have fabric bins with the smaller toys inside. First thing Andrew does after he eats breakfast is go into Robert’s room and throws every single book out of the book cubby then proceeds to dump out all the toys from the fabric bins. Sometimes he’ll even bring the bins out into the living room just to empty them all over the floor. Does he do this because he wants to play with them? No. He does it because he hates when things are in their place. He seems to thrive on chaos. So I end up tripping over toys all day because there’s no point in picking them up only to have them thrown all over the place again and again. This isn’t fun when you’re pregnant and trying to carry a 9 month old without tripping. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the apartment is going to be messy as long as there are babies/toddlers living here, but it does get to be a little ridiculous when I can’t even have things clean for 5 minutes without him making another mess. I don’t understand why he feels the need to do this every day, multiple times a day when he doesn’t even want to play with this stuff? Like the books – he doesn’t look at any of them, but those are always the first things that get tossed in a huge pile on the floor. He won’t even go in later and pick one out to look at. Am I supposed to just put the books and toys away for good to avoid the mess? I don’t want to do that because Robert actually likes to play with these toys and it’s nice to have them around in the off-chance that Andrew might want to play with them too. Or do I just let them be and learn to deal with it all the while trying to not trip every time I take a step?

Next example, we bought a new couch last week. I also bought some new pillows to put on it because, damnit, I’d like to have an adult-looking living room for once. Quite truthfully, after two years of this, I’m tired of living in a kids’ playroom. I like nice things and would like to be able to have nice things in my apartment. With our old couch, I was sick of trying to keep pillows on it so I never bothered with them. They came with it so I really didn’t care. No extra money wasted on my part. But with the new couch, I figured why not try it out again and since I didn’t like the pillows that came with it, went out and did the foolish thing – spent over $100 on pillows that he likes to toss right onto the floor. There’s one white one that he likes in particular. It has sequins and flowers on it, but I’m sure it’s more the fact that it’s white that attracts his dirty toddler hands more than anything else. I know, white anything plus a toddler equals a bad idea, but I liked it and figured maybe, just MAYBE I could teach him to not touch it so I bought it. So now I’m dealing with trying to get him to leave the pillows alone. It’s a huge task and to top it off, he finds it extremely fun to climb on the back of the couch to play with the pictures hanging on the wall. Not gonna happen, buddy. But just try to keep him off there…that’s also not gonna happen. Why can’t I just have a nice couch to relax on and enjoy? Why does it have to turn into a toddler play gym? Why does he have to make everything so much extra work?

What do you even do in situations like this? I guess I could put everything away that he could potentially get into, but that would mean our entire apartment would have NOTHING in it. I already did similarly with his dresser. I used to keep socks and clothes in it, but ever since we moved here a year ago, all he did was rip everything out of the drawers and throw it all over his room. I got so tired having to pick everything up, refold it and put it away time and time again. I tried to teach him to not touch the drawers and their contents, but like most things I try to teach him, it was never successful. So now his dresser sits empty and he uses it as something to climb on. He’ll pull the drawers halfway out and stand on them. I’m just waiting for them to either break so I can say this dresser was another waste of money or him to pull the entire dresser on top of himself and end up getting hurt How do you stop this kind of behavior? I feel like he is completely out of control.

I also can’t allow him in our bedroom unless I’m in there and even then, it can’t be for more than a few minutes. If he’s in there longer, he ends up pulling underwear out of my drawer, pulling the lamp off of the night stand, playing with the alarm clock or jumping all over the bed and mad that he can’t get back down by himself. It’s always something else with him. Why can’t he just NOT get into everything for once? I know toddlers have a lot of energy and have a tendency to get into things, but this is how he acts from the time he gets up to the time he goes to bed at night. He never really has moments where he’s calm and doing something productive. It’s always mess mess mess, destroy destroy destroy, chaos chaos chaos. It’s like as soon as he gets into one thing, he already has 10 more things to get into on his mind.

It really doesn’t help that I’m a neat freak and can’t stand when things aren’t in their place. Andrew is the exact opposite. I know it sounds ridiculous to say about a 2 year old, but I almost feel like we just have clashing personalities. I’m really struggling with finding a happy medium. I want to have a nice place and I want to have my things sit out and I want things to be at least relatively clean, but how do you negotiate that with a toddler who acts like a tornado? It makes me jealous when I see other family members who have girls around his age that have nice apartments and houses with nice furniture and nice things sitting around and wonder how they do that without their kids getting into it? Is it a difference between boys and girls? Or is it just my toddler? How do they teach them to not bother EVERYTHING? I really don’t want to have to wait 20 years from now to have things the way I want them in my own home! I seriously feel like I’m trapped by my 2 year old!

Basically, I’m really curious to know what other mothers of boy toddlers go through on a daily basis. Is behavior like this normal? How do you teach your boys to keep away from things you don’t want them getting into? How do you teach them to just be happy doing one thing? How do you let them get this kind of energy out in a positive, less destructive way?