Elsewhere

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, dinner is horrible at our house…mainly because of Max and just the age he’s at right now.

For some reason I had it in my head that having dinner at someone else’s house might be different. That my middle child might just act civilized at the dinner table for once.

Silly me.

Yesterday, while dining at a neighbor's house, Max managed to mush all his food together, dump it off his plate, climb on my lap and do the same to my food. Then later, he poured his crackers all over the table, chewed on some clementines and spit them out on the rug. With several high pitched screeches occuring throughout the meal.

Not only was dinner the same, but so was the rest of the evening. Max stood in front of their TV trying to change the channels as the older boys were attempting to watch a movie. He pushed all the buttons on the dishwasher until the homeowner finally figured out how to lock them. He opened drawers and cabinets and did a whole bunch of screaming.

He then ventured upstairs to their toy loft, where I let him play alone so my friend and I could actually have a conversation without every sentence being interrupted so I could prevent Max from destroying something.

“How in the world do you do it? How do you stay sane?” she asked me. I hear similar questions from most people who have long encounters with Max.

School…3 half days a week….and then long naps (for both of us) is my standard answer.

Cameron was the same way, so I know (or at least hope) this stage will be over….when he’s about 2 ½!!!!!!!

Until then, I’ll just keep taking deep breaths and saying to myself, “This too will pass.”

After a few minutes of peace, I went upstairs to check on Max. Whenever he’s so quiet, he’s usually in the toilet. However, to my surprise, he was just playing with the toys like he should have been doing. But when I looked a little closer, I noticed that the 4 bobble head dogs they had placed on a side table, looked a little odd. Max had decapitated all of them, and then switched their heads. Luckily I was able to fix all of them (but he proceeded to take them apart when I wasn’t looking and toss them down the stairs).

I’m not sure if we’ll be invited back over again. But at least for one night, my own house stayed in tact.