It’s been a whopping six months since I last blogged. Obviously life threw me a couple monkey wrenches that derailed my literary plans for the last few weeks of 2023.

But that’s all right. Onward and upward.

Things around here are generally settling down, at least in terms of everyone’s immune systems. Mostly. Babycakes is just about over an allergy-induced ear infection. Sugarpie seems to have avoided the last cold of the school year. On top of having produced copeous amounts of nasal secretions for the last month, Little Bro has managed to pick up hand foot and mouth from somewhere unknown.

Freelancing hit a black for much of the past year, but things are looking up as I finally have a project slated to start later this week. I’m hopefully going to be participating in the next anthology from Lowcountry RWA (more on this down the road, fingers crossed). And I’ve got the post-Civil War historical romance in the hands of several beta readers in preparation for a fall submission.

But I didn’t come here today to talk about any of that.

I am here to discuss the onset of Toddler Temper Tantrums, version 3.0.

That’s right. Little Bro is into the tantrum stage of babyhood.

He’s actually got a rather extensive vocabulary for his age and is quite good at letting us know what he wants, needs, or feels.

But as parents across the world know, tantrums and meltdowns occur when a child does not have the verbal capacity to express their emotions in an adequate way.

Little Bro hasn’t been feeling well lately, understandably if you recall our house’s last brush with HFM disease in 2021. So that’s just made things worse. But yesterday… Ooooo boy.

So what set him off?

Well, lately he’s been rather obsessed with cleaning tools. Like mops. The electric sweeper. The Roomba (or at least he was until he pressed the button on top and accidentally started it, thus terrifying himself). The vacuum cleaner.

He also hates being confined and/or blocked or locked out of places.

Has that set the stage well enough?

I needed to run the vacuum cleaner in the living room, and he was insistant that he HAD to do it himself. This thing isn’t heavy, it’s a stick vac, but its length is like two and a half times his height, and it’s not like he can actually maneuver it.

I do hope his enthusiam for the vacuum (and the sweeper and emptying the dishwasher) continue into his teen years. I have my doubts, but we’ll see.

So I let him “help”. But he couldn’t really handle it, as expected, so he kept getting stuck in the corner and wouldn’t let me help him back up to try a different area of the floor. It boiled down to the floor needing to be vacuumed and me wanting to get it done so we could have lunch and a nap. So I just kind of took it away from him and tried to finish as quickly as possible, while Little Bro, wailing indignantly, chased me around the room.

At last, the job was done. I put the vacuum away. We had actually had to add a child safety lock/strap to the closet door, so he was doubly mad when I put it in there.

And then, I told him quite lovingly that we were all done.

Well.

This was clearly the most tragical injustice of the not-quite seventeen months he’s been alive. He wasn’t just crying. He wasn’t just yelling.

This boy was voicing his abject despondency at the top of his lungs – for a full twenty minutes – while alternating between trying to open the closet door and just running about the house with his head thrown back, wailing.

So what did I, his loving mother, do?

I laughed my ass off.

Sorry. It was the most hilarious thing.

I legit got to the point where I could neither stand up straight nor produce any actual sound while laughing.

Eventually I got him upstairs, where my mom (whom he calls “memaw” right now, but that’s another story for another day), read him some of his favorite books while I got lunch ready.

Of course, we are also gluttons for punishment around here. So after dinner, I decided Little Bro’s epic hair was a little too epic and took the hair clippers to his curls. Which meant more vacuuming.

This time I just put him in the playpen, so at least he wasn’t chasing me and getting tripped up on the cord while he voiced his displeasure.

Then today he gave us an encore performance because I took away the bottle of baby gas drops.

Fun times.