“Pwee…!”

It’s a lot of fun now that The Man Cub has started to form versions of words associated to their specific meanings. For instance, if it sounds like he’s choking on a mouthful of Gs and Cs, he probably wants a graham cracker. A phrase that has emerged is his take on “Where’d that go?” as he constantly throws stuff across the room with a mean leftie overhand. Pow! A crayon fragment bounces off the TV and under a chair – wheredatgo?

He’s got me so under his thumb, that when he starts to wail, sitting on the couch next to me, I pick him up and point to the back door and the kitchen – two different directions. He points to the kitchen. We go into the kitchen and I point to the refrigerator and the cabinet. “Shall it be some milk for the master, or would his majesty prefer graham crackers at this juncture?” He points to the fridge and this time, it’s milk.

It’s funny now…

Anyhow, I’ve decided that just pointing to stuff and demanding it with accompanying guttural grants and inchoate howls is not going to take him as far in this life as I’d like to see him to go, so I decided to teach some manners, starting with “please.” Say “please” and get a cracker and a pat on the back from Daddy. It didn’t take our young padawan long to figure out the cause and effect relationship between “please” and reward. He can’t quite make the whole word yet, but his “Pwee…?” is unmistakable in its intent.

This is all well and good until, as The Missus points out, he learns that even courtesy doesn’t always produce the desired result. Which fact I had already discovered when wiping his touchas after an especially messy plop with these really rough wipes that daddy had mistakenly purchased, and he looked at me through his legs, tears streaming from his eyes, pleading repeatedly, “Pweeeee?! Pweeeeee? Pweeeeeeeeee!!!!”

That shredding sound you hear is my heart tearing itself to pieces inside my gut.

Only one thing to do – get him to work on “Thank You.” At least then when he’s enduring a wretched misery like a diaper-changing, instead of begging me to stop, he’ll be tearfully thanking me for the experience.

Fang Bastardson, the CIA Needs You!