Gnaw your own leg off

What you are about to read may shock, revolt, disgust, and even horrify you. If you are faint of heart, squeamish, or even have a tendency to become lightheaded, then this week's episode is NOT for you. Please, for the love of corndogs, do something else. Turn on Fox, listen to CNN, browse the BBC website, read War and Peace in the original Russian, listen to P.D.Q. Bach's inanely dull, quasi-dramaturgical, oratorio-opera, "Oedipus Tex", or gnaw the legs off of your kitchen table.

You have been warned.

My name is Destroy-it Declan. I destroy things...professionally. I'm small, about 2' or so, weigh a little under 20 pounds, and my emotions simmer near the surface. Fortunately my temperament is rather sweet and cheerful. My older sister, Mend-it Maddie, is, on the other hand, dainty, delicate, and clean. Its pretty disgusting. She likes her room clean, she likes to keep her face clean when she eats; she even uses utensils and napkins. I don't understand it. So, being the destroyer that I am, I decided to help my sister appreciate the more "cultured" aspects of life.

For instance, she spends a great deal of time in her room, playing with her toys and things. She also spends most of Saturday morning working to make sure those things are in the right spaces on her toy shelves and book cases. As she is tidying up and as mom and dad are working in the living room and the kitchen, I will stealthily crawl, commando style, into her room (or, if I'm lucky, Dad will plop me down and say, "Maddie, play with your brother") and begin my assault on her toys. Er, I mean, I will begin my mission to help her appreciate the more refined aspects of mess.

On a good morning, I can pull down all 4 toy baskets from their respective spots on her toy shelves and empty the contents all over the floor. If I am especially quick, I can also start on her book cases and empty about half of those. Before I can start with the dissemination of knowledge from the pages, Mend-it Maddie will usually alert the parents of my activities. It goes something like this:

Me: grnalll fibble bunblub
Maddie: Declaaaaaaan! No!
Me: phawgeeeeeee
Maddie: Mo-om! Declan is ripping pages out of the books!

At which point mom and/or dad will come rushing into the room, swing me up high in the air, tickle me, and blow raspberries on my cheeks. Who can be angry with a cute little guy like me, especially with a response like that to my actions?

Maddie’s room, though no one realizes it, is just preparation for taking on the bigger tasks in the house; mom and dad’s ill-thought-out open dresser, the neatly alphabetized dvd collection just at my eye level, the dishes drying in the dishwasher, the pots and pans, and even the potatoes in the pantry. This house is just brimming with exciting places to destroy!

The other day, however, I made one of my greatest discoveries yet: I found out how to remove my diapers. You obviously won’t understand the significance of this discovery if I don’t impart to you a little context about my house. Dad says we live in a very “hoomit” place and mom talks all the time about how hot it is. She even says things like, “It wasn’t this hot in Y-mount when we faced the sun all day!” They say we’re really on the top level of a 5 story apartment building. I can’t quite figure that fact out, since that I only can count two main entrances to our domicile.  I’m not sure what all of this means, but I do know this: because of the “hoomitity” and the heat mom will frequently let me wander around in only my diaper.

I suppose this discover would have been a lot longer in the making were my parents not on baby step #2, apparently that has something to do with getting out of the deep quickly. What they are deep into, I’m not sure – we live on the 5^th level according to them – and why they must get out quickly, I don’t know either. We haven’t had a fire here in a couple of months.  But as they try to get out of the deep, they have begun to buy fewer diapers in the store and have put me in these itchy, but colorful, diapers made of real cloth. I suppose they are fine things to wander around in, as far as it goes. But they have these annoying little tabs on the side made of really really scratchy material.

If I put my thumb down to the top of the diaper and wiggle it around, I can hear the most glorious noise! It sounds like dad’s pants when he was helping at an Eagle Scout project a few weeks ago (and now he won’t wear that pair of jeans). If I do the same thing on the other side, I can wander around my house free of any diaperial constraints. I can assure you, it is a most glorious feeling. Fortunately Mend-it Maddie has never caught me in the act, and I think she is quite blissfully unaware of how I am able to figure it out. She has yet to stop me.

But, she is quite certainly, proving to be a ruin to my explorations. I was sitting in the living room the other day, minding my own business and successfully extracting myself from the confines of my diaper (which somehow escaped her notice), when all of a sudden she screams out in an absolute panic:

“MOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!! DECLAN HAS POOP!”

This, of course, causes mental dissonance. Of course a baby has poop, it happens with regularity, especially after the baby has eaten food…which I, the cute, loveable baby, just had.

The clanking in the kitchen suddenly stopped. The faucet in the sink turned off and mom came in to the living room to see what the matter was.

“Eeeeeeeeew, Declan! That is disgusting! I can’t believe you’d do that! Ow ow ow o wow, gross gross gross gross!”

Suddenly I was whisked up, brusquely put into the tub, and found my mouth being vigorously washed out with soap. (I thought this was a punishment for teenage boys who said naughty things, not for cute babies who can’t even speak!) Blech. Soap is loads more unpleasant than what I recently had in my mouth. No, really, it is.

Mom called dad. Dad laughed and said, “That is abhorrent!” But because he was laughing so hard it came out like, “Tha-ahahaha-at, is, ab-hahahahant” (Don’t look at me, I have no idea what abhorrent means, I’m not even 1).
 Dad asked the oracle at Google, which provided him with sufficient enough information to explain to him, and mom, that there was little ill likely to happen and that I would be ok.

Well, I suppose that’s alright, as far as it goes. They didn’t make this much fuss even when dad found a tiny little bite mark on his knee. That was cool to watch. Now it has left a red welt the size of a softball (which is a really hard ball, believe you me). Dad has to take 10 pills every day to make sure it goes away. And he also has to take it easy and keep his leg elevated. He doesn’t even complain! Mom and Maddie are all careful around him. I say he’s a wimp, and also an overreactor to what I do. But I guess I can’t complain all that much. He is loads of fun to play with. Oh well. I’m off to my next project: finding out where the toilet water goes. Toodle oo! Blub blub!

Love,

Destroy-it Declan.