Spawn, Brother of the Terror

… Right now I am only thankful of one thing, and that is the fact that the Spawn is very rarely around when I’m watching the Terror. You see, the Spawn is the older brother of my adorable little Terror that I must watch everyday…

"You're a *giggle* butt hole..."

And he is at that age where he thinks talking about butts makes him adult.

It's hard to believe my Hedgehog is the uncle to these two...

See, when the two of them are together he takes the chaos that I barely have control over and stretches it to a  breaking point, snatching it out of my hands and turning the entire house into a disaster area. No, I am not exaggerating either. The Spawn antagonizes her on purpose, knocking over the few toys she’s allowed to play with and telling her, and I quote, “You have a hairy butt.” Not only that, but he also starts doing bad things on purpose in an effort to make her act out even more, like jumping across the couches and screaming at the top of his lungs and running up and down the hall…

And I sit there, terrified, because I’m not sure where my boundaries are with this kid. The Terror I know all too well, I’ve learned when and where I’m allowed to act like her babysitter, and that’s pretty much all the time. It took the Hedgehog reassuring me though that I’m allowed to punish her when she’s being bad, otherwise I would just sit there in a panic.

I panic way too easy...

Yet her brother is older and whenever he’s around it’s almost always with his dad in the house, though his dad is always in the shower. The Spawn knows this. He knows I’m terrified of overstepping my bounds. He can smell my fear… he knows his dad won’t hear him being bad… He knows that because he’s older I can’t just stick him in time out or send him to his room, and that’s something that he takes advantage of. He stands up to me when I tell him to stop, laughing at me and making fun of me and getting the Terror to do so as well, because he knows that there’s no real stopping him, that the only person capable of really punishing him is no where nearby… And the Spawn proceeds to be as bad as he can in as short of an amount of time he can.

So he starts talking about butt holes, and getting his sister to talk about them, and when I tell him to stop he just laughs at me with this… this look on his face that I can't describe and can't be captured with badly drawn Paint drawings… Then he dumps his sister’s tiny little pets onto the floor and jumps onto the couch, screaming and encouraging her to jump with him, when I yell at her to stop he starts yelling at her too, then giggles madly when she stares to cry and whine and I glare at him. After that he starts running up and down the hall way, yelling, until she goes, too. All the while the Terror smiles and giggles like the most adorable child ever, calling after him happily, “Brother! Brother!” She's all too eager to follow the Spawn's ever move, openly defying me when I try to make them stop.

"Brooootheeeer..."

 Once the Spawn has started, he can’t be stopped. He’ll just grin and giggle in this tittering voice and insult me, the Terror cheerfully repeating whatever he says. The louder I get, the more he laughs and insults, and the more the Terror gets out of my control…

He even got her to stop eating to do all this...

 He tried something new, this time, though. When he heard his dad get out of the shower he raced to the end of the hallway and crowed triumphantly, “Daaad! Kit’s being mean to me!”

My heart fluttered wildly with fear, but I grinned, knowing he had messed up. While I still look like a teenager, I’m an adult, charged with controlling the Terror from descending  into chaos, and his dad knew that. So all I had to do was call down the hallway, “Yeah, if being mean means telling him to stop using bad language around his sister and to not jump on the couch!”

... What? I wasn't lying.

 … I won the battle against the Spawn today, he was grounded… but I know I haven’t won the war... Mostly 'cause the Terror was an even worse Terror after the Spawn left with his dad...

... Victory comes at a heavy price.