The State of Nature

Highlights from our "nasty, short & brutish", uh, phase:

(1) Jack takes a long nap.
Jack gets up.
Jack lays flat on his back to have his diaper changed.
Thomas is playing with a ball.
Jack yawns a particularly wide yawn.
Thomas seizes the opportunity to run over and try to stuff the ball into Jack's open mouth.
Just to see if it would fit, I suppose.

(2) Jack is eating a rice cake.
A little girl runs over and grabs it from him.
Jack gives her the evil eye.
The little girl's Mommy takes the rice cake away from her and gives it back to Jack.
Jack gives the girl the (patented) "smug and vindicated" eye.
He pauses for effect. He checks to be sure she is still looking
and stuffs the entire rice cake down his mouth.
Take that.

(3) Jack runs over to hug Tommy. Tommy gives him a stiff arm to the stomach.
But it's OK; for a couple of weeks Thomas went to bed with teeth marks every night.

This was a while ago; fortunately I can report that the retaliatory biting has pretty much ceased. But "happiness" biting--that is another story. When Jack gets happy and excited, he seems to need to exercise his jaws. We're working on it.

(4) Jack had a crisis as a result of being aware of his first bandaid. It was on his knee. He kept staring at the bandaid, pointing to it, and whimpering.
After a few minutes of this, Thomas walked over to Jack and without further ado managed to just rip the thing off.
All I can say is: I don't think Jack is going to be a big fan of the "get-it-over-quick" removal method.

(5) Thomas is a pretty peaceful guy. One of his favorite non-compliance techniques is the "lay-in". As in: if you ask him to do something and he doesn't want to do it, he just lays down on his stomach right where he is and refuses to move.