ISO: The Blond Boy I Once Loved

Mitch starts preschool tomorrow, and, as he puts it, "I'm so exciting." I'm looking forward to some semi-quiet time as long as Paige naps for more than 15 minutes and I don't have too many errands to run or papers to grade and nobody calls me and the dishes and laundry fairy drops by.

Last year, Mitch was the sweetheart of the 2 year old class. Nearly every time I spoke to his teacher, she'd gush about how sweet he was and how polite, and I'd walk away beaming, inwardly smug at what a fantastic job I'd done raising a gentle, well-mannered young man.

Well, if his adorableness was my doing, I must have really screwed things up since then, because lately, my darling Mitch has been usurped by bizarro-Mitch, an evil twin I like to call "Gritch." Here are just a few of the not-at-all-polite phrases Gritch has uttered over the past 2 months:

"If you say that again, I'm going to mess up this whole place" (to the Target employee who warned Gritch he might pinch his fingers in the check-out counter's conveyor belt if he didn't put his hands down)

"I don't really feel like it" (to Mommy when she reminded him to say thank you to a little girl who shared a toy with him)

"I think...nothing" (to the teacher assistant at the preschool open house when she asked him what toys he liked to play with)

"If you do that to me, I'm gonna walk out of this house" (to Mommy and Daddy when they were explaining to Owen what being grounded meant (because he asked, not because he was grounded))

"I don't want it" (to the kind jewelry store lady who tried to give him a small helicopter toy)

"........." (to the kind jewelry store lady when Mommy reminded him to say "thank you anyway")

"No, sir! That's not for you" (to the boy at Owen's soccer practice who tried to use Gritch's dinosaur stompers but had them rudely snatched away)

"If you say that again, I'll spank your bottom" (to Mommy when she told Gritch he had to eat his sandwich before getting any chips)

Bottom line, the boy is the anti-sweet right now. I'm fully expecting this message on the answering machine tomorrow when I get home from my morning meeting at school:

"Hi, this is Gritch's teacher. Can you come get him? He's become completely insufferable kthnx."

But maybe, just maybe, the phenomenon of "good for everyone but mommy" will descend upon Gritch and magically transform him back into the giggly, happy, charming boy he once was, at least during school hours. Cause I have a feeling the seasoned Mrs. J isn't going to fall for Gritch's standard response to getting in trouble, pictured below: