Will

After an unfortunate run-in with a poke berry plant

Will. God, help us, that boy has had a heck of a week. Not that that's anything particularly out of the ordinary, since Will seems to have a magnetic attraction to trouble, but this week has taken the cake. It all started Monday afternoon soon after he woke up from a nap. I was in the kitchen cooking some chicken and Will was sitting on the sofa, quietly watching Sid the Science Kid- or so I thought. He was watching tv, however, he was also slowly jamming a long, skinny hair barrette into his ear and twisting it to the point that he lodged it in there. I had no idea this was going on until he ran to me crying with a barrette sticking out of his ear.

A trip to the doctor's office later, we had established that while he (luckily) hadn't punctured his eardrum, he had scraped up his ear canal beyond anything the doctor had ever seen. Awesome. His ear canal is still filled with dried blood that liquefies and drips out every time I put his antibiotics in, and he still tells me every day "ear hurts!" but I haven't seen him stick anything in there since. So hopefully he's learned a valuable- albeit painful- lesson about sticking things where they don't belong.

Tuesday was the day of Houdini-like escapes. Even though we've known of his escape artist tendencies for a while and had taken safety precautions to thwart his attempts, he has gotten smarter and more wily since, so Tuesday morning while I was in his room rooting through drawers in a desperate attempt to find two matching pairs of little socks, he was in the den pushing the armchair over to the door so he could stand on it, undo the chain latch, open the door, and run across the street to the neighbor's house. And since one great escape was apparently not enough, he was returned that afternoon by a different neighbor who discovered him playing in her yard after he escaped the confines of the backyard. After a trip to Home Depot, the house and yard are now locked down better than a state prison, and if he can get past our latest safety measures, I swear to God, I'm putting together a traveling show and taking his act on the road!

Wednesday, what did he do on Wednesday??? Something- I guarantee it, but it slips my mind at the moment. We'll come back to Wednesday.

Thursday he managed to injure himself on a Rubix Cube. Seriously, his finger was bleeding. How do you draw blood on a Rubix cube? It's plastic. It has no sharp corners! But Will managed. And keeps reminding me by coming up to me every hour or so, holding up his tiny index finger and saying, "Finger hurts! Kiss?" Luckily, kisses seem to be doing the trick.

And this morning, in the span of one hour after waking, he poured creamer all over the floor while trying to drink it, grabbed a glob of butter while I was making their toast and proceeded to butter his hands, feet and hair, and gagged himself with his toothbrush to the point that he puked on the floor.

And honestly, while the injuries were a bit extreme this week, all of the other stuff is just par for the course with Will. He is exhausting. He is constantly and actively looking for ways to get into trouble. It's really no wonder that Hays' latest sentence (because he hears it so often) is, "Oh man, Will, dammit!" And yet he brings me more joy and makes me laugh more in the course of a single day than you can imagine. His smile lights up a room, and he has the sweetest, most loving heart. He is pure sunshine. And I just have to keep reminding myself of that as I clean up yet another mess, or rescue him from yet another predicament, or shame-facedly retrieve him from a neighbor's house after yet another escape!