The Sound of Trouble

What does trouble sound like? When you're the mom of a 1-year-old, it sounds like paper being torn.

Tyler eats paper. We found this out when we moved and we kept finding him chewing on pieces of cardboard that he'd pulled off our moving boxes.

A few days ago, he tore a flap off his new "lift-the-flap" book and chewed it to pieces.

My grandmother has a small Downy bottle that all of the great-grandkids have played with. Seriously, it has been around for at least 6 or 7 years. And it looked brand new until this weekend, when Tyler managed to pull of a little bit of the label so he could eat it. (He's the 4th great-grandchild and the first to lose Downy bottle privileges.)

Anyway, I try to keep paper out of his reach. But it seems like he is always finding a new source that I haven't thought of.

Today, I'm working in the kitchen and he's safely in the living room, in plain sight, playing with his Spiderman riding toy. He's honking the horn and making the Spiderman voice say, "New suit, new attitude."

After a few minutes, I become aware that the toy is silent but I hear paper tearing.

I look up from the computer to see Tyler with a big piece of the sticker that he's pulled off of the Spiderman toy. He's shaking his hands vigorously, trying to throw the paper off.

I go in there to help him, and he manages to stick the sticker on me.

I realize that the whole sticker on the seat needs to come off, so to keep Tyler occupied while I took care of that, I put the sticker on the back of his hand. He's smart enough to realize he has to scrape his hand on something to get the sticker off, but he's not coordinated enough to scrape the BACK of his hand on something, so he keeps scraping his palm on the floor and the sticker stays put.

I wasn't laughing or anything....