>The Imp

Bruiser went to bed last night an angel and woke up this morning a hellion.

I could already tell it was going to be one of those days, since I had woken up around three and stayed awake for an hour and a half worrying about ridiculous things like whether it was too late to sign up Punky for dance classes and where I’d put the forms I needed so that I could send off for Bruiser’s official birth certificate (Bad mommy. I know. I’d forgotten that I actually have to pay for an official certificate to be sent to my home, because apparently neither the $4,000 in hospital fees nor the permanent toll a second pregnancy has taken on my body is enough. No, I’m required to send in another $14 to prove the kid was actually born. But anyway.)

I got up, made my coffee, gated the two of us into my Bruiser-proof den and began checking e-mails. Within minutes, I heard a crash and a howl from beside me. Bruiser had turned my entire cup of coffee onto himself.

Luckily, it was heavily creamed and not scalding hot, but I ripped all of his clothes off anyway, while he gurgled and crowed and got busy looking around for more mayhem to create. I cleaned up the mess, poured myself another cup of coffee, set it well away from where he could reach it, and went back to my e-mails. And damned if Bruiser didn’t crawl right back over to the table and start reaching for the coffee again.

“No! Bruiser, no!” I said ominously. “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” He looked at me, impervious to my threats. I sighed, pulled him off the table and set him down with his toys across the room. He wailed for a minute, then crawled back over to the table.

“I said no!”

I pulled him off the table and crossed the room again.

He wailed for a minute and crawled back over.

Damn.

This was how the first hour and a half of my day went. In retrospect, maybe the coffee should have been just a little bit hotter, since apparently on this ten-degree morning, a warm coffee bath was just what he’d wanted.

I try not to read too much into these things, but I worry this will become one of these stories I’ll tell some day when he’s a stubborn-as-hell teenager who insists on making the same mistakes over and over and over again. I hope this isn’t an indication of what’s to come for me, although I’m sure my mother is reading this right now, smiling and saying, “Karma,” to herself.

One thing I do know is that with him, I absolutely can’t be a pushover parent because if I am, there’ll be hell to pay. Already, I’m working on saying ‘No,’ to him and even though he’s not even a year old yet, when I say it, he stops whatever he’s doing, looks at me, and bursts into tears.

It’s never too early to teach ’em who’s the boss.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.