Oh, Boy.

This post is in honor of Julie, over at MotherGooseMouse, who's getting ready to have her very own baby boy any day now. Best of luck, Julie!


So there I am, making lunches or folding clothes or compulsively watching webisodes of Real World: Sydney helping Punky practice writing her name*... when I smell it.

The smell could be the result of a festering boil on the butt of Ron Jeremy, or it might be coming from a decomposing lemur. But Ron Jeremy is nowhere in sight and Zoboomafoo won't be on for another three hours, so that leaves only one other explanation. I look down at my son, mauling a DVD case on the floor. "Did you have a poopie?" I ask. He looks at me and grins. I sigh heavily and pick him up, holding him at arms' length as I carry him to his room.

Yes, boys are very different from girls and nowhere is this more evident than on the changing table. I now remember Punky's poops fondly; they were, after all, easily contained in her diaper and smelled, I'm now convinced, like delicate roses barely past their prime. Bruiser's poops, on the other hand, are horrid, fetid, biohazardous monstrosities that test the limits of even the most durable diaper. The first time my mom changed his diaper on our recent trip home, she actually gagged. "Now you know what I've been complaining about," I told her. Ashen-faced and grave, she nodded.

But the smell isn't even half of it. Once I get Bruiser on the changing pad, the real trouble begins. Within seconds, the boy is wiggling and wriggling and doing his best to maneuver onto his stomach and muscle his way off the table. I hold him in a modified wrestling pin with one arm and use the other to try and get his pants off and undo his diaper. The moment I manage to get the diaper open, he turns over. "No!" I say through gritted teeth, flipping him onto his back. Poop is now all over the changing pad, his clothing, and me. I work my way through half a box of diaper wipes scraping the poop off both of us; halfway through, he reaches down to investigate the clean-up effort for himself, then grins at his now-poopy fingers and prepares to pop them in his mouth. I let out a loud urrrrrgh of frustration. He flips onto his stomach again. It's 18 degrees outside and I'm sweating. And cursing.

Yes, boys are very different from girls.

That's not to say girls are better. Punky, after all, never gave me sloppy wet kisses when I got her out of her crib every morning. Punky didn't smile and laugh as readily as her brother does now. But she also didn't have complete and utter aversion to sleep. She didn't put every single stinking thing she found on the floor into her mouth, and she didn't headbutt every hard object she encountered, then look around and, if someone was watching, wail at the top of her lungs. Boys will test the very limits of your endurance at the same time that they make you realize your heart has no maximum capacity for love. Oh. And they'll also try to drink your wine.

See what I mean?

You see, when Bruiser's good, he's very, very good...

But when he's bad, he's... freaking adorable.

And while the Christmas pictures are out, some of you have written and wanted to know whether Punky liked her Blythe doll. Take a guess. (And yes, they are dressed alike. That was a crowning moment in motherhood for me.)

*Incidentally, Punky is far more interested in drawing 'Noobers' than learning to write her name. No, not numbers, 'Noobers.' They are like a series of concentric circles with a bunch of lines drawn through the middle in various colors. When I asked her what a 'noober' was, exactly, she sighed in exasperation and said as if talking to an imbecile, "A NOOBER is a PUNDER!"