Operation: Civilize Hunter

In the past week, I've discovered a side of my boy that I hadn't taken care to notice before. Hunter likes to see how things work. There were plenty of signs around the house for months that I didn't take the time to realize. The printer suddenly was broken. The TV fell on the boy. The VCR had more vegetables shoved into it than Hunter's mouth. Still, I excused him as being accident prone. Wild. Barbaric even. Beyond any peak of frustration I may have encountered before, I declared, one day, that it was time to begin Operation: Civilize Hunter. My goal was clear. The boy needed to be potty trained (that was evident), but he also needed to stop terrorizing his sister and taking my shoes and running with them while giggling deviously while I'm trying to put them on. The moment had come when his hard skull had smashed into my nose too many times.

The operation went down with a long and tedious fight. After months of teaching, instructing, and a little brainwashing, Hunter finally was saying "please" and "thank you". He was also announcing that he was "angwy" instead of hitting his sister. And slowly, the house quieted . . . just a little. It was shortly after that I stumbled upon Hunter and the remote. There he was pensively dissecting the remote control. I handled it well. My husband made funeral arrangements. A light went off in my head and I suddenly made the connection. The printer didn't just break. The paperclips we found stashed in the VCR may not have been as accidental as we had believed. His unending fetish with emptying the bagless vacume cleaner . . . It allw began to make sense. Hunter was mechanically minded. A side of me relaxed. My chest puffed out with pride like a marshmallow. Hunter was inquisitive and had to know how things around him worked. By the end of the day I found myself allowing him to dissect the staple gun with endless curiosity. So what if I had to replace it later. My boy was not an accident proned barbarian. He was a scientist.