Following a title like that I am sure you are either thinking "oh my gawd, she's horrible" or "Ha! Preach on sistah, I have one of those kids too!" Your response of course entirely depends on your being a parent or not being a parent. Or maybe you are a parent without a sense of humor ... good lord, how do you survive?!
Anyway, my child is only 7 months old and I am pretty sure he has all the makings of a horrendous, terrifying dictator in the making. I already shudder to think about how the history books will portray his sheer mad brilliance, and I hope history doesn't look down upon me too harshly because, as you are about to see, his path was set long before I started to pretend I had control over this.
{Editors Note: I still pretended I had control of him as a human being from the moment the little line on the pee-stick formed right up until about a few weeks before my due date, when I realized I had truly zero control over anything having to do with this kid beyond incubating him.}
With no further adieu, the
Top 5 Reasons My Kid Will Someday Be a Terrifying Dictator:
1. His nickname in the womb was Voldabean. As in a morph of Jellybean and Voldemort. Yeah. At 13 weeks I had my first ultrasound, and it looked like a jellybean with a heartbeat. I thought it was cute -- this kid hadn't given me any morning sickness or unpleasant preggo symptoms as of yet so I started calling the little gender-less blob my Jellybean. Fast forward to the Jellybean turning into a Sasquatch sized member of Cirque de Soleil in my tummy who left me with horrendous heartburn, back pain, early onset of contractions, and thought his "due date" was merely a laughable suggestion of date he should avoid arriving on at all costs... I started saying I was going to give birth to Voldemort. Voldabean was the compromise.
2. His little baby hands can out-do any Chinese Water Torture trial. Oh. My. Gawd. I don't care how short I trim those nails, they are daggers. Maybe he is like Wolverine and can retract them, I don't know. To add to this he has this adorable habit of squeezing his hands open and closed right as he falls asleep. So right as he drifts off he starts slowly, delicately, gouging four small trenches in your arm and all you can do is put up with it, or wake him up. Yes, I have scars.
3. He has a sick sense of humor. Not all dictators have this, in fact many don't thus why they are so uptight and horrible. But my kid? He has already learned to apply his gasp of the ironic in order to manipulate me. Example: I am with this child nearly 24/7. I am the focal point of his world, and nearly always there trying to teach him and help him. Who did he roll over for first? My mom. When he learned to do the much harder back to belly roll over, who did he do that for first? St. Paul of Bunyan. After days of working with his slowly emerging and adorable ability to clap I was gone from his side maybe a couple hours only to return and find him perched on St Paul's knee clapping furiously. When I excitedly said "he's clapping!" St. Paul replied, "oh he's been doing that for like an hour now." Don't even get me started on how the little traitor babbles "Dadadada" constantly.
4. His sense of timing is flawless. Timing is everything, everyone knows this. And so does my baby. Case in point: child holds off on a blow-out until just the right moment. Like the I am running late wearing my favorite shirt and
only clean jeans in the house, go to pick him up and put him on my hip and ... I'll spare you the visual.
5. He is so stinkin' cute and perfect he could convince you to do anything. It has been said that the greatest, most horrible dictators of our time were, for all their tyrannical cruelty, still very good leaders. This is how they were able to convince so many to follow them, no matter what. I assure you, Thing 2 could make you do anything. Anything. Between his perfect little round-bald-baby-head, big blue eyes framed with perfect dark, curly eyelashes, and adorably chubby cheeks ... my kid could kick the Gerber kid's ass. He sneezed yams into my eye the other day, and I am the world's biggest sissy with eye stuff. The word "contacts" makes me shiver just at the thought of touching an eyeball, but there I was with globs of grainy yam in my eye sockets and he laughed, and I was okay with it. That gummy little smile could melt Satan's heart. This child can already convince you to do anything, so I can only assume that this skill will be honed and of greater threat once he practices some more.
So let the record show, someday when my child is trying to overtake a small country or is working at the Motor Vehicle Division, that I saw the signs and tried to intervene. But then he gave me that cute little gummy smile and used sign language to either sign "mama" or "bitch" (they look really similar) and I know whichever it is, it refers to me, and I just melted. Sorry world.
