truly bad behavior

I worked at Curves today all day long, and Dennis spent the majority of his day with his Gran. She said he was pretty well behaved with some not-so-great antics when it got past his naptime. She took him to lunch at Wendy's and they called me from there. He told me what he was eating and where and wanted me to turn down the music so I could talk to him better!

Tonight he was maybe as terrible as he's ever been. Chloe and family were down visiting and helping out with the last minute scramble to finish preparing Uncle Denny's house for his arrival home from the hospital tonight. She and Dennis alternately played and fought for the whole of their time together and it drove their mommies absolutely bonkers. Dennis got a new tiny all-inclusive fire station/truck/fireman toy today from Gran and Chloe wanted it because he was so enthralled with it. Imagine lots of whining and snatching and pushing and shoving and crying, if you will, and you'll have a fairly correct image of our evening. The worst was when he shoved her down and she hit the bathtub with her chin (because this particular fight broke out in the bathroom of all places). He got a major timeout for that and he wailed and cried big tears (which was when I noticed that we were about an hour past bedtime), and then he apologized. Tonight on the way home, in the midst of him asking me to ask him to identify places (a fun game we play in the car--"there's Wal-Mart, Mommy, and there's San Marcos where we eat chips" etc.), I asked him why he was so mean to Chloe and he said "because she snatched my fire station and I wanted to play with it". We had a lesson about how it would have been nice to share the new toy because she wouldn't get to play with it after today and he would. He absorbed that for awhile and then we got into some of his questions. He asked "what are sounds, Mommy?" after we talked about the radio tower and sound waves (also prompted by one of his questions) and I explained that sounds are what we hear with our ears. He asked "what makes sounds?" and I told him the car radio did and people did and fire truck sirens did and he said "oh. Are sounds like noises?" and I realized that I could have avoided that very long explanation if I'd just thought of the word 'noise'. Oh, well.

Surely he'll be nicer tomorrow...