Brick Gets Lost

As you all know, several years ago I gave birth to what I thought was a regular human child but turned out to be in fact to be some sort of human/animal/robot/stuntman hybrid. This might be one of the sweetest children to ever live, but he is also the toughest, craziest and most ruthless child on the planet. He seems to have been sent here with a special mission to accomplish. That mission: attempt to kill his mother through either psychological or physical means. I assure you that he is slowly accomplishing him mission and doing it with more charm than you would think could be found in a 2 year old. I seriously weep for the girls who will come across him during the dating years.

Brick's normal M.O. is to do something that will make me so angry I want to spank him and then turn around and smile at me as though he has done nothing wrong at all. He specializes in the destruction of everything I own and some of the things other people own. He loves to climb so that almost nothing is out of his reach. The other thing he loves to do is hurt his sister, not because he is mean, but because he thinks it is fun and has a naturally high threshold for pain. If something does not hurt him, he cannot fathom it hurting anyone else. Let me assure you, almost nothing causes him physical pain. Because he is so naturally sweet he almost never understands why he is in trouble and he gets his feelings hurt when he is put into time out for something he just doesn't see as wrong. In short, despite being so ruthless he is entirely without guile. He understands right from wrong and knows what is really , really wrong but has trouble translating that knowledge to all of his actions. For example, in a room full of people and other children, he will wail on everyone in the room with a sword except for the babies. He understands that they are too little to "play" that way, but he does not understand that he is hurting all the people who are bigger than he is.

I live in constant fear that he will find a way to inadvertantly kill himself or send me into early labor. Several months ago he pulled a large knife out of the dishwasher and tried to sword fight Mailee with it. She was not amused. A few weeks ago he climbed on top of the stove and pulled everything out of the cupboard above the microwave, including an entire box of matches which he spilled all over the floor. Last week I had enough with trying to keep him from climbing up the shelves in the pantry and I had Mark install a lock high up on the pantry door. Mark also installed a lock on the door to the garage since I discovered Brick was climbing up on a little railing to reach the garage door opener. Thus brings me to this morning's event.

Mark wakes the kids up in the morning, gets them dressed and then feeds them breakfast. I usually stay in bed for 30-45 minutes after he leaves and then get up to survey the damage. This morning I did as usual, but instead of checking on the kids right when I got up I got straight into the shower. After the shower I headed downstairs in my robe. Mailee was in the office watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and I could hear the computer in the kitchen playing Alvin and the Chipmunks. I assumed Brick was downstairs but he was nowhere to be found. The door to the garage was open but he wasn't in the garage and the van was locked. Mailee said she hadn't seen him since Mark left for work. She and I looked for him around the house but I knew he couldn't be anywhere in the house. He wasn't answering me when I called for him and Brick never does that. I knew the only way he wouldn't answer me if he was in the house is if he had fallen asleep somewhere and I knew he would not have fallen asleep unless he was upset and stuck somewhere and there was nowhere in the house where he could have gotten stuck.

My big fear was that he had somehow gotten outside, maybe when Mark left for work. He could have snuck out and gotten stuck out there when Mark closed the garage door. Other possibilities were that he had opened and then closed the garage door himself or that he opened the door and someone else had closed the door after snatching him. I called Mark and he was fairly sure Brick was in the kitchen when he left for work. Keep in mind that there is heavy construction going on on the hill behind our house. So I opened the garage door and looked down the street. I could see dad out in his yard and I thought maybe Brick had walked down to see him. No such luck. Dad headed up the hill to make sure he hadn't been run over by any trucks and I called mom to come up and help us look.

In the meantime I headed back inside to look again (even though I knew he wasn't in the house) and decided I'd better look in the van again (even though it was locked and I didn't see him when I looked through the windows). As I unlocked the van, the lights came on inside and I could see Brick's legs sticking up from the stroller in the back of the van. I couldn't see his head and he wasn't moving. Filled with absolute terror, I opened the back of the van. His head was under the stroller, his legs and arms out and he was fast asleep. I picked him up and he immediately woke up and started crying. "I stuck, mommy. I stuck," he cried. He told me he had gotten in the van to look for his lunch box because he was going to Parents Day Out with Mailee (Mark had already packed his lunch box and put it in the locked pantry). While he was in there he'd accidently locked himself in the van and then gotten stuck in the back. No one could hear him yelling and he apparently cried himself to sleep. The poor thing was so upset and kept saying over and over that he was stuck and needed his lunch box. Mom walked up about this time and saw that I had found him. We called Dad down off the hill and tried to calm down together.

For the first time in weeks I wasn't mad at Brick for making me crazy. I was just grateful I'd found him and not under the wheels of a bulldozer. I know he will continue to get himself in trouble and I know that someday soon we'll visit an emergency room for more stitches or something, but I'm just glad to have him, craziness and all.