How Do Boys Make it to Be Men?

A common question that all mothers of boys wonder; How in the world do boys ever make it into manhood? Now if you don't have any boys of your own then you are missing out on hair pulling excitement! I was blessed enough to have four boys, that's right four (five if you count my husband, which is fitting about 50% of the time)! I can honestly say that I live in one of the nosiest and most chaotic houses around!

With an 8 year old, two 6 year olds, and a 10 month old, it's a party at my house all the time. I think by the end of this adventure, my husband and I are going to get a one way ticket to the loony bin! For all of you that are missing out here are some stories to either reinforce why you never had children, or why you should get grateful that you had girls (or didn't end up with four boys)!

The Trampoline and the Tractor

When the two middle boys were three or four we had a large trampoline in the backyard. The boys had been told a thousand times, stay in the middle of the trampoline and don't put anything on it! I was in making lunch and watching them from the window in the kitchen.

My husband was helping me in the kitchen and also watching the boys outside. Well obviously, a thousand times wasn't enough because when we looked out the window there they were, with their little riding tractor and a big wheel, on the trampoline bouncing around.

I sent my husband out to correct the situation, which he did by explaining to them that they would fall of and hurt themselves. So they got off, for the time being. About a half an hour later, they were at it again! This time, however, one of them had figured out exactly what daddy was talking about. My husband and I saw everything, much to our horror!

There he was bouncing around in the little tractor, bouncing to close to the edge, bouncing to high and flying right off the trampoline. Everything was slow motion. His head landed right on a large rock! He was fine with the exception of a bump the size of baseball on the back of his head. The funny thing about it is, that none of them learned. We caught the three days later doing the same thing. We sold that trampoline.

Little Boys and Urination

Among the countless urination stories that I could inform people of (and there are a lot of them), I have picked some of my favorites. Little boys can't always make it to the bathroom, and don't care to stop playing outside when they need to go. So they pee outside. We have told them time and time again, not to go to the bathroom outside.

First, when the 8 year old was about 5, he had it in for one of his little brothers (and still does, personality clash) and decided it was a good idea to pee on his bed. I don't mean stand on the bed and pee off of it, I mean pee ON the bed. He ended up wearing a diaper for about an hour, and that was the last time he though about doing that again.

Then, when the same child was 7 years old, knowing that he shouldn't urinate anywhere other than the toilet, he decided to convince his 5 year old brothers to pee on the floor. Not the floor in the bathroom, but the floor in the hallway on the carpet. Then, once my mom caught one of the 6 year olds peeing on the side of her house. When she cornered him, while he was still going, he lied about and said that he wasn't peeing on the house. Of course he got in trouble for urinating outside, on the house, and for lying about it. Talk about not knowing when you've been caught!

Finally, the fourth, and my personal favorite is about the kindergarten playground. We were at one of the 6 years old kindergarten conferences when the teacher asked us if our son had a small bladder or if we had ever caught him going to the bathroom outside before. We explained to her that we tell the boys all the time to come in the house to go to the bathroom, then asked why she was asking.

She informed us (trying not to laugh the whole time) that she had caught our son peeing in the corner of the playground behind a tree during recess. She told him that he couldn't do that at school and that he needed to go inside of the building if he needed go to the bathroom. She said that it was the funniest thing, all she could see was his little butt (I guess he has dropped his pants and all to go) on one side of the tree and a stream on the other. I would have been really embarrassed except we were all laughing too hard.

Age Limits on Toys

Every parent tries to pick age appropriate toys for their children, however, this rating systems needs to be changed. I think that they need to have one recommendation for boys and one for girls. I estimate that the boys will be about two years older than the girls for the same toys. Here's an example of why this may be a good idea for the toy manufacturers.

My children got some of the magnetic toys for Christmas, they had the metal ball bearings and magnetic bars that you could build things with. The whole family loved to play with them, we would all build things together, and this was in their age range. We apparently, there was a not very well publicized recall on these because the magnets were coming off, and younger children were swallowing them. It was no big deal if they swallow one because it would just pass right though and get flushed down.

However, if you swallowed more than one, they could get separated and try to reconnect with each other, which is a bad thing if one is in your stomach and one is in your intestine. There were some cases where they were tearing holes that required emergency surgery. Needless to say, one of our middle sons swallowed these magnets. When we asked him how many he had swallowed, his older brother told us one. But when we asked him why he has swallowed them in the first place, we had found out that he had swallowed two magnets.

The reason that he had swallowed them was because his brother was trying to take them from him and he didn't want his brother to have them. I suppose that the reasoning made sense, but he got the lecture about how you don't put anything other than food and medicine in your mouth again all the way to the hospital. The magnets found each other with no problems and he didn't need any type of surgery. I did, however, end up having sort through poop for a week looking for them. Lucky me.

I could very well go on forever with motherly curiosity. I ask my husband everyday, "Did you do that when you were little too?" Even though he says that he didn't, I'm not so sure that I believe him. The question still remains, "How in the world do boys ever live long enough to reach manhood?" The world may never know!