Ahhh, the ripe young age of two years-old – a time filled with Goldfish crackers and sippy cups, when every toy is a new opportunity to trip up your parents and the whole world is your jungle gym…

…no matter how many times they tell you to GET DOWN already!!!

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about parenting over the last year as I’ve watched my son transcend this treacherous staircase from a wonderful one year-old into the frighteningly foretold realm of the terrible twos, it’s that one doesn’t dare dabble in complacencies for long when raising a miniature person, for new challenges seem to arise on a near daily basis as their brains grow to accommodate all of this new learnin’ stuff like walking and talking and preparing to become productive members of society and whatnot.

Whenever I think that I’m finally one step ahead of the game, that’s when he strikes – like a little velociraptor systematically defeating my security protocols as I vainly attempt to defend the command center from this sticky-handed, cabinet-scaling, hazard-evading monkey boy who intrinsically leaves a trail of big toe-offending debris in his wake just waiting to put me on my butt at three in the morning after another day of the longest game of Catch Me If You Can! that the world has ever known…

For example, the other day we bought a new fence to go around our pool because experts say that allowing your child to drown in your swimming pool kind of makes you “a bad parent.” So we bit the bullet and had a guy come out to install this ugly, mesh monstrosity around our beautiful, backyard lagoon in hopes of preserving our son for another year or two through these exploratory years of his…

Yeah … it took my child a grand total of THREE DAYS to defeat said pool fence.

And now whenever he wants to splash and play in the pool, he just ducks around its inconveniently located weakness as if it were put there just for him, oblivious to the fact that we didn’t even need a pool fence before he came along because both myself and his Mom are grown adults who are perfectly capable of standing up in even the deepest depths of said backyard lagoon!

Seriously – it’s stuff like this that makes me wonder why us parents even bother building an elaborate system of gates and monitors to ensure that our offspring remain safely contained at all times!

One minute the kids are just calmly playing on the rug in the middle of their bedroom, the next time you glance in they’re clinging to the ceiling fan as another cranks it up as fast as it’ll go while a third child you didn’t even know you had is discretely digging a tunnel in the corner over to the neighbor kid’s house. It’s a wonder that they don’t have an aisle for Electric Fences & Toddler Tranquilizers at Babies ‘R Us, except that just like any other piece of technology, the kids will have already figured out how to short out the fences and built up resistances to the tranquilizers before the 15% off coupon for them has expired.

Of course, as parents of slightly older children have already been quick to inform me – the terrible twos really aren’t that bad as compared to the terrible teens, on account that even if my toddler manages to swipe the keys to my car, it’s going to take an awful lot of Duplos for him to be able to reach the pedals right now! And even with this little breaking and entering a la pool style that he’s been perfecting as of late, we can just think of it as a testament to all of the money we’ve spent so far on swim lessons since the kid was barely able to crawl across the floor!

Not to mention a quick splash here and there should serve to teach him that Mommy and Daddy don’t go swimming in our pool in the middle of March because warm air doesn’t necessarily translate to warm pool even here in Florida…

So here’s to the treacherous, tumultuous twos and all of the jungle gym inspired, bananas in the hair, random fits of giggling and screaming that this new stage in a young toddler’s life has to offer. If this is karma for that time when a much younger Scott did laps through his parents’ house wearing a diaper filled with Fruit Loops and chocolate pudding, then I suppose I’ve probably had at least a little bit of this already coming.