Jack the Ripper

Have any of you seen Disney's Lilo and Stitch? In it, there is a character named Stitch.
In the beginning of the movie, Stitch is actually introduced as a weapon of mass destruction. His creator hard-wired him to destroy everything he comes across, and the movie is about how Stitch learns to love his family, which teaches him how to reign in his destructive tendencies (among other things, of course).
I always liked that movie, but now that I have a toddler, I feel like I'm living it. You see, we have our own little "Stitch" on our hands, but we call him Jack.

He's just so curious and so busy that a lot of things get destroyed around here. Last weekend was no exception.

We went over to my parent's house for Sunday dinner, and they had just gotten two baby chicks and two baby ducklings. The birds were too small to live outside yet, so they were staying under a heat lamp in my younger brothers' room. Jack loves our chicks (which we keep in the garage, away from him), but we had never let him around them without close adult supervision. We're trying to teach him what it means to be gentle, but that's a concept he still doesn't seem to grasp, and instinct (as well as common sense) told us not to let him in near the birds. So, we locked the door to my brothers' room (not knowing that the doorknob on that particular door doesn't actually lock), and told each other firmly that we'd have to keep a close eye on Jack, then went our ways.

Later that afternoon, we were all sitting around the table, finishing our delightful cheesecake, when Jack ran proudly into the room--holding all four birds in his grasping, chubby little toddler fists.

I gasped, pointed, and stood up. Steve got there first, removed the birds from the child's grasp, and immediately took him outside, while McKay and I surveyed the damage. Both chicks were dead, and one of the ducklings seemed a little shell-shocked, but okay, while another duckling was totally fine. I started crying angrily, then went outside to discipline my little cold-blooded killer.

My mom took me aside, however, and let me know that they weren't angry or upset, and said kindly that she wasn't telling me what to do, but her advice was to let it go. Jack wasn't old enough to understand what it meant to die, she explained, and he had no clue he was hurting the animals when he squeezed them--to him, they were just like the toys he has. When you squeeze 'em, they make noise!

I appreciated her point of view, because my first instinct was to go outside and chew him out, show him what he had done, then put him in Time-Out for, oh, maybe eternity. But I listened to her advice (something I should have learned to do a long time ago), and was gentler than I originally would have been. I entreated Steve to let Jack come back inside, and we vowed, even more firmly this time, that we'd make sure not to let Jack anywhere near those ducks!

We enjoyed talking for a few more hours, when disaster, once again, struck in the form of Jack.

I had been in the kitchen, and I rounded the corner to the hallway to see Steve pulling Jack by his elbow out of...the boys' room.

My heart sank, and I ran into their room to see McKay once again crouching over his beloved birds. One of the ducklings had already died, and the other was obviously seriously hurt--struggling for each breath and just crying. Knowing that it was in pain, my dad took it outside to put it down.

I went on the front porch, fuming, where I saw Steve was holding onto Jack, who was screaming and trying to wriggle out of his hold. Jack still had no clue what had happened and just wanted to go back in and play with the "stuffed animals," but we were angry and frustrated by the fact that that kid seems to destroy EVERYTHING.

Once again, my parents gently came outside and talked to us, reminding us that these were farm animals, not pets, and that Jack had no clue what he had done. The fact that my parents were actually trying not to laugh helped a little, but we still felt heavy-hearted, especially when I saw how sad McKay was.

We promised him that we would get him more ducklings, and that cheered him up a little. Later, when my mom started telling McKay about the time he tried to teach some kittens how to swim, as well as about the time HE had gotten ahold of a few birds of his own, not to mention a couple of hamsters, all with less-than-desirable results, and as I remembered a few times when I had bathed our cat as a child, I started to realize that perhaps this is a phase that all children go through, and I cheered up a little. Now that a couple of weeks have passed, I still feel twinges of guilt when I think about the whole thing, but I am starting to see the humor in the situation.

Hopefully my child won't turn out to be a serial killer, after all.