I’ve discovered there are two ways to be treated like a massive celebrity in a restaurant. 1: Be a massive celebrity. 2: Be carrying a 3-year-old voicing the fact that his soul is burning with a thousand suns of indignation. Either way, fellow patrons will stare in disbelief, the wait staff will part like the sea before Moses, and the hostess will hold the door and facilitate your exit posthaste.

Then, you quickly switch roles to skeevy kidnapper, as the arriving people in the parking lot observe you trying to insert a raging tornado screaming “NOOOOO, take me back!!!!” into a car seat, which is a process much like stuffing a very angry cat into a carrying case, claws and all. You Just. Can’t. Control. All. The. Limbs. One will always escape and break the seal to evasion.

Toby’s new spirit animal is the Hellbender Salamander, discovered in an article about this horrifically ugly reptile in the latest Virginia Wildlife magazine.

It’s pretty apropos, as “hellbender” is pretty much how I’d describe Toby on far-too-often occasion in the last few weeks. The 3-year-old existential angst has hit like a ton of bricks in our household. I’d say that roughly 30 percent of the time, our kind, agreeable mini-human morphs into a snide, conniving, angry, resistant, fill in the uncooperative adjective here. It’s made me question every parenting decision and literally lose my mind on a few occasions. As much as I didn’t enjoy the infant “blob who just eats and poops” phase, this is worse. And then ads for books like “Managing Emotional Mayhem” pop up in my Facebook feed. Those Facebook people, they know.

But they all tell me it’s just another of those phases. And the whole “learning boundaries” thing is essential but not fun. So, I guess, when you’re going through Hellbender, just keep on going.

Toby goes to bed at 7:30ish each night, but he has a habit of calling out at about 9 p.m… “Mom. I have sometin to tell you.”

I go up to his room and sit on the edge of the bed, and he grabs my cheeks, pulls my head down to inches in front of his face, and whispers something COMPLETELY random. Example… “Mom, we haven’t used my stroller in a really long time.”

He’s the type that hears a fact and rolls it around silently in his head for days on end, then spits back out some question that’s obviously been stewing for quite some.

One of our cutest exchanges recently was this morning, when he asked me, “Mom, I was in your belly?” When I said yes he thought for a minute and then said, “But why did you eat me?”

My desperately thought of a reply and came up with “You were actually like a seed that grew in me.” Thankfully, he changed the subject and we carried on.

But it occurred to me today that I could very well face some interesting questions at 9 p.m. in the coming days. I’d be willing to bet I might hear something along the lines of: “If I was in your belly, how did I get out? Did you poop me out?”

I can’t wait.

For two days now, Toby has started every conversation with others with the somewhat gleeful exclamation, “We put my cat in a hole!”

We made the decision to euthanize our teenaged and faltering cat, Spork, on Friday, and we spent a lot of time trying to decide how to frame it for Toby. We agreed that having him see the body and help bury it would help him realize what happened. (Seriously, does anyone have a definitive answer on how to handle this kind of situation?)

In the meantime, he’s piped up with some of the expected questions… “Was Sporky cold outside last night?” “How did she eat her dinner?” And some that took me by surprise… “So, when are Turtle and Biscuit going to die?”

It’s one of the few times I’ve wished we were religious, because then I’d have a pretty good script to read off of for situations like this. But John and I winged it with some “her body is in the hole, but her spirit and who she really was is all around us and in our memories.”

Who knows if we handled this “right.” Toby doesn’t seem too sad about Spork, but he’s definitely processing it all as he goes—he keeps asking questions at random times. But his somewhat alarming primary takeaway is the concept of putting her in a hole. Such is life, I guess?!

Parenting. It’s the ultimate of winging it and never knowing if you got it right. I guess until we see how well adjusted Toby is in the future!

“Hey Mom, check my butt,” I hear from the bathroom. I glance through the doorway and am met with the sight of Toby in a reasonable facsimile of downward dog, ass to me, family jewels dangling on display.

It’s a sight that pre-motherhood would have freaked me out. A lot. Now it just made me laugh out loud.

We’re in the ‘learning to wipe’ phase of potty training and apparently this ‘check’ of their effectiveness is something they do at daycare. My hat is off to you ladies if you see a chorus line of this sight each day.

If the childbirth process eliminated any vestiges of dignity I had, motherhood has made me immune to sights and tasks that would have broken the non-mom me. It’s like we’re lobsters thrown head first into the boiling pot of disgusting bodily functions. Once you’ve dealt with diapers, you really feel like a butt-check is a vacation.