STITCH

Originally published 2/19/2010 on Momaha.com

"If the FBI ever fingerprints him, he'll be guilty of something," my dad said.

You see, our 2nd child, Miles, has an unbelievable amount of curiosity, and that's putting it nicely. He has to touch E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!!! As we’re telling him to stop touching this thing, he is already touching that thing. He's obsessed!
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This quality has earned him a lot of nicknames. All of our kids have nicknames, but Miles has more than all of them combined. Probably the one that describes him best is “Stitch,” as in the alien creature from the Disney movie “Lilo and Stitch.” If you recall, in the movie Lilo says that “Stitch destroys everything he touches.” That pretty much describes Miles.

A perfect example of how his nickname came about was when he was two and we were visiting my parents for the holidays. My parents have a beautiful home that is for adults.

It is a perfect place for Stitch.

Mom has all kinds of cute trinkets on coffee tables, end tables, desks...everywhere. And the best (or worst) part is that they were just at Stitch's level. Of course he obliged by touching E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!!!

"Get out of there!" I hollered. "Quit that!" I yelled. "Will you stop touching that!" I implored. Too late, he'd already touched something else.

Then it happened - he got hurt.

He grabbed a snow globe off an end table that was too heavy for him to lift. It fell, landing right on his big toe and then breaking into a hundred pieces. He screamed. At first I thought the glass had cut him, but he wasn't bleeding. He kept on screaming. Something must have really been hurting because Stitch rarely cried more than a minute when he got hurt.

That’s when I noticed his big toe. It was black. And it was getting swollen. I grabbed a bag of peas out of the freezer and put it on his toe. After he stopped crying I turned to my dad and said "I should probably take him to the doctor tomorrow morning.” 

"But he only cried for about 5 minutes. It must not hurt that bad," my dad said.

"Yeah, but he has NEVER cried that long." I guess a good bit of toughness is needed if you’re going to be overly curious.

So the next morning we went to the doctor and thankfully he determined that his toe wasn't broken. "I can poke a hole in his toe to relieve the swelling, but he won't like it. Besides, with some ibuprofen, it probably won't bother him for long." 

We decided not to do the toe poke and, sure enough, the doctor was right. Stitch was back to touching E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G as soon as we got back to my parent's house.

I opened a savings account for his FBI legal defense fund that afternoon.

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