I’ve raised a savage.

Kids do the strangest things sometimes, but this is a new one on me.

My youngest has now begun to bite his big brother.

Now it isn’t as if he hasn’t been provoked. My oldest enjoys the fact he is bigger and whatever toy his little brother picks up, territorially he can simply pluck from the little one’s pudgy fingers, My oldest sometimes goes too far and can get too physical with my youngest and often when they are having their crazy hour – laps around the kitchen, exacerbated by me chasing after them pretending to be a marauding hippo wanting to eat their bellybuttons – their will be collisions where the oldest child simply barges past and send the little mite crumpling to the floor.

My youngest is quite stoic though. There isn’t often a shriek or wail. He will simply get back up and continue to toddle toward whatever destination he previously had.

Well, it does now seem he has reached his limit. The last few days has seen my youngest react differently to having the toys he had in his grasp unceremoniously thieved from him. No more, he must have thought. And now, he shakes his head, gives a little roar and then grabs out for whatever extremity on my oldest is available, and he will bite him.

We knew something like this would materialise, so we have attempted to nip this in the bud whenever my oldest child does exercise his physicality. When a toy is stolen, we make sure he gives it back. When a barge occurs, we make sure he apologises to the littlest.

To no avail.

Watching him bite his oldest brother, you can see he is losing his temper – and it is quite funny. The ‘roar’ he gives out, paired with him shaking his head from side to side, is actually hilarious – but we are still attempting to stop it.

If we don’t then can you imagine what he would be like as an adult? He doesn’t get the promotion he wanted at work so he clamps his gnashers on his boss? His football team lose and he leaps onto the pitch to sink his teeth into the manager? Just imagine if McDonalds ever get his order wrong…

The dynamic between the two is probably the likeliest variable that causes the fragile equilibrium for peace at home to be shattered. They get on most of the time, but as mentioned in previous #DaddyDiary entries, the sharing thing? That takes time.

So does ironing out any bad habit it seems.

Any violence toward each other is being acted on by taking the offending child out of the equation and implementing a warning system. When all warnings are expired, they go up to bed – which they hate. They wail like a banshee and it is so hard to hear them distressed, but the alternative is that these moments will continue for longer – so they have to learn by hook or by crook.

At the moment though, they continue to clash and as they get older, it will only get worse. Arguments over toys, territory, who got the biggest drink poured out – pretty much everything if I remember what it was like with my siblings correctly.

My youngest can’t articulate what is annoying him – so he reacts with what he can do – which is a bite that is supposed to tell his big bro to back off.

It isn’t working for him, but it is rather funny.