Borrowed Brothers

As far as sibling struggles are concerned, Connor won the brother lottery.  His older brother Mitchell is very mellow and mild mannered. Lucky Connor. It means that he has the great fortune to escape the traditional hazing that usually befalls the youngest male who lives in a home that harbors at least one older brother under the same roof.

Unfortunately Connor doesn't seem to see it that way.  Instead, he has decided that in-home hazing is a right of passage, an inalienable right, a truth that he holds to be self-evident, that as a younger brother he should endure a traditional sibling smack-down every now and then. Connor took matters into his own hands and decided to outsource the job by borrowing some big brothers.

Borrowed Brother #1 is Nick.

Nick is Mitchell's good friend who stands about 6 foot 6 inches high with the physique of a linebacker whose favorite past time is to watch WWF on cable TV and then come to our house and try out the moves on his eager sidekick "ConDog". (For those of you with a largely estrogen based home WWF stands for World Wrestling Federation-or so I'm told.)  Connor has been "flea flicked", "bad slammed", "splash pressed", and "chokeslammed" all over the house by Nick. All while Connor sports an enormous grin from ear to ear--though admittedly his eyebrows are simultaneously raised in strange contortions that can only be described as having the consistency of two parts foreboding and one part fun.

Borrowed Brother #2 is his cousin Tanner.  Tanner is almost as tall as Nick but still scrawny enough that he couldn't really pull off a flea-flick on The ConDog.  Tanner's fiendish forte is that he is good at being a smooooth talker.  So while Nick fulfills Connor's perplexing need for physical torture, Tanner plays the role of beguiling brother. It just so happens that Tanner is also a younger brother himself who knows all to well the perils of letting an older brother convince you to throw caution to the wind and do something absolutely stupid. So to help Connor learn how to avoid this sort of painful pitfall Tanner considers it his duty to temp him into dangerous situations, thereby teaching him NOT to ever, ever, ever, trust an older brother's pernicious plots. Tanner is what we call a self-appointed mentor of mayhem.

Last week Tanner's latest scheme was to convince Connor to let him stuff him into a trash can. Later that night Connor was laughing as he told us all about his odiferous adventures as Houdini of the heap.
"It only took me 10 minutes to escape!" he boasted with a self-satisfied grin.

Seriously, what is wrong with this kid? 

Then recently Connor wrote the following letter to one of Mitchell's friends who used to live nearby and was yet another "borrowed brother" who helped fill Connor's self-imposed pain quota.  When I read the letter things got more confusingly clear.

Apparently the exhilaration of getting stuffed in a trash can AND having the pleasure of getting "choke slammed" are all interactions considered by Connor to be brotherly bonding moments--but getting his head accidentally whacked into a couch's arm rest (I believe that sorta move would technically be called "The Facebuster") is apparently where Connor draws the line...

...at least the kid has one.

I was beginning to think the boy was crazy.