The way mothers block out childbirth, dads try to forget the terrible 2s.

Our oldest son, now 6, had his moments as a toddler, but his natural shyness, I suspect, acted as a brake against his most outlandish impulses.

At least, that’s how it seems to me now. Meanwhile, our youngest son — No. 2 — has no such inhibitions.

My wife and I still talk about the time as a toddler that our oldest son refused to enter a family restaurant in Red Bank. We sat anxiously together in the parking lot for 20 minutes while he yodeled and trampolined around in the back seat of the car.

Son No. 2, on the other hand, would have gone inside the restaurant, kissed the waitress, given the owner a noogy and Frisbeed a few dishes across the room.

Little brother is still three months shy of his second birthday, but he already has turned in some Oscar-worthy “terrible 2-type” tantrums.

Just last week, my wife was out of town on a business trip. I was cutting up some grapes one morning for our toddler to eat, when he began to melt down. The next thing I knew, he was on the kitchen floor screaming like a bag of cats.

“What?” I groaned. “What do you want, son?”

“Dat,” he said, pointing urgently to the fridge. “Mo’ dat.”

“Mo’ dat, what?” I asked.

“Mo’ dat wa-wa-meh-won,” he said.

“Dis no wa-wa-meh-won,” I explained, pointing the tip of my paring knife at the neatly halved grapes in front of me. “Dis gape. You want mo’ gape?”

“Noooooo!” he bellowed. “No mo’ gape! Mo’ wa-wa-meh-won.”

When I picked him up, he tried to do a backward somersault out of my arms. That’s another peril associated with 2-year–old boys; they all think they are Jackie Chan.

You can forget changing his diaper when he’s in one of these moods. He’s sneaky. He will be all smiles until just before he plants a kick to your chin.

“Yah!” he yells as he kicks, like some pint-size Ninja.

Wrestling his clothes on is like trying to put a leotard on a frog. The boy can alternately make his body as stiff as a board or as limp as a noodle, and he seems to know intuitively when to stiffen and when to melt to make it feel as if he weighs 150 pounds.

Somebody needs to write a chapter in one of those parenting books: “10 Ways Your Baby Can Hurt You.”

Toddlers are natural street fighters capable of spitting, biting, head-butting and hair-pulling. Sometimes when his older brother and I are wrestling on the floor, the baby piles on and grabs handfuls of our hair. If he had the strength, I think he would bang our heads together.

With firstborn children, you worry that this wildness is a permanent situation, that your cuddly little baby has morphed into a maniac destined to be on “Friday Night SmackDown.”

With second kids, though, you know that the terrible-2 period is just a temporary freak show. Soon — say by age 4 — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will shake hands and your child’s sweet personality will emerge.

Just this morning, I picked up my son from his crib, and he put his head on my shoulder and nuzzled my neck.

“My Dah-dee,” he said, and he patted me on the back.

Give this boy some watermelon.

Mark Kennedy’s new book, “Life Stories,” a collection of his columns, is available at Amazon.com.

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