Because someone definitely stole my daughter and replaced her with a monster.
Sheesh. What a weekend!
This was most definitely the weekend of testing mummy, and tantrums. Almost every activity involved some kind of full-on screaming fit of some kind. Either Daisy didn't want to do it and had to, or Daisy did want to and didn't want to be stopped. Either way, almost everything elicited either a strong love or hate relationship that forced the edges of my patience and emptied two bottles of wine.
No nappy = no happy
Let's start with the fact that Daisy does not nap on weekends now. I think I've mentioned it before but now it's gone from a temporary phenomenon to an ongoing issue. Despite my patient and repeated attempts to get her to sleep in her crib, it just doesn't happen. What does happen is that she just sits there quietly for 20-30 minutes (if I'm lucky) and plays with a stuffed toy.
This would all be fine and dandy if "quiet time" was all she needed but the reality is that, as soon as I then decide to go out somewhere, she falls asleep in the car, leaving me with the agonizing decision of either waking her up and risking bad moods later, or letting her sleep and dictate the path of my day. Either option doesn't seem stellar from my point of view but, given that I only get two precious days a week with her, I tend to (although not always) opt for the letting her sleep. Better to have the path of my day dictated with a happy toddler in-tow than forge ahead, blinkered, with my plans, dragging a kicking and screaming little girl along for the ride. Maybe you disagree with my choice? I'm not sure I'm always that happy with it either.
Here, by example, are the net results of both strategies:
- Saturday afternoon I spent 45 minutes burning gas in a Target parking lot, while waiting for Missy to wake up.
- Sunday, I pulled her out of the car, mid-nap, to go to BabiesRUs for diapers, but wound up carrying her around as she continued to sleep on my shoulder.
No listen = No kissin'
It's easy to discipline a child when they do obviously naughty things like hitting or biting. What's not so easy, I have found, is trying to just get them to listen. Especially when you're dealing with a toddler who, while somewhat ahead of her age in comprehension, doesn't understand all the subtleties of what you need to tell her.
For instance, on Saturday I took Daisy to a park (see more on my other blog about this soon). There is a petting barn there, run by a local girl scout troop, and I thought it would be cool to go pet some goats or something together. Unfortunately, it's a big park and getting from the free parking lot (sorry, not paying $10 to park for a toddler's attention span of 45 minutes) to the petting barn, which was clear on the other side of the park, proved to be a problem.
I didn't want to take the stroller because I was also (at the time) planning on taking her on a train ride and didn't want to leave the stroller somewhere while we zoomed off around the park. So I decided to carry her through the parking lot and then let her walk the rest of the way.
Even while recognizing that getting a toddler to walk anywhere in a focused, straight-line fashion, requires patience and ingenuity, it was a bit of a disaster.
It started when she ran straight to the fishing lake and yelled "Swim! Kick-kick! Daddy!" because she thought it was a pool (she had been for swimming lessons with her dad that morning.) All my calm and soothing explanations did very little to dissuade her of that assumption and she literally beat me off with flailing arms, Exorcist-twisting head, and kicking feet, as I attempted to restrain her from launching herself over the edge and into the green, murky water. (Of course, there was screaming too. To save me some characters, let's just assume that, from hereon out, all of these case stories involve blood curdling screaming, ok?)
The only way out of this one was to pick her up, which I'm sure you can guess she did not like.
I suppose I could have reversed strategies at this point and told her if she didn't behave then we would go back to the car and she would miss out on the petting barn. But here's the reality: she didn't really understand why we were there and so telling her she was missing out on it would have very little (if any) impact, except to say that we would have missed out on the one part of the excursion that was fun (the petting barn itself) and I would have been forced to figure out what the hell to do with us for the rest of the afternoon.
(Here we go with that lose-lose again.)
Getting back from the barn was a little bit better, as I steered her towards some large grassy areas and literally ran ahead of her, keeping her engaged with keeping up.
Of course, there were the side-trips to grab and throw dirt, which I can totally deal with. I'm not one of those moms who doesn't let her kid get a little dirty.
The problem came when Daisy saw a clearing and flew into it ahead of me, refusing to change directions. The issue here was that there was a baseball game going on in the clearing and she was heading right for third base. Again, not amused as I retrieved her before being tagged by a baseball in the head.
Back to the car we finally got and then off to Target, where I turned around to get out and, as you already know, found her sleeping soundly. Super.
This nightmare walking issue continued yesterday as Daddy and I decided an evening walk around the neighborhood would be a nice way to gear-up for dinner. Daisy, however, had other ideas.
She arched her back and kicked her feet when we tried to put her in her stroller, refused to leave the driveway for ten minutes, would only walk on the edge of the curb which resulted in her falling and scuffing her knees repeatedly, ran up people's driveways and sat down or flung herself on the floor when I tried to pull her back to the side-walk, and wrenched her arm out of its socket when I tried to hold her hand. Finally, I picked her up and walked her back home, with her screaming at the top of her lungs.
We ended the day with her screaming bloody murder from her crib for 20 minutes before she would go to sleep and me shaking the wine bottle for those last, vital few drips.
Ahhh... we have definitely launched ourselves into full toddler-hood now. Time to buy shares in Kendall Jackson.
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*If "Maybe the dingo ate my baby" means nothing to you, watch this video from a classic Seinfeld episode
3 comments:
Hated hated hated when my mother in law would say to me "but she didn't want to nap" when we picked up Noelle only to find her sound asleep one minute into the drive home. I have suggested that my MIL take a short cruise in her car with Noelle to put her to sleep, then just put her down for a real nap. She never took that advise. That said, I'm not sure how Daisy would react if you do that to her but my only piece of advise, as an (a little more) experienced would be to take her on a ride if she refuses to go down in her crib. I believe a nap is essential for kids (even myself, the sissy) and normally would do anything to get them to nap. Other than that...the dingo probably did eat her up...
Joy. The problem is that she USED TO go down after we put her to sleep in the car, now she just wakes up as soon as we put her in her crib. And its not like we don't wait for her to fall back asleep. I've waited 45 minutes, routinely, and all she does is sit there.
So maybe you just let her sit there? I don't know. But good luck. It sure sounds like testing mommy time.
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