Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Mother of the Year, right here

Oh my goodness. I am so frustrated with The Child I could scream.

She's needy. Needy, needy, needy. Not just needy for a human being. Needy for a toddler. The way to help her has always been to shower her with affection until she feels safe. Well, that doesn't appear to be working this time. I can't do anything without her tugging on my pant leg and crying, "Want pick you up please? Want pick you up please? Want pick you up please?" All day. Every day.

She won't eat anything except cereal (Cheerios or Kashi), oatmeal, and other grain products. Once every other day or so, she'll deign to try three bites of something else, but otherwise she's living on air, starch, and fiber. It's making me crazy. I couldn't care less what she eats (so long as it's not junk), but I'm sure low blood sugar is contributing to her constant crankiness. She'll ask for something for lunch (one of the number one tricks I've been taught is to offer toddlers choices about as many things as you can), and I'll make it for her, and she refuses it. So she goes hungry because I'm not her waitress.

I am angry at her about half the day, and I feel guilty about feeling so angry the other half of the day. It's exhausting.

This might be easier to handle if she hadn't improved so dramatically in the weeks before we moved. She was eating just about everything we put in front of her. She was happy about 95% of the time.

We've lived here for weeks. Please tell me that it's totally normal for a toddler to take a long time to settle in to a new home.

And please tell me that she and Emmy will get used to sleeping in the same room someday soon. They don't stay awake and scream; they stay awake and laugh (thank goodness). But neither of them is getting enough sleep. We don't have the space to separate them.

We've had good days since we moved, don't get me wrong. Today is not one of those days. And when I'm stuck in the middle of one of these days, it always seems like there's no end in sight to this behavior.

1 comment:

  1. Okay, so, I wrote this nice long response, and then the window crashed when I went to post it. I was annoyed enough that I didn't feel like retyping it immediately, but now I have *two* to catch up on. So.

    About the girls sharing a room, they'll probably always lose a bit of sleep. Mine still do (my 4-year-old doesn't nap, so she could use a bit more sleep, but the napping 2-year-old keeps her up and wakes her early). I did do some things like what you mention in your newer post about the curtain (we had a crib tent, so we'd drape a blanket over the side of the crib tent that faced the room). We also used that to block out the sun sometimes.

    As for the eating, it won't kill her, although I sympathize with your frustration over her low blood sugar and all. When she gets a bit older you could try a "no, thank you" bite technique. Our oldest must try one bite of each food before she can leave the table. The first time, she sat at the table for something insane like 5 hours, but we held firm. Much screaming and crying. That was the only time she tested it. After that, there might be whining, but she'll always do it and won't take all that long. Sometimes once she tries a bite, if we don't make a big deal of it, she just keeps going. We haven't tried that with our 2-year-old yet, as we aren't sure she'd get it, though, and I know Grace is closer to her age, so maybe more as an idea for the future.

    Good luck!

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