suck suck suck

[flea]

The period between 1 and 2 am last night sucked more than anything has sucked in quite a while. Casper woke up and mr. flea went in to try to calm her down. She was pretty darn upset, and he asked to tag-team with me because he was having trouble keeping it together. So I went in, and Casper wanted to nurse, and I said not until morning, nursie was sleeping, and she threw her first all-out two-year old fit, screaming and kicking her legs and at one point shouting in her best Exorcist voice GO AWAY. So angry and frustrated and unwilling to accept comfort - she'd let me be in the room with her, but not on the futon, no touching, and for a long time if I spoke to her she screamed louder.

Maybe it's perception and stereotypes about being 2, but I feel like we had a happy little dude in our house until a few days ago, and now we have miss mercurial roller-coaster girl. One minute she's giggling "silly daddy, silly dilly" and the next she's got this awful screech set up. She used to be fairly distractable if we kept her from doing something, but now it's insta-screech.

It's hard for me to judge how much to let her be and work on self-comfort and coping strategies, and how much I need to step in because she's just in a rut of screaming, or worse, winding herself up even higher. In the night we gave in and gave her a cup of milk, which set her on the road to back to sleep. She woke up screaming at 6:30, but once she was awake she seemed fine.

And my schedule today is: desk 8-9, meeting (I take minutes) 9-10, meeting 10-11:30, meeting 1-2:30, pick up Casper (who will have already napped, so no respite there.) YAWN.

Comments

[hecubot.livejournal.com]

Of all the Buffista babies, Casper's development reminds me the most of Emmett's. The same (non)sleep issues, and now the arrival of the tantrum phase. Which really stressed me out.

I don't know what'll work for your family, but here's what I wound up doing with Emmett during his worst tantrum stretch (19 to 26 months) after a lot of trial and error: (1) It only made things worse to do warnings and counting down and stretching it out. I really had to learn that tantrums were about kids testing boundaries, and my job was to enforce the boundaries. Unacceptable behavior (kicking and screaming) meant a timeout. Timeout meant into their room by themselves. (2) The more I interacted with him during a tantrum the worse it got. I let him scream and yell by himself. I put in in his room. If it was a full on tantrum in the living room, I'd walk out of the room. If it looked like he was going to break things *then* I would physically take Emmett to his room. (He didn't do a lot of breaking though, really. Some throwing.) Generally though it was better not to try to physically restrain him in anyway as that just exacerbated it. (3) I learned to not go to scheduled events that messed with his nap schedule. That was a guaranteed meltdown. (4) If he started to go when I was out with him at a store, we'd leave immediately. Abort! Abort! (5) For myself, I tried to give him timeouts in controled situations, i.e., when I was home. That may seem obvious, but some books will advocate giving a timeout whereever you are, but that never worked with him. (6) Timeouts were actually very short. Usually 2 minutes. They they could go on because I'd add a minute if he continued yelling or thrashing in his room. He had to sit quietly on his bed for two minutes. So the scheduled timeout was 2 minutes, but the actual timeout was often about 10 minutes. (7) There was a lot of cuddling and soothing afterwards which is where I would impart the consequences for behavior message, but reinforce that I loved him.

Good luck! It gets better. I comforted myself a lot with the knowledge that his spirt and will would serve him well as he got older, but it was my job to socialize his behavior when he was young. That's exactly how it turned out. It was very stressful for me.