This too shall pass
Mar. 22nd, 2013 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigidA few months ago, Nesko and I were worried and upset. Why was our child acting like an out of control jackass? Was it something we were/weren’t doing? Was this a major personality change? My MIL returned to beating the drum of “it’s his medication’s fault” (he takes an oral medication for his asthma every night) but she blames everything on that. I fretted to a friend of mine who doesn’t have kids but who nannied for several different families while in college.
I keep telling you, Brig. Little kids are psychos.
She is full of wisdom!
The best part of getting advice from someone like her, someone who’s raised kids but isn’t a parent, is that she isn’t as emotionally invested in her advice because 1) they aren’t HER kids and 2) she’s worked for a bunch of different families and seen just how different kids are. So she can be all “well, this worked this time and that worked another time, your situation reminds me of this other thing” and I get a range of advice instead of “THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DID WITH OUR CHILD AND HE’S PERFECT SO IF IT DOESN’T WORK FOR YOU IDEK YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”
Anyway, apparently kids who are 3 1/2 go through this stage where they turn into horrific beasts and EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE and they challenge everything and “forget” all rules and sometimes start crapping their pants again even if they’ve been potty trained for a year because HA HA HA WHY NOT, SUCKER.
So we battened down the hatches and set boundaries and enforced rules gently but firmly and remembered to give him extra time for transitions, and… I realized the other day that I no longer want to find a nice family of wolves to take over raising my child. He’s back to being delightful and charming.
It’s not perfect, he’s back to sleeping in our bed which I HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE. But at least he’s sleeping now and not waking up constantly screaming about how lonely he is… or just plain screaming. His actual hand to god real nightmares and night terrors have been completely gone since he started sleeping with us again, poor duck. So in theory I should be more rested. But in actuality he pushes me to the edge of the bed and is a very active sleeper, hitting and kick and working his cold feet under my body to scrape his toenails along my torso/crotch. If I put my back to him he hooks his toes into my butt like he’s a tow truck trying to haul me out of a ditch. It’s weird, man! Toes don’t go there!
But this too shall pass. He won’t be in our bed forever.
He’ll either grow out of this, too, or I’ll look up that nice wolf family I had my eye on. There’s some coyotes in the area. You think they’d take him in?
Mirrored from Now Showing!.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-22 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-22 07:34 pm (UTC)So that's what's happening to our little cutie-pie...
(He'll be four at the end of August. Tell me that then the worst will be over.)