Much to my dismay, the "terrible two's" are in full swing over here. At nearly 20 months of age I was beginning to think that Savannah's carefree, cheerful, laid back, easy going personality would allow her to skip right over the dreadful stage. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, her lovely personality transformed. It all happened rather quickly, with little warning. She just woke up one morning and started having tantrums - multiple, loud, screaming tantrums. And then came the power struggles - "I don't has to do that!" (has=have), "No, No, NO!".
Ugh.
About a week ago I spotted her eyeing a puzzle that Bella had just completed. Immediately I said to her "You can look at that puzzle, but please do not take it apart. It will make a big mess and you'll have to clean it all up." She gave me "the look" and then proceeded to take apart the puzzle, tossing pieces here, there and everywhere. I said nothing. She played with the pieces for a few minutes and then went to get up to find something more interesting to do. I stopped her in her tracks and told her that before she could leave the room, she needed to pick up all of the puzzle pieces first. She replied "No" and so kicked off the first (of many) power struggles. She yelled. She screamed. She downright refused to pick up the pieces. As my frustration level began to rise it occurred to me that it was time to introduce her to "time-out", a technique that (quite surprisingly) I never needed to use with the others. I explained to her why I was making her sit and told her that she could get up once she agreed to pick up her mess. It took her a while, maybe 15-20 minutes or so, but eventually she stopped screaming, stopped fighting, got down from the chair and did as she was told.
Since then she has sat in the "time out" chair multiple times. She is SO stubborn but fortunately, I am MORE stubborn. In the end, I always win, but that's not to say that she doesn't go down without a major fight!
In addition to her power struggles she's been going through this AWFUL stage where she claims she is hungry ALL-THE-TIME. From the moment she wakes up, until the moment she goes to sleep!, she says "I hoooooongry, I hoooooongry" over and over and over again. In the beginning it wasn't a big deal at all -- I figured she was just going through a growth spurt because she would eat whatever I gave her. But after a few days, despite the fact that she kept saying she was hungry, she wouldn't eat what was given to her - even if I gave her what she asked for. SO ANNOYING! She just continuously walks around saying she's hungry, whining that she's hungry and then crying when I won't give her something different, because I had already given her what she wants. This morning was the final straw - she woke up early and whined that she was hungry for a full 20 minutes before we went into the kitchen for breakfast. I asked her what she wanted. She asked for cereal - Frosted Mini Wheats. I literally gave her 10 little pieces of Mini Wheats (SO much food has been getting wasted lately because she claims she wants something and then won't eat it) with a splash of milk. She took two bites and announced that she was finished. I clicked my internal "tough love" button, put my foot down and demanded that she finish. Now normally I honestly wouldn't even attempt to "force" ANY of my children to eat. I have no want to give them any sort of food issues when they are older. That being said, I KNEW that if I allowed Savannah to walk away from the table after only having eaten a few bites of her cereal that she would be back 10 minutes later claiming to be "hoooongry" again. Enough is enough, you know? So she sat at the table and screamed. She cried a tearless cry. She screamed some more. Cried some more. I just kept repeating myself over and over - "You can get up and go play AFTER you eat ALL of your cereal." Finally, after maybe 20 minutes of this insaneness, she calmed down. I told her if she ate her cereal I would read her a story. By the time I was done with the short book, she had eaten it all and then proceeded to eat a piece of toast and some of Jim's scrambled eggs. Mission Accomplished. It was a full 3 hours later before she announced that she was hungry again - and it was snack time anyways - never a battle with that!
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