Do you remember the first
fit I mentioned? Did you think that it would be the last? If so, then you would be wrong. No matter whether we've gone on a five minute walk around the block or are returning from an hour long romp at the park, the return home is often more eventful than I would like it to be. Like the forehead indents? That's what you get when you smash your head into the cement if mom doesn't put her foot in the way fast enough (because of course you can't throw a proper fit on the grass when you're 19 months old. It just doesn't have the same effect). Usually I'm pretty ok with tantrums, no matter what the scenario, and have a system worked out for how to handle them. If you want it in professional terminology,
read this, but basically I make sure he's safe, let him throw himself, and when he's calmed down a bit, we move on.* Sometimes, however, "my" way just doesn't work quickly enough. This morning was a perfect example. The boy woke up about an hour earlier than I was expecting him to, and when we started to head downstairs he got the(false) impression that I wasn't going to carry him down and decided that the only recourse was to express his frustration. loudly. Head banging was involved. When he finally stood up (what I'd been encouraging him to do all along), I wiped off the blood from his slightly split lip, picked him up, and brought him downstairs. All good, right?
As soon as we got downstairs, I tried to stand him up on the floor to take his sopping wet diaper off so he could sit on the potty and/or eat breakfast, and he threw himself all over again. This fit was even louder and more dramatic and lasted for about 10 minutes before mr. waaz stumbled downstairs, picked DS up, and brought him back up to bed. Didn't say much to the boy aside from "you may not bang your head on the ground, and you may not scream at your mother. Lay down here and calm down for a minute", put a blanket on him, and waited. In his words, it was a "high-risk maneuver" because 1) it might not work, and 2)it might give me, the mom, the wrong impression that I was "doing a bad job".
While this was happening, I, the mom, was thinking in my head, "this is never going to work, he's going to be even madder than before, and I'm going to have to fix it," but less than five minutes later, I hear snoring, and we all got to sleep at least another hour. WHAT?! No wrong impressions here. In fact, Daddy is Mommy's new hero.
Tune in next time for adventures with finger paint, no fits allowed. =)
*n.b. this is not to say I'll never use...um...physical discouragement...of negative behavior, but so far it hasn't seemed like the appropriate response to a barely verbal toddler's tantrum. Touching the stove/xbox/knitting on the other hand...
Problem: How to mimic the absorbency of a disposable diaper. Solution: Have a mother willing to sew and push you through the process. Not to imply that Carolyn didn't actually DO the project. . .just that organizing her thoughts about HOW to do it needed some guidance. In the running were microfiber, old t-shirt, cotton velour, hemp, cotton flannel, old birdseye, and old cotton towel. We determined that a small disposable could hold over 16 ounces of liquid (one did, the other less). A learning moment: Carolyn, holding the really soggy goopy icky feeling diaper, says, "Now what?" I said, "Toss it in the trash." She said, "Really? That's all? Now it sits in the landfill?" Later, when we used the cloth alternatives, she wrung each out, put it on the clothes rack, and remarked, "Em will like these. They'll be used over and over." We determined how to duplicate the amount of liquid the disposable could hold, but wondered why anyone would want to! We also determined which of our easily accessible samples held the most liquid for their weight (a lighter weight diaper is generally considered more comfortable). Care to guess?
