Tantrums.

Mr. Grumpy

Tonight I force-fed M chocolate frosting.


Chocolate frosting, people.  I did so because it was the end of the meal, time for dessert, and M pitched a fit over, well, I don't know what over.  I offered him a cupcake, and I think he thought I said cookie, so when I showed him the cupcake, he went ballistic.  He pitches epic fits over everything.  If I don't unpeel his banana fast enough, or the right way, if the banana cracks in half while he is eating it, if I tell him not to eat the rice cake in the living room, if he can't reach the book he wants, or can't figure out how to climb on the couch, or if he can't go outside to ride the tricycle because it is wet or rainy.  Pretty much anything that thwarts his will produces an epic fit of screaming, throwing himself on the floor, kicking, smashing anything in sight, throwing things, throwing food, general violence.  You get the idea.

M the Barbarian

My husband and I are tearing our hair out over him, because he's been like this for a whole year. The change caught us off guard, because he was such a happy and contented baby.  He slept through the night very early, was happy to play with toys, happy to eat, just happy to be here.  And then he turned one and got mad.  And then E was born and he got madder.  He stopped sleeping through the night and began waking like a newborn.  He started having terrible tantrums about everything, and becoming a picky eater after eating everything.  Or refusing to eat all together.  Frankly, we just don't know what to do with him.  H gave us plenty of trouble, but it was of a slightly different variety, and there were different phases of it.  There was never the underlying rage that I get from M.  Plus, H was (and is) always well behaved in public.  M, not so much.  We keep wondering when this phase will end, because we have no previous experience to go on with this type of thing.  I shudder to think that we might be in for two more years of it.  It's not that we don't set limits (we set plenty of limits), or that we don't enforce them (I feel like I spend my days saying no or redirecting); we are just so tired of all the tantrums, and the screaming, and the general carrying on about every.darn.thing.

M's general intransigence is one of the major reasons why I let him have a pacifier whenever he wants, and why he still gets a bottle several times a day, plus at night when he is falling asleep (but with water, not milk).  Those two things are sure to calm him down in the midst of the storm.  Sometimes it just buys me five or six minutes of calm before the next tantrum.  Or enough time to go to the bathroom.  St. Theophan the Recluse wrote that we as parents have a sacred duty to teach a child to tame his passions, and I do think that is important, but honestly, I'm having a hard time understanding the implementation.

I want my children to be well-behaved, self-controlled, compassionate human beings who can participate meaningfully in the life of our family.  I want them to be able to put aside their own desires and needs (at least temporarily) for the greater good of the family.  I know that these are adult sorts of ideals, but I know that the time to shape them is now.  I know I can't expect perfection at this age, but I'd to be able to at least expect reasonable behavior some of the time.  Most of the time I feel I am dealing with a complete barbarian who not only speaks a language nearly incomprehensible to me, but his customs, culture, and ideas are foreign as well.  I don't understand how to help him assimilate.  His great sucking need for me and my husband's attention and time, to the exclusion of all the other members of the family, is difficult to deal with on many different levels.

The bright side of this whole thing is that E has gotten much easier in the last few weeks, and isn't screaming in tandem with M.  She still goes crazy several times during the day, gets up a lot at night, and remains needy in the way that babies under age one are, but she seems more content with life.  The general chaos level comes down a notch when she is content, even if M is not.  As long as we can keep her healthy, that is.  But that is another topic for another day.

I wish I could write that I have learned some big lesson, or have a nugget of wisdom to pass along, but honestly, I've gotten nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero.  Just the hope that things will improve some time soon.