This is just a little vent. I guess I feel since I was a behavior therapist for so long and I currently work with children with developmental delays, I feel as if my child should be the best behaved child on the planet. If he misbehaves I put so much pressure on myself to find the source of what's going on and make changes to make things better. It's ridiculous. I stress myself out with worry over him constantly. For instance, lately, everything is some sort of fighting game with shooting noises involved. It drives me crazy. I hate it. I feel like my sweet cuddly boy is turning into a violent child (not really but just in play). So I'm constantly on him trying to do things that in my mind can't possibly have any type of this play incorporated. We do puzzles and play games and color and do playdoh, yet somehow, somehow, it ends up coming back to a shooting game. This all started from the buzz lightyear ride at disney and has snowballed since. I need to relax. I know it's a phase but I hate it. I can't wait for this phase to be overwith.
The other thing that stresses me out is his sleep as usual. This is nothing new. The kid doesn't sleep. He wakes up a million times a night, he's up late no matter how early we put him in bed, he wakes up at the crack of down raring to go. It is exhausting and stresses me out. All I've learned in too many years of schooling is how important it is for a child's development for them to get a good amount of sleep. My new strategy is this: At night I turn on the humidifier in our room which is kind of loud, then I turn on the fan to a high speed. I love the humming so it helps me sleep and it drowns him out so if he wakes up whining for a half a second it keeps me from leaping out of bed half awake and checking on him. It's a great tactic because I know if he really needed me he would just come into my sound proof room and get me. I love it!
Finally, the fun part of this week, the hitting and biting. When he doesn't get his way he hits me, not hard but just to get my attention. And then he gets to the point where he loses control and starts biting me. It drives me crazy. I'm typically the only target because daddy is the fun one. So I know it's attention seeking and I try not to give attention to it but it really gets me mad sometimes I find myself losing it and telling him "Stop it! Stop biting and hitting me! I've had enough!" I'll put him in time out until he calms down. I've tried ignoring it which doesn't help. It will pass but I've realized that I need to lay down the law more. When I tell him no it means no and there are no loopholes if he keeps asking. So I started tonight. When he threw something and refused to pick it up he was not allowed to watch a movie tonight. He cried and cried and asked over and over again and told me he'd listen and then he hit and bit and went in time out and finally he just fell asleep on the floor from exhaustion. But I feel triumphant as if I won a small battle tonight by standing my ground. The other new lovely behavior he's starting doing is getting up into kid's faces at daycare and then biting their noses. In retrospect it's funny because where on earth did he come up with this tactic???? However, I really don't want all the other moms to start getting angry because he keeps biting their kids' noses! ugh
Seriously. I deal with families all the time who's children are lucky that their parents even know they exist. Here I am analyzing every detail of everything my child does and why he does it and how to change it because I'm paranoid that some day he will end up on the show Intervention and when they do the part where the look back at his childhood to find out what went wrong they're going to say, "well it all started with his mom's parenting style." So many parents that I work with don't have a clue about the fact that they are the cause for why their children behave the way they do. I am hyper-vigilent about it but I'm beginning to think that maybe I need to CHILL OUT!!! No means no, how hard is that right? You bite or hit, there's no , "if you do it again you go in time out". He should go the first time. This is not rocket science so maybe I need to just go with my natural parent instinct instead of into behavior therapist mode.
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