Today, I slept until almost noon. But that was only because I was sick last night — woken up by it right around 1:00am, actually — and wound up staying up until almost 4:00am. I stayed in my PJs all day and didn’t do anything with myself beyond brushing my teeth and throwing my hair up into a clip. But still, I was presentable, and when Alyssa asked if her friends W and M (brother and sister; he’s 8 and she’s 9) could come inside to play, I said yes. I was the perfect Mommy Hostess. I suggested W and M call their parents to make sure it was okay for them to be inside our house, I spoke with their dad to confirm things; I made suggestions of games and activities; I intervened when Ryan started flapping and crying 1; I even served up cold glasses of milk and slices of chocolate cake mid-afternoon.
But come 5:00pm, when it was time for W and M to go home, Alyssa completely fell apart into a sobbing, blubbering, heaving, hyperventilating mess. Why? Not because W and M had to go home, but because she couldn’t go back outside to play. She somehow twisted things around in her mind so that when I said W and M had to go home at 5, what I really meant was that they had to go home at 5, and she could then go back outside to play. At 5pm in the middle of February? When the high temperature for the day was 42°? When it’s a school night? I don’t think so.
Dear god. It took me a good half hour to get her calmed down, and that was with talking to her, reprimanding her, threatening to take away her opportunity to go to Ryan’s preschool and be the teacher’s assistant tomorrow morning (she has off for the holiday; Ryan does not as it is a snow make-up day), holding her and rocking her, Dan coming in to talk to her, hold her and rock her, etc. The whole time she was doing that heaving gasping thing you do when you’ve cried too much and can barely catch your breath, and in between we were treated to such gems as:
“You don’t love me”
“I’m going to stay in my room forever”
“I wish I would get killed”
Really? REALLY? All this drama from a six year old? I swear, the crybaby/flouncing gene did not come from me. And god help me when she’s a teenager…
- common autism thing ↩
Holy cow. I don’t look forward to Fumiko getting older. The other day she started door slamming. When it was time for a nap and she didn’t want to she would fly into her room tell me to go away and slam the door or just slam the door and then proceed to kick her wall. I was like “o.O”. Neither my husband or I EVER acted that way as children. In fact if you ask either of my parents they never had to raise their voice at me and I was spanked once ever. It’s amazing. I keep wondering where it comes from since she didn’t get it from either of us, and her brother didn’t act that way.
Seriously, where do they get these things?
Oh my! Kids nowadays. It’s kinda cute when she said “You don’t love me.”
I remembered when my mom would ask me to take my mandatory nap time when I was in grade school and I wanted to play outside instead. I used to say that…
Wow, welcome to parenting a girl. That all sounds pretty normal, I was surprised at some of the gems that came out of Sydney’s mouth after she started school and had heard them from someone. Like the whole dying thing. There were some pretty dramatic kids with some pretty messed up parents, so I could see her picking that up from one of them. I calmly told her that it’s not cool to say such things, asked her if she really realized what those things meant, and she’s never done it again. Well, the hyperventilating fits tend to come out, but we don’t give in so it usually ends before it begins.
The only thing I would have done different is the holding her and rocking her, I used to do that and it encouraged Sydney. Now I refuse to reward any type of behavior like this, even whining, with attention. I’m simply like when you can talk to me normally, without drama, and calm down, we’ll do that. Until then, get somewhere and calm yourself. It works for our kid.
My favorite gem when sophie gets into the temper tantrum state is “Mommy isn’t my best friend any more!”
Kids are so cute when they are younger… and then they learn to talk back lol. It is always good to teach them to have an opinion but it sucks when they use it against you… although she seems very intelligent for saying things that will make you upset lol. She probably gets it from her friends or others around her. Kids are so perceptive and soak up everything they hear! Haha, just wait till the teen years set in. But maybe by then it’ll have worked its way out of her system, you never know :D
We’ve had to deal with quite a few tantrums from NHL. He’s been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and, when one sets off, he’ll be crying, running wild and screaming at the top of his lungs even over the littlest thing. When he’s in one of these moods, he’ll scream the nastiest things and can’t be reasoned with.
Just today, we were going to a hockey game. First, he began freaking out that we wouldn’t get there in time (despite being a mere 15 minutes away). Then, as the game came to a conclusion, he began screaming that we needed to go home and that he wished that we had never gone. I reminded him that, had we not gone, he wouldn’t have caught a hockey puck or met Dora – who was at the game. Luckily, that calmed him down.
There are days when I wonder if my 7-year-old is practising for his teenage years.