Meltdown mode....

Sigh. This is gonna be one of those posts.

I know I recently posted a pretty sunny home ed post. All's well in that department, true enough.

BUT.

We are slightly at our wits end where our youngest boy is concerned.

We are peace-loving souls, and we treasure and adore my boy.

We really do.

But I just don't get the toddler rage thing. Even more so now he is actually almost four!

I think to myself c'mon, what have you even got to be in a rage about? How dare you be so.... ragey? When we are spending so much time trying to be nice, committed, and involved parents?

He is soooooo impatient it is untrue.

If something doesn't happen really quickly for him he just boils over straight away -Total meltdown.

If we serve him a drink and he doesn't have the exact right cup he'd had in mind - total meltdown. If the juice isn't the right one, or at the correct strength, or say, temperature - Total meltdown. If we want to go out and he wants to stay in - Total meltdown. If we cook him something he doesn't like - Total meltdown.  He'll spend ten minutes having a total meltdown demonstrating his displeasure and dissapointment with us, for serving up food that is not to his liking..... then have an even longer paddy when we feed it to the dog, an hour later, telling us that actually he really really wanted it. He has a total meltdown if his say, his sock or T-shirt gets a tiny bit wet, or his seatbelt isn't just so, or his hair is annoying him.

Basically, he has a meltdown twenty frickin' times an hour, over every little thing that doesn't quite work out for him like he'd want. And he's been like it now for months.

I've gotten used to living with him like this - demanding, crying, getting stressy about things that seem really petty and even illogical. We try to be respectful towards him, rational, reasonable. We try to be cool headed. We try to explain that we are sorting x,y,or z, to please be a bit more patient with us, that he can have something in a minute, or why he can't have something, or why we are doing something he doesn't want to do.

The other day I lost it though. He refused to come on a family bike-ride, and called us stupid dum-heads.

That really flipped my switch.

I'm starting to really wonder how the hell to help this angry kid, without giving in to every whim and being bullied by him. He's acting like one of those kids off Supernanny or something.

How did this happen? We are nice people. We are kind. We try to be gentle, patient, supportive. We try to give the kids a lot of freedom in how they choose to spend their time. We are a close family generally speaking, sharing a lot of laughter and cuddles. Pete and I get on fantastically, rarely argue, love each other like crazy. Are mostly pretty light-hearted and easy going.

The older guys were never this hard work. We'd spend hours and hours playing on the floor together, doing toddlerish things. Building train-tracks, painting, playing play-dough. They all went to nursery in some form or another and liked it. The break from home seemed to open their world up a bit, giving them a chance to play with different kids and toys and liven things up a bit. Alf refuses point blank to have anything to do with nursery at all. So here we are at home.

He seems to be really grown up in so many ways. He hates anything toddlery. Didn't like being a baby. Was always looking onwards, trying to break into the next stage, fidgety and restless to be bigger.

Being the fourth boy, he has had a different kind of set-up - he has three older brothers who he wants to join in with. He wants to be just like them. He wants to play Lego and Pokemon and big boy stuff. Storytime or playing board-games with mummy is usually refused, since he would prefer doing things with his brothers.

The activities that he will do with me, like baking a cake, or something physical, are often spent bickering. He whinges and whines his way through so many activities with me that sometimes its easier to give up and walk away. Let him go on the computer like he wants to do. Or watch something. Or just jump around.

Some days I feel pissed off that he is so demanding about everything. So fickle. So impatient. So determined to resist any reasonable request I make. To test me and push me on every frickin issue.

Do you have a child that complains and bitches the whole time no matter what you do for them?

Please someone out there tell me they have a toddler that is driving them batshit crazy!