The Wolf has been on a kind of roller coaster lately. He's super, super, super sweet most of the time. He's funny. He uses voices to play characters in his little games. He likes to dance and jump on things. He's learning to spell. But when he's hungry or tired or upset, he's a fucking demon.
He's learned how to shriek. That's no surprise, right? Kids learn to yell. He's got a banshee quality that sounds like souls being ripped apart. It's a horrid sound. We are learning to tune him out.
He requires that things happen a certain way. It started with, "No! Mama can help me [put on pants, get out of the car, take a bath, whatever]!" and it was so rare it was odd. Now it's, "I want to go down the stairs first!" and screaming ensues if you're already downstairs. The same with opening the door, turning on/off lights, sitting in chairs, getting into/out of the car, pressing the doorbell at school, getting the mail, taking out the trash, reading a book, reading a different book, moving the stool around the house, opening/closing/flushing the toilet, and many other issues. Screaming.
Some days, he doesn't want to do anything. Kid goes limp or stiff as a board when it is bathtime, or time to go to school, or put on pants, etc. One day, I had to literally wrestle him into his clothes before school. By the time we got there, he was fine, but shaky. In the afternoon, while riding home, he told me "Daddy, you put your leg on my head?" I said, "yes, I put my leg on your head." (Full disclosure: I had him in a scissor hold to keep him from flailing while I pulled his socks on him and my lower leg was pressed against his face; it worked pretty well). His response? "DAT'S FUNNY!"
He has narrowed his choices of food that he will consume to sugar and chicken. He seems to be healthy enough, so we're just doing that now. He has also gone back to demanding milk at bedtime, which is annoying, but probably a sign that he's going through another growth spurt, so I cave more often than I don't.
He's mostly potty trained, but just won't poop in the toilet with any regularity (hah!), so he wears diapers to bed. Diapers--plural--because he sometimes barely waits until his bedroom door is closed to poop up the one we put on him at bedtime. He only pushes one out on the toilet when he really, really wants a cookie. Then he poops up his diaper 20 minutes later.
Most of his tantrums fall into a cycle of I want that/I don't want that. "I'm hungry!" so we present him with food--his favorite food--and he screams, "I don't want it!" Nothing works. We say we have to go and he doesn't want to go. Goes limp. Goes stiff when you try to pick him up. When we say we're staying home, he runs to the door to get into the car, screaming all the way. It takes a while to talk him down, and sometimes he's so worked up we just have to throw him in his room until he calms down.
We're at the crossroads of wanting to leave his door open at night so he can get up and go potty at night and locking the little bugger in, because if you don't, he won't go to bed until 10 or 11 and the next day will be fucking useless. The Wolf is a precocious thing, but he knows he can rely on us for some basic services. And since we don't like cleaning up pee-soaked sheets and we like for him to be reasonable and well-rested and well-fed when we can get him to do those things, we relent and give him the milk at bedtime, or let him slam the door and reopen it so he can go first, etc.
The parenting blogs tell us that he'll grow out of it. In the meantime, never shake the baby, never shake the baby, never shake the baby, never shake the baby...
And now, this:
