When you become a parent, no one tells you the following things may happen.
Your child may refuse to go to bed, night after night for months. This may vary from mild objection to outright defiance. Sometimes your child may continually get out of their bed, not even waiting for you to leave the room. Your child, if this behaviour is ignored, may stay up until 10.30pm. If you try to follow the “silent return” technique, the following things may take place.
Your child might slap you round the face. First one cheek and then the other.
Your child might throw sizeable plastic toys, a doorstopper and a shoe at you.
They may declare that you are stupid, an idiot, that they will rip you to pieces, that they are going to bite you, that they hate you.
She might pinch you, pull your hair and scratch you.
They may sit in a buggy when they are meant to be in the naughty corner and when you go to pick them up they cling on to the buggy snuggle and the whole buggy swings out and trips you up so you drop your screaming child. (You’ll feel really fabulous about that part)
Once you’ve finished the naughty corner spell half an hour later, explained that none of the above is acceptable or allowed and that they are to go to bed right away and go to sleep, you may want to go to the kitchen and have a bit of a cry. Then eat a lot of post-Christmas Ferrero Rocher.
Another thing that isn’t covered in ante-natal classes is the moment when you hear one of your children call the other one fat. A number of thoughts crossed my mind when this happened.
Firstly, should I leave them to play out their own safe conflicts?
Secondly, should I object to the word fat being used as an insult, thereby instantly making it an appealing thing for them to say?
Thirdly, should I point out that neither of them is fat? I can only see this leading to a situation whereby we have to determine exactly who is (probably at loud volume on public transport).
I did think twice about posting this but I don’t want to make out it’s all funny poo stories and finding all the Barbies having some kind of freezing Jacuzzi in the bathroom sink at 4.30am on New Years Day. I don’t really mind spending NYD detangling Rapunzel’s hair or hand sorting 800 Aquabeads into 8 colours, but I’m positively out of my comfort zone with the other stuff.
I have to say, I’m not really looking for advice as we have tried tonnes of techniques. I just wanted to get it all out.
