So, I originally thought I was going to be doing a FKB in November, and started writing something up.  Then, someone else did one, and I sort of forgot about it, and now I’m up for reals.  But, since I wrote up a bit of a post a few months ago, I though it’d be interesting to see how things have changed in the past three months.  This was a pretty enlightening exercise for me, seeing how much things have changed in what seems like such a short period of time.  Then again, to a 2 year old, 3 months is a pretty substantial chunk of his life, so maybe I shouldn’t be quite so surprised.  To try to make it clearer which section is from which time, I put what I wrote in November in normal font, and today’s in italics.

(As a background, we have two boys; one is 4.5, and the other just turned 2 in January.)

Then vs. Now

Then: In general, they are both great kids.  The older one is amazingly helpful to us and his brother, and rarely does much to cause any big problems.  Of course there are things that could be better (still having frequent accidents and lying are the two biggest), but he’s always been such an easy kid to deal with.  I see how he acts compared to his classmates in preschool, and am constantly amazed at how mature he acts.

Now: It took a very long time to get to this point, but the frequent accidents from our 4-year-old seem to be mostly done.  In November he was still having accidents at least 3-4 days per week at school, but today it almost never happens.  I had always hoped we could wait this out, and turns out we did.  As for the lying, that also seems to have been a bit of a phase.  I think he figured out at some point that he could sometimes get away with not telling the truth, and was sort of testing it out for a while.

Then: However, lately we’ve been having a lot of difficulty with our almost 2-year old.  Whenever he gets bored, or we aren’t paying attention to him, he acts out.  That includes throwing things, dumping everything from a bookshelf onto the floor, intentionally hurting his older brother, just general crappy kid stuff.

Now: This seems to have mostly passed as well.  He still certainly has his momentary tantrums, but they are now far less often, and far less destructive.  His newest move is to pour his (or his brother’s) cup of water out on the floor or table.  Certainly annoying to have to clean up, but not that terrible a thing to do.

Then: Plus, bedtime has become a huge problem, which I could believe is the cause of these issues, or an effect of the same phase.  As recently as 2-3 weeks ago, bedtime with the young one was so easy.  We’d read him a book, lay him in bed, turn on his music box, and he’d go to sleep.  Easy as pie.  Then, for whatever reason, everything changed.  Instead of going to sleep, he would open his door, bang the door against the wall, and yell.  There’s a baby gate in front of his door, so he can’t get out, but he sure can be a huge pain.  We had already put up the little door stoppers that attach onto the hinge of the door, so that he couldn’t actually hit it into the wall.  Well, he managed to push the door hard enough to break a hole in the hollow door, which then allowed him to break a large hole in the drywall with the door handle.  Good times on that one.

Now: We’ve adjusted bed time regimens, and it has certainly helped.  Rather than leaving right after reading him a book, we stay with him for a while.  The downside is we now end up laying in his room for 20-30 minutes most nights, waiting for him to fall asleep.  It still beats holes getting punched into the wall, but I’d rather not be spending that much time sitting in there, waiting for him to finally go down.  I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to keep improving this part of our day-to-day routine, and hopefully getting where we can leave while he’s still awake.

Then: I’m pretty sure these bedtime tantrums will pass (hey look, I was right!), but I worry a bit about how we are dealing with it.  It seems like between my wife and I, there is always at least one of us that has been stretched to (or past) our limits.  That leads to too much yelling, too much anger, and too much escalation, which of course never helps the situation.  When we’re both available, we do a pretty good job of tagging the other one out when we see that they’re in too deep, but that’s of course not always possible.  Dealing with this, along with a ton of extra duties at work, have stretched us both pretty thin.  It’s almost the end of the semester (my wife and I are both professors), so I can at least see the end in sight.  But while we’re in it, I know I’ve been too quick to anger, and I don’t like the way things go after that.

Now: This is still an issue, but we’re getting better at it.  The triggers have changed, but I still feel like we don’t deal with our emotions as well as we could.  We’ve both been frustrated to no end by both kids just flat out ignoring us lately.  Having to say everything over and over just eventually drains me, and leads to poor results for everyone.  My wife and I are both making a big conscious effort to get more/better sleep, and I feel like this is helping.  If we can keep up this better sleep schedule, hopefully we’ll be able to keep ourselves from getting quite so overwhelmed.

Well, I feel like I’ve rambled on enough, and hopefully others will find this retro account interesting, too.  For me, writing this all out helps me remember a bit better that, whatever is going on with the kids now is temporary.  For better or worse, things will change.