M turned 2 at the beginning of February and slowly but surely the terrible two’s have reared their ugly head. It’s become more apparent over the last few weeks and to be quite frank it’s exhausting and really testing my patience. I almost lost it on Mother’s Day.  Hubby had organised for us and my mother in law to have lunch at a local Indian buffet.

It started off well – he enjoyed the poppadoms (for all of 5 minutes) and then it went horribly wrong.

He refused to sit in his chair and wanted to sit on my lap only, so for arguments sake I let him. I didn’t mind waiting for him to eat before having my food, however he then decided to try a bit of everything and then say “don’t like it” and spit it out. *sigh*

This then turned into incoherent moaning which none of us understood and quickly escalated into a full-blown tantrum – proper angry tears. I had to take him out of the restaurant whereby he kicked and screamed because we were leaving Daddy, Nanny and E behind. He was in such a state he just screamed and screamed at me – so I let him. I was at a loss at how to calm him down. Usually, his comforter “Henry” does the trick, but not today. Anything I asked him was met by a scream of “NOOOOO!!!!!”

This has been happening more and more and I am running out of ways to handle/deal with these situations. I don’t remember E ever going through the terrible two’s like this – just goes to show how different two children can be. I do wonder whether the main crux of this is M’s lack of ability to communicate when he is frustrated. I would say from a speech point of view, he is a little behind compared to his older brother, who by this stage was managing to string a good few sentences together (the boy never stops talking now!)

Both hubby and I have been working pretty hard recently and childcare arrangements have changed over the last couple of weeks whilst my mother in law rested her knee after having a minor operation. Have all these changes turned my usual lovely smiling boy into a little monster or is he just going through this phase anyway?

I’ve always been very wary about spoiling my boys and feel that usually, I am pretty good at getting the right balance between disciplining them and praising/having with fun them but I think we have been harder and a lot less patient with M than we were with E.

I need to be conscious of not always raising my voice and saying “No” to him when he is doing something wrong and instead divert and distract him from what he is doing. I’m guessing some one-to-one quality time wouldn’t go amiss either. We have Fridays up until school pickup time to do fun things and we usually go to the local playgroup, but with my workload lately, this has been put on the backburner. Maybe M’s recent behaviour has been his way of telling us that he is not getting enough attention? (cue mother’s guilt)

Now my workload has eased I am going to make more of an effort. With the weather warming up we’ll be able to enjoy the outdoors more too  – I’m thinking picnics in the park, playground, fun days out for just the two of us. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to deal with tantrums as best I can and wait it out….

How did you deal with your toddler tantrums?

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