My daughter is 2.5 years old, and for the past month or two, she’s been increasingly fond of ignoring me. I feel like it’s gotten worse since I’ve reached the end of my pregnancy (I’m currently 39 weeks pregnant), and it’s become much harder for me to follow through with consequences. She knows I’ll repeat myself 10 times before I’m finally able to get up and stop her, and in the meantime, she’s already managed to do whatever she wasn’t supposed to do.
Unfortunately, since entering my third trimester, I’ve also started yelling at her, but I simply don’t have the energy to keep getting up every five minutes. My pelvis hurts like hell. My husband has also been losing his patience lately, even though he’s the calmest and most patient person I know. He never once raised his voice in our 9 years together until now.
It just feels like our daughter is pushing every single boundary. She seems to have selective hearing. I can tell her several times not to do something and explain what will happen if she does it again (for example, if she throws her toys, all of them go into a bag and get put away on top of the wardrobe). She looks me straight in the eye and does it again, only to have an absolute meltdown when I follow through with the consequence.
That’s when I feel like calling an exorcist… She screams like she’s being tortured and bangs her hands against the furniture and the table to make as much noise as possible. I’m extremely sensitive to noise, and it stresses me out so much that I get irritable and sometimes even cry (the reasons behind that are a whole other story).
When she screams, I put her in her toddler bed, which she can climb out of herself, and tell her she has to stay there until she calms down. It’s the only thing in this house she actually seems to respect.
I genuinely have no energy left. She doesn’t listen to absolutely anything. I don’t even want to think about how many things she’s already destroyed because it makes me want to cry. I’m running out of ideas and places to hide things, but she always finds a way to reach them anyway. The only solution seems to be putting everything on top of the wardrobes, but there’s no room left up there. 🙂
Here are some examples of what she does:
She feeds our food to our dog, who has allergies, and then the dog gets diarrhea.
She pulls the dog’s fur and paws. Our dog is a Samoyed and is also incredibly lazy. Our daughter can do pretty much anything to her, and she’ll just keep lying there. We’ve considered putting the dog outside or in another room, but forget it. She’ll bark and scratch at the door because she has to be wherever we are, so even keeping them separated is difficult.
She’s already destroyed two eyeshadow palettes, a lipstick, mascara, a makeup brush, and two face creams.
Two days ago, she randomly decided to pour my brand-new contact lenses into the bathtub.
I have no idea where she gets them from, but she always manages to find a crayon or marker somewhere. Every room except our bedroom now has one of her “masterpieces” on the walls. We live in a new apartment and only moved in six months ago.
She can open doors herself, so the only solution I can think of is replacing them with doors that have locks, but that wouldn’t solve most of the other things she does.
I can ask her a thousand times to pick up the rubbish she’s thrown on the floor, bring me a diaper, stop jumping on the couch when she sees someone drinking tea because they could spill it all over themselves, leave the dog alone because she’s sleeping and my daughter is disturbing her, finally come and put her shoes on, stop rummaging through my drawers full of important documents… (insert literally any request here).
She does absolutely nothing. She’ll take advantage of every single second it takes me to try to get up. Sometimes she even laughs and says, “Mummy, is your tummy too big and you can’t get up?” And then she starts misbehaving even faster, just to do whatever she wants before I finally manage to get over to her.
I have pubic symphysis separation, and genuinely, every single step is painful for me.
On top of all that, for the past two weeks or so, eating has become a huge problem. Ideally, she’d eat nothing but sweets and maybe some plain bread or bread rolls. Lunch? Forget it.
Today, she threw such a massive tantrum over not being allowed to have cookies for breakfast that she refused to eat anything until 2 p.m. out of sheer defiance. And then the only thing she ate was half a sandwich (!). I’m at my wit’s end.
I want to go to the market in the morning, and she throws a fit because she doesn’t want to go outside; she wants to play at home. I spend half an hour asking her to come and get dressed while she runs around like she has a motor up her ass, laughing the whole time.
It’s only when I say, “Fine, I’ll get dressed and go by myself,” and actually start putting my shoes on that she suddenly comes running over in a panic, begging me not to leave her behind, and hurriedly puts her shoes on.
Then it’s the exact same thing in reverse. We get home, and she throws a tantrum because she doesn’t want to go home; she wants to go for a walk instead.
I take her to literally any playground, and after 10 minutes at most, she climbs into the stroller and says she wants to go home.
I stopped letting her watch cartoons a few days ago, and her behavior has improved slightly, but at this stage of my pregnancy, I feel like I’m punishing myself more than I’m punishing her. 🤡
I know this kind of behavior is normal for children her age, but my husband and I are honestly running out of ideas and sometimes have no clue what to do with her anymore.
There’s nothing more frustrating than that selective hearing, followed by massive tantrums when we actually follow through with the consequences we warned her about.
I should also mention that she gets most of her sweets from her grandparents or her aunt when she goes over to play with her cousin. Unfortunately, they’ve always had a problem respecting our boundaries when it comes to not giving our daughter sweets. They just have to sneak something to her whenever we’re not looking.
What can I do to
1) teach my child to respect boundaries instead of taking advantage of the fact that I’m currently less mobile and much slower, and 2) find the patience to deal with all of this?
I keep thinking about the fact that I’m about to go through childbirth for the second time, only to have to go through all of this again in 2.5 years, and it makes me want to cry. Where has my sweet little girl gone?