Bewildered

Many of you have probably seen me posting a bit about it on Facebook, but Elias' terrible twos are in full swing, and I am just fairly bewildered. He is just Mr. Meltdown now. All. The. Time. And the bewildering part is that I rarely know exactly why he's crying. We're playing together, and suddenly he's crying. What the heck? I know a lot of it has to do with the frustration of not being able to communicate. He just can't tell me what he didn't like about the way I was playing, and so he just cries to express himself. And the rest of it is that he just doesn't understand everything. He doesn't understand why it can't always be his way. And so he cries or whines. Oh, the whining! Sooooo, we're trying to figure out exactly how to deal with this. I mean, I know this is just part of growing up. And I have a very passionate and intelligent child that I want to encourage as he blossoms. Yet he still has to learn how to handle himself properly and be a productive member of society, not to mention of our family!

So our general approach is to tell him to use words to tell us what he wants. He's getting very VERY good at asking for something and saying "please." Today I was washing dishes and asked him if he wanted to call Grandma after I was done. He ran to the phone and said "Grandma, please!" How sweet is that?? Of course, he screamed through our entire phone conversation, and I have no idea why, but that's not the point. Often, though, what he wants is something that he can't express in words or something unreasonable, like he wants to break all the crayons. Well, I understand what you want, but I'm just telling you no. Hence, meltdown.

Then, our course of action is to tell him that it's ok to be sad/disappointed/frustrated, but it's not ok to scream and cry about it. Then we put him in his room until he calms down. The point we're trying to get across is that if you want to be with other people, you need to behave civilly. If you want to scream, you're going to have to do it by yourself. It's only been a couple days we've been trying this approach, and the jury's still out on how well that's going to work. But this isn't something I expect will be solved overnight, but hopefully at some point he'll learn self control!

Soooo, I'm just putting this out there so that you all know where we are, and because I know a lot of the mamas who read my blog can relate! Feel free to comment, but only encouraging or sympathetic comments please!

And to balance it all and keep me from going insane, my pumpkin muffin also is doing some really precious stuff, and I have several videos I need to get uploaded and posted. So stay tuned for that this week!

In the meantime, here's a reminder of what his meltdown face looks like. This is the only picture I have of it right now. (It's from his birthday party when he couldn't get the frosting off of Thomas.)Yep, that's looking REEEEEEALLY familiar these days... :)