Happy New Year!!

Yeah, it’s 6 days late, but better better late than never!

We had our last “Christmas” over the weekend in Tulsa with Ryan’s family. It always astounds me how much changing Hanna’s schedule and habits really messes with her.

We ended up leaving late ~ like 6:45pm. This is a terrible time for us to leave for a 2 1/2 hour drive because it’s right around her bedtime, and sure enough, she was sleeping before we hit the highway. This is wonderful for the drive ~ as there’s no screaming and thrashing around trying to get out of the car seat, but it’s horrible for the rest of the night because that’s more than enough sleep to keep her going for the day.

We got there and everyone was thrilled to see her, they failed to heed my warnings to leave her alone and just let me put her back to bed. She probably could have gone back to sleep, but there were car noises, and fire truck noises, in addition to all the people in the house she hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving.

She was awake, and sleep wasn’t really an option. In fact, she started screaming “I’m not sleeping. I’m not staying in here” at the top of her lungs. This went on for quite a while, until I finally caved and let her go in and see everyone.

I just don’t quite know how to handle the persistent screaming.  She’s much more persistent than any other kid I know. She can carry on with that for HOURS. Yes, I mean literally HOURS. In fact, she did later on when I tried to put her back to sleep again later.

She doesn’t do that much at our house, but we have a routine and a way of doing things that helps her get to sleep.

She ended up brining a clippo game her cousin got into the bedroom and playing with it on the floor. Finally we just turned out the lights which she then freaked out about it being too dark. She brough the clippo table into bed, and played some more by the street light, and then layed down and played with it laying down for a while. Finally she passed out, with the clippo game on her lap.

That was around 2AM.

Through the night she flayed around, slept sideways, shouted in her sleep, which kept me up the whole night. My husband slept through the whole thing. Then she was up and at it again at 6am which is her normal time to get up.

Much of the weekend was like this.

I ended up back at the bookstore when we got home, looking for another solution to help me help her to better manage whatever is going on with her.

This time I picked up Parenting Your Strong Willed Child. So far, it’s pretty interesting. The first step is learning how to “attend” to your child. This is basically just doing a play by play of what they are doing. No questions, no directions, just “now you’re riding your tricycle” etc. It’s a 5 week process, so I’ll keep you up dated on how it goes.

While I was standing in line someone in front of me mentioned the book “Get a New Kid by Next Friday“, I looked it up on Amazon and found some reviews that really made me rethink getting that one.

Here’s part of my problem with parenting ~ well, I don’t know if it is a problem or not, but anyway, I don’t want to make her into a kid who just minds because “I said so”. I want her to keep her persistenc and her own mind. They will serve her SO well when she is older, it’s just difficult for me now.

So I keep trying to find resources that will help me learn how to teach her better coping mechanisms and ways to handle what she’s feeling, and trying to do.

I have all of the books, and maybe (ha ha probably) me just not implementing directly enough and for long enough. (always looking for the magic bullet, lol) and she’ll get better after we do something for a while and then we probably slack off.

Our favorite method so far has been Love and Logic, and I probably should just go back and reread those books instead of getting more books to read.

I don’t, know, here I go just rambling again. It feels good to have somewhere to say all this though. Living in the middle of nowhere as we do, there aren’t a lot of other parents around I can get together with.

As always ~ comments welcome. 🙂