I must admit I have found the girls challenging in the past few months. The ratio of crying and whinging to charming and amusing behaviour has seemed to be all too often not the sort of ratio I was hoping for.
I’ll take you through a recent day.
1.58am: I wake to Lara crying. She wants dad but because I’m on duty I go in and hold her hand for a while, explaining that I can’t get dad because he’s asleep and if I leave the room no-one will come back to stay with her. Fifteen minutes or so later she lets me go and I go back to bed.
6.15am: A sleep in. Fancy them both sleeping in so late! They want their babies to come with them out of their cots. They both want to walk to our room. No! One now wants to be carried. The other wants her lego man who is missing in action.
6.20am: Breastfeed. And 6.40am. (‘I want more moot.’ Crying and whinging etc). In between:
Lara: ‘Mum can you move over a iiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit? Mum. It’s a bit doshy. Can you move over?’ (knocks me in the eye).
Rhea: runs outside our room to get her baby. Lara hops out of bed and closes the door with Rhea outside. More crying. We let Rhea in, and armed with a packet of biscuits that she has found in the kitchen, she crumbles them on our bed, then finding her sultana snack box under the bed, she sprays those across the room. She does the same with Lara’s sultanas. Lara is not happy. Probably time to get up.
7.30am: Breakfast. I dish muesli up in their bowls, put a tub of yoghurt on their little table and pour some milk in a measuring cup each so they can have the satisfaction of ‘making’ their own breakfast. They eventually gravitate to their tables, Lara eats dried muesli and drinks some milk from the measuring cup, gets up, spills muesli on the floor, does some drawing, wanders around the room. Rhea wants to be fed sitting on my knee. I spoonfeed her and after threatening Lara that I’ll take her food away a few times I really do take it away. New regime, trying to be more strict.
9.30am Don’t know why it takes more than 2 hours to get out of the house but it does. Late for playgroup again. Managed to get us all dressed and fed and I’ve had a shower. Snacks, nappy change, hats, cream on faces, nappy change again. Water bottles. Bag. Shoes. No time to pack any food for me – I’ll eat their leftovers.
10.15am Playgroup. Phew. They are fascinated by any babies present and distracted by the other children, toy cars and activities. I’m flat out cutting up fruit for morning tea, writing receipts for payment, making sure any new people feel welcome and discussing with the other organisers how the fence building/lockable storage/library/website projects are going. Still more relaxing than having the girls on my own.
Noon: time to leave. We drive home, they sleep in the car for half an hour or so. When we arrive I send a few emails or text messages from my iphone and rest for a few minutes.
1pm: Nappy changes then lunch. After waking in a bad mood crying, I take them outside for a change of air and give them their lunch. I have to feed Rhea by hand. They pick at their food, wandering off while I cajole, distract and eventually give up. There’s always dinner.
1.30pm: Washing up lunch then activities punctuated by ‘I want a duddle up. I wanta duddle mum’ (Rhea). I end up holding her most of the afternoon. We sometimes do cooking and the girls help me hang out the clothes. At the playground I am fully occupied helping them up steep climbing frames, taking them down the slide and pushing them on swings. None of this sitting back and watching: it’s hands on here too.
Dinner is much the same as breakfast and lunch but they are more tired. Now that they can sit in the bath unassisted we usually give them a bath every night. It also keeps them self-contained and occupied for a while. Then it’s the exhaustion of the bedtime routine. One wants dad, then she wants mum. She wants to choose a biscuit herself, she wants her milk in her water bottle not her cup, she wants more stories, to find her baby with dad before putting her gro-bag on, she wants to help turn out all the lights, she wants to turn them on then off then on then off.
It’s after 7.30, time for Torture by Tooth-Brush then I can leave them to Steve who is home now and has more patience than me. 30 to 50 minutes of crying and whinging later and Steve emerges, worn out, to snatch a few minutes of TV, cook or wash up the dinner, fold the clothes, pay bills, get through various other administrative activities and fall in to bed.
I get it now, why there are so many lullabies about babies and children being awake who should be asleep; why the phrase ‘toddler wrangling’ is so apt and why they call this age ‘the terrible twos.’ It’s fun, lovely to see their personalities develop, to hear their little conversations (Lara: ‘Who’s that?’ – pointing at a painting of baby Jesus with Mary. Rhea: ‘A baby.’ Lara: ‘Got no nappy on’). But hard slog all the same.
Hats off to the single parents I say, and to mum who had three of us under 15 months with no family in town to help. I’ve decided to go all out in the distraction stakes for these two year olds. Bamboozle them with new experiences and stimulating people, shock them with unpredictable behaviour and make them forget about their frustrations. I might have to take them out more or do different activities with them at home or invite people over more often.
I’ll see how that goes. It certainly can’t hurt.
