How To Get Under My Skin

There are three things I’m a firm believer that you just can’t force your kids to do:  eat, poop, and sleep.

They have the final say on those every single time, and it’s just not worth the battle fighting them on it.

When they discover that it irritates you when they refuse to poop, your kid is going to use that to get to you.  In a world where they have very little power over anything other than their parents’ heartstrings, those are three doors they alone hold the keys to.

And if you make a big deal out of the fact that your kid hasn’t taken a shit in two days… well, you’re most likely going to run into a situation were he/she/it has a colon backed up from the Tuesday before last week.

Why am I mentioning this?

While my child has a healthy appetite and was potty-trained from very early on, I kind of suck as a parent in the the whole sleep area.  This is a reminder to myself that no matter how exhausted Julie is, I cannot force her to take a nap.  The more I ask her to stop jumping on her bed and having conversations with God-knows-who in that ridiculously loud voice of hers, the more she’s going to be a defiant little twerp just to annoy me.

It could be worse.  She could be one of those kids who smears shit all over her walls during naptime.  Or one of the ones who refuses to eat anything  but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Or a 3-year-old who still wakes up twice a night crying because she wants to nurse (no, I’m not tandem breastfeeding).

But holy cow, the whole nap time thing manages to get under my skin in the worst way possible.  The evil part of me wants to go in there and smack her little butt as hard as I can.

But I don’t.  I know it’s not going to do a darn thing except give her the satisfaction of knowing that refusing to nap is one thing she can do to make her mother crazy without fail.

*Sigh* I give up.  There are some fights you just can’t win.  The white flag is waving from my side of the house.

Current Mood:Alarmed emoticon Alarmed

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under My Girls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “How To Get Under My Skin”

  1. Rosanne Says:
    March 29th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    I am very, very empathetic. Have you tried any kind of reward system for something she really likes? We had a deal with Melissa – if she had a good bedtime (went to bed and stayed there), she was allowed to wear her “fancy shoes” to school the next day. Worked well most of the time.