At work, we talk a lot about how we need to be proactive with our customers – in the support world, we’re trying to anticipate the problem before it causes a crisis. I’ve been able to apply this same theory to my home life now with Amelia.
Amelia does not like to go to bed. I can’t even tell what actually gets her to fall asleep and I’ve sat with her 50+ times trying to figure it out. She goes to bed just before 9 o’clock most nights but ends up tinkering with something, reading a book (she obviously can’t read) or clicking the sounds on some of her books. Lately I’ve been coming into her room about 9:30 to try to take away whatever she’s reading or playing with so she finally falls asleep. When we have to get her up at 6:20 in the morning, she’s in no mood. She’s getting more and more difficult to wake up – I basically have to grab her and completely move her to get her to wake up.
So she typically starts off the day with a deficiency of sleep. She takes a nap at daycare, but it’s usually only for an hour thirty to two hours when she could easily do three hours. If you add all that up, you end up with one cranky kid when she gets home from daycare. Just about every night, she comes home demanding apple juice in a cup you didn’t provide her. She orders us to just about everything in a certain way when she gets home. Yesterday was a classic – I filled two cups of grape juice to the identical amount in identical glasses, and when I gave them to Katie and Amelia, she complained she wanted the other one. I guess that’s the game you get to play when you’re two.
There is a way to get back to the cute and thoughtful Amelia. The key is to put her into timeout practically as soon as she gets home from daycare. Once she spends 2-3 minutes crying her head off in the timeout room, she’s ready to continue the night like the good girl she is. Thus the "proactive" timeout – sticking her in timeout to avoid the eventual blow-up.
Eric's space 