Please stop the whining. Pretty please!

Alex is driving me mad. With incessant whining. About everything. From not wanting to watch TV, to wanting to watch TV, to not wanting to wear his black shoes, to wanting milk/water/juice, to not wanting to eat dinner/bath/get dressed. This morning, he wailed and screamed because his white shoes had been washed and were still wet. So I put on his black shoes, which he had worn yesterday with no problem. He promptly removed them, threw them on the floor and ran away screaming “I don’t like my black shoes”. WTF? ARGGH! I have tried the calm “what is the matter, what do you want my boy, please speak in your nice voice” approach, as well as the (embarrassed to admit) shouting at him in frustration approach. Neither works. And the whining continues to drone through my head like a jack-hammer. Come to think of it, a jack-hammer would probably be more pleasant. Whilst I appreciate that this is just another phase, my already spread thin patience is running out.

And to think that I thought he had missed the “terrible two’s” (and three’s) altogether. When all of my friend’s toddlers were behaving like Rosemary’s baby, Alex was happy as Larry. No bullshit, no non-compliance, no whining. That was until two and a half (by which point I was 7 months pregnant with Caris, and not as patient as I maybe could have been.) My once happy boy was suddenly moody, sulky, whiny, and prone to throwing himself on his knees in a pitiful wail, at the mere mention of perhaps having to do something he didn’t want to. It peaked when Caris was a few weeks old, when he treated me to a full-blown throw-yourself-on-the floor-in-a-screaming-rage tantrum in the middle of pick ‘n pay. All because I offered to buy him a toy car, but he couldn’t decide which one to choose. So there I was, tiny baby asleep in pram, psychotic almost-3-year old writhing on the floor, with horrified shoppers glaring at me, and the odd sympathetic smile from a mom who’s been-there-done-that!

The on-the-floor tantrums were fairly short-lived thank God, but have been replaced by (really annoying) whining. I am sure that if anyone took the average 2 or 3 year old for a psychiatric assessment, the diagnosis would be chronic Schizophrenia. One minute they are full of the joys of spring, the next, demon-possessed. The last few days have tipped the scale towards the dark side. His saving grace, is that in between whining, he is funny, cute, loving and charming.

It is said that animal babies in the wild are cute so that their mothers don’t eat them… maybe that is true of humans too!