The Will at the Wheel.

(How corny.) Oh My.

God must be orchestrating this, with this kind of logic: okay, so you´ve got about a month.... you better figure out this mothering thing with your firstborn before the baby makes her debut.

It has been an interesting week... interesting, as in HARD. With the pacifier-weaning, and all.
Actually, that has gone surprisingly smoothly: by the third night, Ari just let me tuck her in without any whining. And things stayed quiet. But last night, we had a bit of a situation.
Ari woke up at 1-ish & wanted to sit with me, as usual... So, she did. Only this time, she didn´t cue me to put her back to bed after 2 minutes. No, she demanded that I hold her, that I stay with her. She wanted her star-music, too. But I thought, "wait a minute, I am not going to stay in this chair all night.." and I put her in her bed. Well, she did NOT agree. She was enraged: she screamed and yelled, "mama zitten!", held on to my neck with violent insistence.

At first, I thought she may have just needed some extra comfort, but then I realized that I was dealing with a temper-tantrum. That it was a will-thing, not a need-thing. So, I stepped out of the room and stood by her door. She continued screaming, but it stopped after only a few minutes.

But, because I am really stupid sometimes, I figured she´d need to be tucked in again. Never mind that she was wearing a sleeping-bag, which would have kept her warm enough. I thought she needed to be checked on. SO, I foolishly opened the door and got the whole drama started again. It appears that "mama zitten" has become a substitute for the pacifier. But we weren´t going to follow through with that one.

It would have been nice to have Daniel there, but he had a concert and wasn´t there. I wanted his perspective. How do single parents do it?? Not just tending to their children & the efforts that requires, but just knowing what to do. Sometimes, no, frequently, it takes the both of us to solve a problem with this child!

The truth is that we don´t have the discipline-thing figured out at all. So, Baby Zus will come around next month, turn our world upside down, and we still won´t even know how to parent her older sister!

I have figured out this much, though: the key is recognizing what you´re dealing with, identifying the cause of the problem. Duh. No, really. So, it comes to this: my daughter is almost 2, and though she still has plenty of needs, it is her will that takes the wheel most of the time. She is want-driven. She may be really young, but she is also really clever: she knows that she has a lot of power over her smitten parents! That´s what I had to tell myself last night, while I was torn between holding her and letting her go. And, magically, once I put the proper boundaries in place (ex. leaving her with her tantrum, because it was just out of place), she gave up and went to sleep.

From our experience with Ari, we have come to the conclusion that, from time to time, children just need some space. "In hun eigen soepje gaarkoken" ("to cook in their own soup").
Obviously, I don´t mean that we should ignore their cries. Not at all. But I think the following method may be effective and beneficial:

1). Attend: respond to the crying.
2). Identify the cause of the problem: need versus want.
3). Solve: make the problem go away!
need- deal with the issue: change the diaper, offer the drink, comfort & calm, etc.
want- set the boundaries: night-time is NOT the time to play. Explain & Walk Away.

So, once we have made sure that Ari´s needs are met, we explain that it is time to sleep, we put on her star-music, rub her back, and we walk away. It´s so easy to think that they want/need us to fix everything for them. They do when they´re babies, of course. I never walked away when Ari was a baby. But sometimes, at this stage, it´s a matter of showing her that she can solve some of her own problems. And then, she does. And it´s faster & easier that way.

Last night, Ari definitely needed to be left alone with her frustration. I say that, because her response to it was so clear: she calmed down almost immediately after I left her.
I might have thought that holding was the best way to help; but while I held her, she just kicked and screamed. I was only aggravating the problem.

Anyway, it was a challenging ordeal. It took me a long time to fall back asleep afterwards.

I am so desperate to be the right parent for Ari. To figure it out with her. But it is such a painful process, sometimes.
It overwhelms me, then, to think of caring for a second child while I am still such a novice at dealing with Ari´s phases & stages. Wish us luck, people. We´ll need it.

This is such the mother-blog. That was not my intention. But it seems to be all I can think about these days.

p.s. I made a scrumptious Endive Salad last night. Reminded me of Holland.