Last night was a great example of the highs and lows of parenting an independent toddler. We sat down to dinner around 6:15. It was a pretty great dinner, I'll say. A potato-salmon hash, with leftover steaks and scrambled eggs. I upped the ante on the eggs with some truffle salt, a gift from my sister. She recently visited from LA and brought us some goodies from an "LA-made" market, including a set of flavored salts and some onion-garlic jam. Brian and I ate the steak with the jam, which Caleb demanded to try. He loved it too, and dipped his steak pieces into the savory jam, ate up all his eggs and I got up to scramble another batch for the three of us. We laughed over our little foodie kid, who loves dipping his food into any condiment.
Then Caleb and Brian ramped up playtime, roughhousing and shooting basketball until it was...time for bath. We told Caleb numerous times it was time for bath, to be met with "No, it's NOT time for bath!" and continued play. I finally ran his bath, we wrestled him out of his clothes, and that's when the low portion of the evening started. Bath was a crying disaster, brushing teeth was a crying disaster, reading a book was a crying disaster, bedtime was a mix of Brian and I trading off a book, a kiss, a hug, a good-night song, and finally, finally, silence.
Watching your kid break down because they cannot handle moving from playtime to bedtime is just rough. You can almost see the synapses refuse to process. They exhibit confusion, (A bath?? Again?? Just like every other night, what are you talking about?), betrayal (Mommy!! Mommmmy! Only to find that Mommy isn't going to relent either), and finally, flat out exhaustion.
We finished up "bedtime" around 7:30 or so and I know I personally felt 2 things: like a really shitty parent, and also, as I cleaned up the massive amount of cars, trucks, and trains scattered across the living room, like making a drop off to Goodwill. (Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, no more toys. We are FULL UP.) I was also exhausted and out of energy for anything I had possibly planned for the reminder of the evening.
Parenting a two-year is hard, hard work, y'all. It's constant and never ending. I may be misremembering, but it's way harder than parenting a baby. How much good behavior should I try to instill? Where do I draw the line on letting him be a little boy? How do I reconcile the kid who leads us in prayer at mealtime with the one who lashes out in the bathtub? Does he know I love him if I've been fighting with him for a solid 30 minutes before bed?
While I know this is a phase I can't control, I have a couple thoughts. One, he's not waking up as tired in the mornings, so it might be time to try actually pushing his bedtime back a little bit. Right now it's lights off by 7:20-7:30, and he might be able to handle 15 minutes later. Second, cutting down on the high-energy play after dinner. It's hard because Brian gets a very short window of time in the evenings with him, but we might need to keep it a little less wild.
We'll see how all this changes when Baby June enters the mix this summer and we figure out how to be a family of four.
