Behavioral Considerations
Piper has been pretty fun the past few days, which is a relief after WEEKS of bad behavior. We start with a minimum five minute time-out in our house, and arguing with us, defiance, sneaking in toys to play with, or getting up before your time is over will earn you a penalty of +2 minutes. Recently she's been so out of hand, and stacked up so many penalties, that she would spend as much as 37 minutes in one stretch sitting on that rug and facing the wall. Being made to sit still and look at a blank wall for 35+ minutes makes for a pretty unhappy 3-year-old.
I was at my wits' end a couple of times, because not only did she tell me "NO! I don't have to!" when I told her to sit down, she just got up and ran around and absolutely refused to do what she was told. I was flabbergasted - I knew in theory there would come a day when she would just simply refuse to serve her punishment, but I was unprepared as to what to do about this. We don't want to be spankers, but there aren't many guidelines on how to handle it when you say "Sit down" and your kid screams "NO! I! WILL! NOT!" and goes back to jumping on the couch. In the end, I moved her time-out to my bedroom and half-shut the door so I could still supervise, but she was away from all the noise, music, and excitement in the living room. We've also learned to take away privileges - refusing to eat dinner, dipping your hands in your water glass or throwing food means no ice cream later; not picking up your mess at clean-up time means the stereo is turned off and you can't listen to the Beatles any more today. My in-laws bought her a little boombox for her birthday so she could listen to music (meaning the Beatles 24-7), and now she likes to take it into her bedroom at night and listen to the Beatles as she falls asleep. She's much better at staying in her room when she has this; it's also useful because she knows that if she comes out of her room after we've put her to bed, "the Beatles music" will be instantly removed and she won't get it back until morning.
There were days and days of screaming and defiance and a whole lot of just being mean - jumping on us without warning, whacking us with things, kicking us in the face and then, after being made to apologize, immediately doing it again. The house was a complete disaster at the end of the day: toys strewn from one end to the other, blankets dragged out, couch cushions thrown on the floor, things pulled out of cupboards in the kitchen, the dining table covered in plates of food with one or two bites out of it because she kept asking for different things every five minutes. She'd spend her days making messes and screaming demands at me, and no amount of sitting in time-out helped.
But the past two or three days she's been absolutely wonderful - sure, not listening to everything I say 100% of the time, but, well, she's three. She's been saying "please" and "thank you" pretty much every time, asking nicely for things, happily going with the flow when I need to run errands and not throwing fits when I tell her it's time to leave a fun activity. We suspect the bad behavior might be related to another growth spurt or cognitive leap. It fits the usual pattern: she'll eat a lot and sleep a lot, then we'll have a period of bad behavior and hyperactivity, during which she will eat almost nothing at all and wake up 3-4 times per night, and then one day she'll wake up an inch taller or with feet a size bigger or speaking in more complex sentences or with improved fine-motor skills.
The language stuff especially is immediately noticable - one Friday just before her birthday she came into our bedroom in the morning and instead of "Can I please have a waffle?" it was "Mommy, get up! Can I please have a waffle? The kind from Trader Joe's? They're in the freezer. Can I have honey on it? Do you think we're almost out of waffles? Do you think we need to go to the store and get some more?" Suddenly she reveals that she understands what's going on around her at a level way higher than we thought. When I thrust an ink pen and some junk mail at her, she doesn't make random scribbles any more. She grips the pen tightly, and draws over and over little curlicues and circles and lines that look very much like actual letters. And we're always like "Holy shit! When did she get so big?!" I spend all my time with her, we are always watching her and interacting with her, and yet it always seems she's making huge leaps when our eyes are closed.