tell me it is just a phase!!!

wow – parenting a 2.5 year old is tough. for the first 2 years of charlie’s life our parenting style was working out pretty good. 9 months – we started managing him. around 1 year we started time outs where he would stand with his hands on the wall and in one place. it was great. I wasn’t frustrated or confused about our parenting style. then he started to refuse to stand up during the time out so we started strapping him in his high chair while facing a wall.  when that didn’t seem to be packing enough punch we had to move time outs into our room where we had a booster seat strapped to our bed and we could strap him in so he would be removed from the action (can you tell we love strapping things). which takes us to now…I have stopped putting him in time outs in our room because he usually starts screaming (which is against the rules and adds minutes to the time out), which just elongated his time out and by the time he gets done screaming the real reason he was in time out is forgotten. in the last month or so charlie is really pushing things. he tests every. single. thing! I am not sure if this is a 2 and 1/2 year old thing or a parenting thing or a big brother who has 2 very need baby sisters thing, but either way it is exhausting. currently my strategy is to try and figure out what is important to him to be able to start taking toys/privileges away when he is not sharing, etc and when he is talking back or hitting i walk him down to his room and he spends 5-10+ minutes in his room. the crazy thing about this parenting phase is that I don’t see a ton of improvement yet. when he was younger after we would start the discipline I would notice a change, but that is harder to see now. obviously, most of the issues are bigger now (sharing, taking toys, anger management, being disrespectful vs. not touching outlets, cords, bookshelves, etc). with some issues he still gets put in time out in his highchair in our room. take tonight for example, he decided to blatantly disobey and throw a piece of noodle on the floor. bill moved his whole chair into our room and as he was going into the room he started his screaming bit. he will do little screams over and over as we increase the time on the timer. he started off with a 18 minute timeout (6 minutes to begin with and then a lot of screaming). bill and I decided to put on CARS during dinner really loud so he would think we were having a blast at dinner (it also stunned the girls down too). when bill went in to check on him and remind him why he was in such a long timeout he told bill he was going to hit him. well that definitely added time to the timer. all in all he spent about 45 minutes in the chair between threatening to hit bill and screaming the time just kept increasing. agh!  

a lot of people will say - he is 2 and a half it is just a phase. i have a hard time with that-what are we supposed to do just ignore his misbehavior? i dont think so! it is really hard to watch your sweet, mostly obedient boy turn into a sometimes angry, disobedient boy. it is so confusing! anyone with insight please share. we are going to keep being consistent and continue to remind C that we are in control. it is definitely challenging to try to figure him out.  I can’t even think about having 2 – 2.5 year olds yet or I start shaking. hopefully eleanore and claire won’t be as strong willed as charlie. I can dream right?