Goozo Fraba

If anyone has watched Anger Management with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, then they will understand the title of this post. It is the little mantra that is taught to the anger management students to diffuse their rage. I have found the need for it a lot recently while raising my 3 year old. It's either mumble nonsense words to myself, or duct tape my daughter to the wall.

Here I thought that laying all this wonderful ground work during her second year of life would translate into an easy transition into 3 and 4 and so on. I was mistaken. The "terrible twos" really aren't that terrible. Three has catapulted us into a war zone that I didn't see coming. Erin is a strong willed child (aren't they all) and now that she is three she seems to want to exert that at every turn to subdue the enemy into letting her stay up later, watching more TV, eating chips and chocolate and using all the soap in the bottle of hand soap to wash her hands. . . once.

I've been told several times by several different people that you can't show them what makes you angry because then they know what button to push. NOT GET ANGRY??? So when she is spitting her juice across the floor as if she were a sprinkler and I tell her to stop and she just smiles at me and keeps on keeping on I'm not supposed to grab her juice cup, chuck it across the yard so hard it makes my shoulder hurt, and drag her to her room to sit in a chair???? Goozo Fraba, goozo fraba. . .

Now Erin has also been testing the limits of bed time. We can get her there easily enough, but now the excuses to get out of bed have started. "I need to go potty, I need to go poop, there's a moth in my bed". . . Not only that, but she has started getting up in the middle of the night and wandering around the house. One night I found her in Izzy's room, another she was hiding under a blanket on the couch. I think the scary thing is that she is getting into stuff she shouldn't like eating chocolates and filling the toilet with toilet paper. It's the medicines and cleaning products that I worry about. I just need to find something and lock it all up before something disastrous happens.

It doesn't help that I have to get up at night to feed a newborn so I am so tired that I hardly hear her. Like now, I put her to bed an hour ago and I can hear her bouncing around in her room!!!! GOOZO FRABA!!!!