It’s not often that Ma Puce (The Artist Formerly Known As The Tinkerous Toddler) has a tantrum, I know we are very lucky on that score. But when she does, oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy are they impressive.
Yesterday’s tantrum was a force 10 on the Richter Scale. But it wasn’t the scale of it that got me, it was the content. I quite literally couldn’t keep up.
Said tantrum started over me asking her if she wanted a bath. I wasn’t sure if she’d said yes or no, so I asked the question again and that set her off. She absolutely didn’t want a bath. “Fine”, I said, but she misunderstood and protested again and again that she didn’t want a bath… until I finally got her to understand she didn’t have to have one.
Then she wanted a bath…
Until it was time to get into the bath.
Then she absolutely didn’t want a bath. I put her in anyway – she really needed a bath, so I thought a quick dunk and out was the way forward. She screamed all the way through bath and hair wash, demanding to get out the whole way through… until I got her towel.
Then she screamed and shouted that she didn’t want to get out of the bath.
What followed once she was in her bedroom was a whole towel on, towel off tantrum, until the point of me diverting her attention by reminding her that supper would just about be ready.
As we went downstairs for some of the carrot soup she’d been looking forward to, the tantrum rose up again.
She didn’t want soup.
So I offered her a banana.
Yes, she wanted it.
No she didn’t want it.
Yes I could have it instead… until I took a bite, then she went into a head spin that I’d had a bite, because it was her banana, not mine and she wanted it.
SHE WANTED IT!!!!!!!
I won’t even try to explain the ever decreasing circles that wound themselves around whether she wanted a yoghurt or not after she’d finally eaten her soup.
Talking of ‘ever decreasing circles’. I feel certain now that it must have been the parent of a small child prone to a circular tantrum who first coined that phrase.
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