The Great Tantrum of 2009

The year of 2009 has gone out with a bang for my daughter!

It all started while she was helping me feed the dog. For the last month, Charla's "job" has been to dump the dog food into the dog's food bowl. She loves doing this. Getting to the food bowl can be a bit tricky. It's in my husband's and my bedroom and that is the black hole of the house. So, she must scale a pile of laundry but she does so happily.

Tonight there also happened to be a small shoe shelf standing against the wall. I had done a bit of reorganizing on Tuesday and hadn't gotten around to finding a new home for the shelf so into the black hole it went. As I was following Charla into the bedroom I bumped it. It fell over and hit her on the hip. Well, you would have thought she had been caught by her worst enemy and was now experiencing painful torture.......slowly.

I picked her up immediately and took her to the couch to survey the damage. All I could see was a red mark forming on her back/hip area, no big deal. This shelf is not a huge and heavy piece of furniture. I bought it at Target and put it together myself, it weighs all of 10/15 pounds! So hugs and kisses were in order but that did not settle the stream of tears.

Eventually I thought I heard the word "bed" in amongst the screams of "pain". I took her to her room and she actually quieted down, success! Oops, there she went again, now screaming because I had placed her in her crib. I took her out and thought maybe she meant my bed, turns out that wasn't it either. Water? NO! Crackers? NO! Blankie? NO! Rock and cuddles? NO!

This went on for a full hour! I have to give credit to my husband though, he took the last 20/30min because I still had to run to the grocery store and since it's New Year's Eve they closed early and it was already 6pm.

When I got home she was finally done crying. There were legos scattered all over the living room. I asked what had happened and my husband said she had thrown the bag in a fit of anger, it wasn't pretty! Apparently she had settled down about 10min before I got home and was playing like nothing had happened. Meanwhile I was about ready to climb the wall!

Happy New Year!

P.S. Charla's resolution for 2010 is no more tantrums. Think she can stick to it?