Cry Me a River

I'm happy to report that the hitting phase seems to have passed.  And it looks as though it took the whining phase with it.  However, a new one has swooped in to replace them and it's even more powerful than its predecessors.  Oh yeah, the crying phase has dawned in this house...

And when I say crying, I mean crying... Over. Every. Little. Thing.  And not a few tears that stop as abruptly as they start, I mean lengthy crying fits.  Full force, snot dripping, can't catch her breath water works that last anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour.

She cried so hard at nap time last Saturday that it seriously took me over an hour to get her calmed down.  We repeated the episode one night this week at bed time.  That same night, she woke up at four in the morning and cried for another hour.  Tell her no...about anything...and the faucet turns on full blast.  We're almost drowning in tears around here and I have no clue how to handle it.

This child was never a crier.  As an infant, hunger was about the only thing that would trigger a cry.  She never cried at bed time.  Not once ever at bath time.  Never when she needed a diaper change.  If I add up all the boo-boo tears she's had in her lifetime, they don't even come near the amount of tears we've seen in the last week or so.  And lord knows this kid has had boo-boos.  I saw her slam her forehead off our headboard so hard that a super-ball sized lump appeared in thirty seconds flat...and she cried for about three minutes.

It's almost like she is suddenly super sensitive.  Simply telling her no hurts her little feelings so badly and the tears flow instantly.  I absolutely love that she is so strong-willed and independent, but as any parent knows, she can't have/do whatever she wants.  It was hard not to cave with the whining.  It was difficult to ignore the hitting.  Apparently we did a good job because they stopped.  But now she pulled out the big guns and it's virtually impossible to tune out and ignore the crying.

She sounds so pitiful and it breaks my heart.  I try everything I can think of to calm her...without giving in to the original issue that started the fit in the first place, of course.  I don't want her to learn that this crying crap will get her whatever her heart desires.  No way.  But man, it's tough.  I was actually reduced to tears myself during one of her marathon episodes.  Partly because my baby was so upset.  Partly because all my mama tactics had failed to soothe her.  And partly because I just couldn't take it any more.  Talk about frustrating.  Geesh.

I know how this phase stuff works.  They rarely last only days.  Usually not even weeks.  In actuality, we could be looking at months here.  I need to figure out the trick to calming her down in minutes rather than hours or we'll be building an ark by Christmas.