Mummascribbles – Is there such a thing as a fournager?! – Mummascribbles

I remember writing about the moment that Zach turned three and instantly showed the threenage tendencies. It was such an immediate change that it was quite a shock. Gone was my placid toddler who didn’t show a hint of the terrible two’s and here were new challenges being thrown at me every day. A comment that I received on that post informed me that if I thought that was bad, wait until four hit. 

We are just two weeks away from him turning four and…

OH MY GOD! 

Seriously, I don’t know what has happened. 

We have attitude.

We have rudeness.

We have kissing teeth (really!).

We have point blank refusal to do anything asked.

We have laziness. 

We have a 40 week pregnant mumma (unless I have given birth by the publishing of this post!) who is going out of her mind, treading on eggshells and being reduced to tears. 

Seriously, what has happened?! 

I very regularly get told to ‘go away’. And he repeats it over and over again so that I know that he doesn’t want me there. And if I am sitting next to him, he is usually jabbing me in the leg with his foot. 

I get huffed at if I get something wrong, like putting the wrong episode of Ben and ruddy Holly on. 

He has started hitting. Not bad and he doesn’t seem to do it to anyone other than us, but a gentle tap to tell us we have done wrong or that he’s peeved with us. But it’s still a hit.

And the most frustrating thing is his requirement of being helped to eat. He is about to turn 4, he is quite capable of feeding himself but on Monday he refused to even try. So a ten minute stand off situation of me refusing to feed him, him refusing to feed himself, me telling him that in that case he simply wouldn’t eat and him still refusing, resulted in me leaving the room and breaking down in tears. Five minutes of crying and me then returning to the front room and asking him if he was now going to just eat then resulted in him actually feeding himself. And yet on Tuesday morning, he immediately asked for help to eat his porridge. Aaaaargh!  

It doesn’t of course help that I am about to pop a baby out. I am super emotional at the moment and super frustrated at having to say a lot of ‘no’ to his requests because it hurts! Or that I am not really up for going out the house on super fun activities because a) I might go into labour and b) I can barely ruddy walk! 

And of course, some of this stuff might be happening because we are about to have a baby. It is a major change to his little life and it might be him saying, ‘hey guys, I’m still here you know’.

It may not be though – it may be a new stage and for that reason, we have to work with it and try and stop it from all happening. I have a tab open on my laptop right now full of reward charts to download and I think that is the route that we are going to have to go down. It’s no good us just saying no anymore and I’d rather start this route early than leave it until it gets impossible to deal with. Nursery have said they will back up anything that we are doing at home and encourage him to be good at home by giving him stickers if we tell them he’s been good. 

In reality, he is a good boy – far more so than him being a naughty boy. But I don’t want him to develop into that naughty boy by not hitting this stuff on the head now. 

Have you had any luck with reward charts? Are there any tips you would advise using? Do share your experiences with me because I think anything will help! 

***Update*** Whilst we are still in the midst of the struggle, on Wednesday he actually fed himself! Wahoooo! Need to conquer the refusal to brush his teeth without screaming though!!!