This has been A Day.

Background, the elder kiddo has been giving us no end of grief with potty training for one thing. Despite doing perfectly fine with it at daycare, at home she's been treating her pull-ups like diapers and never telling us either that she needs to go or that she's done something in them, leaving us to detect when she's done a number 2 by smell.

Which I swear happens like 6 times a day.

And she complains of rashes, which guess what causes that when you don't try to get poo off of you.

So we've been stuck having to lecture her about listening to her body's signals, not getting too distracted by what she's doing, etc. We've attempted to get her to the potty at regular transition points between activities, but she repeatedly tells us that she doesn't need to go, and usually doesn't produce.

Anyway, today she essentially opted to skip her nap, again, which I've been allowing because A, she's been awful at actually getting to sleep any time close to when we put her down if she's had a nap and B, she's close to the age where it's a possibility that she might legitimately not need naps. That was a mistake.

She was super low energy all afternoon, culminating in a bit where she was sitting on the couch so absorbed in a TV show that she peed enough to soak through her pull-up and her pants and onto the couch.

One long lecture later, punctuated by the same offhand "okay, I will" responses she gives us as an obvious ploy to get us to stop telling her to improve something about her behavior, she eventually broke down and admitted to being too tired to understand what we were asking of her.

This prompted us to declare she was going to bed early. Come dinner, she starts insisting she isn't tired.

After pressing her on this, we eventually get to admit that in saying she wasn't tired, she has been lying to us.

oof

/comfs

It’s such a hard age.

It’s been... a challenge, yeah

And I suspect the shake-up around the new arrival isn’t helping

(Nor the current state of the world either)

So far, that hasn’t made a huge difference to her routine. Her daycare is still running (we’re making a risk-benefit decision that letting her get to socialize like a normal kid is worth keeping her in there, at least for now) so the main effect is that we don’t have as many places we can go out to anymore.

The loss of the ability to take her to the library or the church I’d been taking her to are probably the biggest impact changes right now.

yeah, I suspect it's mostly rough age and that whole learning actions have consequences thing, and having a new baby sister in the house. though she might also be getting some resonant stress - even if routine doesn't change, it can be easy to be like "mom and dad are worried ahhhhh"

Mostly mom and dad are tired, but that still ups the overall stress levels