Friday, February 2, 2007

the flip(out) side

and then some days you have mornings like today. pooka likes to eat breakfast with me before i leave for work in the mornings. usually, she wakes up, tells me what she wants to eat, i make it, we eat it. simple. sometimes she wakes up and needs to have a tantrum first. this morning, she asked if it was tuesday (that's the day i am taking a half day to take her to the movies). since it's not, she started to get upset off the bat. she wouldn't tell me what she wanted to eat, although she did say she wanted breakfast. i finally got fed up and told her she could make her own breakfast. this elicited more complaints. i sat down to eat my food, and she came out to start a tantrum. she sat at the table and displayed her glorious attitude. i was eating, horrors, one of HER mini-bagels without asking. so she stole it. she wouldn't give it back, but refused to eat it herself. so i finished the rest of my food, got up, and proceeded to get ready to leave. this prompted an all out screamfest. at this point, daddy got involved.
i had tried being nice and indulgent. i had tried being tough. i had tried being reasonable and explaining that she was wasting the precious time that she so desperately wanted to increase. nothing worked. it is so frustrating. the reason she was so upset was because she wants to spend more time with me, but by having a tantrum, she was wasting the little bit of time that we did have. she doesn't yet see the self-defeating nature of that situation. how can i explain it to her so that she'll get it?
additionally, the older she gets, it seems like the more help she demands. during portions of heavy chemo when she was on serious steroids, she would get up in the middle of the night to make herself a snack or pour herself a bowl of cereal. now that she's a year older, she suddenly is incapable of doing this already mastered task.
then there's the issue of her thinking that she is the only one allowed to eat certain foods (in this case the bagels). just because they were bought at her particular request, doesn't mean they are exclusively hers. of course, then i turn around and get mad at kisu for eating MY special treats. but that's different, right? i mean, they're MINE.