CM Club: Meeting all the childrens needs when one is overly demanding.

[SammyK]

Can anyone offer me any tips or ideas?

In an afternoon I have DS (4), mindee (3), and mindee's baby sister (8months).

Oldest mindee is a lovely sweet girl, but very demanding wants the paints out, plays with them for two mins, wants a game out, wants the playdoh out, wants me to find a missing marble, and so on. Normal to a certain extent but cannot wait! Wants everythng and wants it now!

I figured it would eventually sink in that she may have to wait a few minutes, I always explain for example, I just need to change this nappy, or baby is having her bottle right not, but the asking continues every 30 seconds until I am ready (usually a few minutes).

Have spoken to mum andis the same at home. Between the 2 mindees DS does not get a look in.

I am also becomming frustrated as older sibling mindee is purpousely disrupting the babies bottle time, distracting her from her bottle and then elling me 'oh X does not want her bottle now can we do xyz now?'.

These are my afternoon mindees, they are both lovely, and I want to work through this, but at the moment it's grinding me down a little, as I feel bad for older mindee, baby, and ds, as I just seem to be dashing between them!

Sorry that's quite an essay, thanks for reading.

When I had a young mindee who needed a bottle I used that time for reading to the mindees. So they would all choose a book and we would all sit on the settee together, bottle in babys mouth and I would then start to read the books 1 at a time with the mindees taking it in turns to have their book read 1st.

Hello, dont know if I can be of much help really. I used to look after a 5YO boy and he had the attention span of about 1 minute. It is very wearing so I really sympathise. The only time he sat for more than 5 mins was when he was eating. So perhaps your mindee could have a snack at the time when your feeding or ask her to keep your son amused or to help you with the baby, ie get you wipes/nappy ready.

Or perhaps give her a doll to feed/change when you deal with the baby.

Thanks for your replies ML and coolj, I do the reading a story whilst giving a bottle, have tried snacks. Friday afternoon actually went really well, the children were all lovely so hopefully we will come through it.