I need some advice with DD1 ! She's driving me absolutely bonkers !

[FoghornLeghorn]

DD1 is 3 1/2 and is pushing me constantly at the minute.

She currently goes to pre-school, 5 afternoons a week 12.30 - 3pm. Pre-school is really taking it out of her, she is exhausted when she comes home and miserable to match. I deliberately do nothing too physical with her in the mornings or she souldn't making it through the afternoon. She has been going since September and although DD1 seemed to be manging better, since going back after Christmas we are back to square one with the tiredness.

For the last week or so she has taken to answering me back with "No" or "I don't want to" or just an ear piercing scream if I ask her to stop pushing her sister around or share her toys sit nicely at the table or wait for 2 minutes before I can make her a drink.
DH & I have done smacking (really doesn't work and just makes us feel terrible), the naughty step (she just gets up), counting to 3 (we get to 2, she stops, we stop counting, she starts again), sending her upstairs to her room (she comes down within a matter of seconds, aplogising then goes right back to doing it again).

I don't think the bad behaviour is down to tiredness as she goes to bed at 7p.m, we read books, sometimes she plays quietly in her room for a while but is always asleep my 7p.m - she gets up at 6.15ish.

What else can I try ? I know some people suggest ignoring the bad behaviour and praising the good but how can I ignore her screaming at the top of her lungs at me (I have no doubt the neighbours can hear) or pushing her sister over etc.
I have sent her to her room already this morning for saying no and the screaming at me, she came back down, said "sorry mum i'll start being good now" and for the moment she is sitting doing a jigsaw puzzle but it wont last long.

All suggestions welcome

stamin = stamina, sorry

I don't know if she'll cope with full time school aged 4 and a bit, but she isn't coping with this now, so I don't think it makes sense to continue with it.

Does she have to start full time reception when she's only just 4?

Thanks all

Franny - I don't know exactly how reception will work but I think she will go in the mornings initially, maybe until half term and then full time after that.

Have spoke to pre-school, no morning slots available - they actually have a waiting list already for people wanting a space should one come up.

Bozza - what is a bunny clock ?

OK - I think I am going to try 6.30 bedtime for stories and then aim for her to be asleep for 7 - I will try this for a week and see how she is.
Apostrophe - I too notice she gets into a bit of vicous circle and the morning start getting earlier and earlier.

I really want to avoid cutting back on the pre-school if I can, surely this is something she needs to get used to and I did notice an improvement in her tiredness/naughtiness before the break over Xmas.
Thanks for all of your responses - they are appreciated

fog, yes i think you shoould ignore it.
i used to hide in th etoilet. now i hide on mn. whilst i am mumsnetting, around me is utter chaos. but it sorts itself out eventually.

Well tonight we have all eaten together as DH was home at a reasonable time, which was lovely. We put DD2 to bed early-ish as she has been grumpy today so we've had an hour just with DD1. DH watched TV with her while I washed up, then we played Monster Inc Pairs Game, then we went to bed to read stories.
DD1 was asleep by 7.15.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow

That sounds great. It might help her to feel like a big girl with time with both of you IYSWIM and DD2 in bed. Bunny clock is like an alarm clock and the rabbits eyes open when it is time to get up rather than making a noise. If you are interested you could do a search on here, there have been loads of threads about it. The low light on a timer is a similar technique for young children.

Wait til they get to 12/13....all we get is You do that! or ohhhh whatever or really-in a sarcastic tone...and plenty of huffy door slamming

Thinks back to the nicer yrs....[grins]

Well she was up at 6.05am

Am going to look into this bunny clock

Deffo look at the the bunny clock, though it never worked with ds I know some people have had success with it.

You did say sh gets up early anyway (6.15ish) so 6.05 is pretty normal really. I don't think you can really expect her to sleep much later than that, though you can of course hope to encourage her to stay in her room for a bit.

My view with ds is that he gets up between 6 and 6.30am most mornings (I am grateful for this as it was between 5 and 5.30 until he was nearly 3 years old.) and if he goes to sleep at 8pm he is getting 9.5 hrs sleep, if he goes to sleep at 6.30 he is getting 12 hrs sleep.

I have given up trying to get him to sleep later and just accepted the early mornings. As he gets older they are improving and he tends to sleep later on average than he used to. And this is from someone who pre-children rarely got out of bed before 8am on work days and usually nearer 10am at weekends.

He probably could have been 'trained' to wake later by keeping him up later but my view was that it would have been a painful process and we'd have had to endure a long time of him being very grumpy in the evening and unhappy during the day.

I did try it once for 10 days but the waking just got earlier and earlier but with a friend of mine, keeping her ds up later worked withinn a couple of days and he just started sleeping later.

Early starts mean I get a lot of time with ds in the morning, which makes up for the fact that I don't see much of him in the evening.

We are also not rushed in the mornings for when I have to get to work. For instance this morning, ds and I did playdoh, made biscuits with him and cleared up. Then I made breakfast and we ate and chatted, we also played babies where he asked to becarried in his old carriers and slings. He also got to watch 30mins of TV. I then dropped him at nursery and came to work.

The other tyhing is that even with enough sleep, I have noticed ds is less well behaved when he is at nursery or at least for a few weeks when he starts back after a break. Also Mondays (after the weekend) tend to be worse.

I suppose I should just resign myself to early starts then
Being pregnant again has made me so crap in the mornings, I just want a decent sleep !

I know it is a pita. Don't give up yet though, just because I did with ds doesn't mean some of these things won't work with your dd. Try the bunny clock and give her a week or so of early nights and get some early nights yourself. When you are all better rested things will seem better. Even if her behaviour doesn't improve significantly, you will feel better able to cope with it.ter

Is there no way to go to bed earlier, even if just a couple of times a week? I used to really resist it but I do find that an ultra early bedtime (bed by 9pm and asleep by 9.30pm) a few times a week does help.

early bedtimes for you I mean !

Lazycow - it's a maricale if I am awake at 9.30pm any day of the week

See today she is as miserable as sin, she was falling asleep before she even went to pre-school and has come out with the right ump on - she's screaming and shouting at the slightest little thing !
Really is a vicious circle because she got up slightly earlier this morning, now she'll be a miserable sod all afternoon, fall asleep slightly earlier tonight and then get up even earlier tomorrow.

I will continue with this for a week or so but it's going to be hard, I can tell !

[banging head against brick wall emoticon]

Well I'd say if it hasn't worked in a week or so, then you should try slightly later every night for a couple of weeks (move the bedtime later by 5-10 minutes every evening). That will be difficult as well because she will be so tired at night but as I say it did work quite quickly for my friend and made her ds sleep a bit later. I just didn't have the stamina for it with ds

The problem may be that she still needs a nap a few times a week but afternoon pre-school 5 days a week makes this impossible I know.

I really do sympathise as this is so much what my ds does. He was so much calmer over the christmas holidays than he is now he is back at nursery.

I deally I would send him for fewer hours but as I can't reduce my work hours much at the moment we're a bit stuck with it.

We'll we've been up since 4.30am. DD1 wet the bed and then would no go back to sleep, in the process woke DD2 up.
I'm so fucking tired !

Ah.... I have a 3.5yo DS and he is also turning more demanding, screaming, fussy, etc. My gut feeling (DS is my 3rd child) is that it's the AGE, some of them just turn into little terrors. Threenagers, and all that.

I do keep him off preschool haphazard days when he's grumpy, though, or it just suits me. I don't go with the getting them used to it, argument. They don't HAVE to go to school until September, why not use the flexibility you have while you can? Unofficially skip one preschool session until after Easter (the session is funded and place paid for so it will be there when you want to take it up again, right? So you won't be out of pocket, I imagine?). And see if the extra day of dossing and not getting out of PJS helps.

My older children had autumn birthdays, so were well over 4yo at this point and still not up to more than 3-4 preschool sessions/week until the last few months b4 they started big school.

And if you think this is bad, wait until you see how tired they get in Reception, poor little mites.

5:55 this morning and that was from getting up at 4.30 yesterday with a 20 minutes nap in the car on the way to the shops
Not sure this early bedtime lark is doing us any favours .... although it has only been 3 nights so far.
Last night in bed by 6.30, DH read stories until 7 then asleep by 7:15

Get the bunny clock, we did it is the best thing in the world. Also we find the earlier they go to bed the later they get up. We even confiscated the bunny clock once as dd was ignoring it, it worked a treat she just loves that bunny, she puts it for a nap in the day when she is playing. For the first few days she just woke it up herself but soon realised we knew. You need to back it up with a sticker chart or treat of some sort, I have had people say that they get the bunny to leave a treat if it gets to lie in.
You start by setting it for say 6.15 and make it 5 mins later every day. You will have to go in and set it though as it only sets for 12hrs.
Lots of sympathy, go for a very long drive, park somewhere and both slepp ion the car.

foghorn - re-reading it really does sound like she is not getting enough sleep. I would try and think of ways of solving that - although I know it is a difficult age when they don't want naps any more.

Thanks Bozza - I have definitely come to this conclusion over the last few days.
She was up at 5.30 this morning and my patience is wearing thinnner and thinner due to my lack of sleep

I just have no clue how to force a 3 and half year old to nap or ^force her to go back to sleep.

FL - That is just it, you can't force them to nap or go back to sleep.

Ds did this SOOOO much. He seems to be doing it less recently and 6.30am wake-ups are the norm, with 5am ones the exception (1-2 times a week), wheras before he almost never woke up after 5.30am and 4.30am starts weren't unknown either. I wish I knew how this happened but I honestly don't think we did anything specific.

Nowadays DS is actually asleep at 7pm on non-nursery days and at 7.30/7.45pm on nursery days and as I said he generally wakes up at about 6.15/6.30am regardless of bedtime. That is 11-12 hours sleep and he seems to be Ok with that. When it drops to 10hrs or less his behaviour does definitely get much worse.

I have never cracked the 'go back to sleep' bit in the morning very well but dh does tend to have more luck. What he does is go into ds's room when he wakes and lie down on the floor next to him. Sometimes that works.

As I said we did try a bunny clock and he did eventually learn that he could either play quietly in his room or lie quietly in bed with us until the bunny woke up.

Unfortunately he always chose to get into bed with us and the lying 'quietly' without jumping all over us and screaming/laughing etc. was difficult for him to grasp . A few weeks of us returning him to his room if he didn't lie quietly did do the trick eventually.

Nowadays if he wakes up too early for us to get up (before 6.15am in our house!!) then he does lie quietly in bed with us for up to an hour and I usually manage to snooze a bit, though at the end of the hour ds does start to wriggle and move around more so it is still exhausting if the early mornings go on for too long..

I'm not sure what I'd do if I had another child who woke up as well. I really sympathise and I wish I had a magic answer but I do actaully believe from what you have said that a few weeks of fewer nursery sessions may help with her behaviour.