Hi there,
I'm the stay at home mother of a 25 month old. She was slightly preterm (5 weeks) but none of her milestones have been affected by it. But because people usually ask (do parenting forums still worry about gestationally age after 2 years?) I just wanted to add gestationally she is technically 24 months.
Anyways recently she's not quite been herself and I'm add there are a few factors that could be affecting this.
She's normally a very easy going child. She's always been very smiley and cheerful. The few times that she does misbehave she is usually easily redirected and it's very low stress. In the last month that has changed dramatically.
Initially we thought "oh this just be what they meant by the terrible twos!" Melt downs galore, tantrums, sobbing, dead weighting, refusing to nap the whole package!
But a few things have been bothering me that I'm trying to sort out if I'm just being an overlt concerned first time parent or if this is normal and expected behaviour.
I guess an important thing to note is that recently her father moved from morning shifts to night shifts and this clearly had a profound affect on her. He used to put her down at bedtime and she gets angry with me when I try to put her to sleep. Sometimes he doesn't get home till 10pm to 1am. She will fight to stay awake for hours until he is home. She seems to resent that I have taken charge of this task and refuses to to hug and kiss me now because of it. That's fine. I don't take it personally and I still try to show I care in other ways. This leads up to the other issues.
- Once she's in a mood she stays like that seemingly for hours and she's impossible to talk down. An Example is yesterday morning I told her she can't play with her ball because she threw it at her father's work laptop twice. She started to cry. Even after I hugged her and tried to calm her down she was quietly sniffling and sad for the rest of the day on and off. I even gave her the ball back because I felt bad. This did not cheer her up.
- She's been having nightmares.
- She refuses to nap even when she's visibly exhausted and nodding off. She fights sleep like she's scared to sleep because of the nightmares.
- We recently caught her sleep walking on two different occasions.
- She's been exhibiting very intense separation anxiety particularly with her father.
Advice would be helpful please.
The lack of sleeping is pouring over into other situations. For instance she used to love going to the playground. Now she is always crying on the playground, having a meltdown and on a couple of occasions she fell asleep. 😅