How do you cope with your toddler when you are under the weather, stressed and exhausted to your very core?

[nickytwotimes]

Any advice?
Really struggling this week.
WOnderful Granny has taken him for a few hours atm so I can veg, but dreading the rest of today/the week.

i'm in the same boat today- exhausted from getting up in the night, been awake since 4am, and have horrible period related pain / grumpiness

Crayons? Short walk? Bath time is good here- i chuck them both in and let them splash etc while i drink tea and listen to the radio while perched on the loo. CBeebies?

Yep, Cbeebies is featuring quite heavily in our lives this week.
He gets bored so easily though. I like the bath idea though. Tea and radio..mmm...

"so I can veg" Haven't heard that in ages, since my student days. Made me laugh..
I now you're tired, but what about getting out and letting him run about? I know it's an obvious one, but we went to the park on Saturday (just the two of us) and had a wonderful time. We were there for about three hours!
We had swings, slide etc, but also had a little picnic and then went for a explore through the woods, played hide-and -seek etc. DS LOVED it!
Finished off with an ice-cream.
Time goes much more quickly outside than indoors, I find. And you house doesn't get messed up in the process.
There's also soft play, where you can have a sit down and a coffee and a watch for a while, depending on the size of your soft play centre.

I am totally with you today, well all week actually as dd1 (2) has chicken pox so we are consigning to the house. Gah. And dd2 (9 months) has no spots yet so I've probably got about 3 weeks of this to look forward to. Am shattered so today we will mainly be watching CBeebies and playing games which involve mummy lying down and pretending to be asleep (WAKE UP MUMMY!).

What age is toddler? What are the things you find hardest/easiest to manage? I am now 30 weeks into a difficult pregnancy, with a 3 year old, so my exp may or may not be relevant depending on your situation.

I hope you're cutting severe corners on housework etc. - get takeaways etc. will cut down on washing up. Kick mess to the side of the room and ignore.

Cut up bits of paper and stick them on another bit of paper. Also stick pasta etc.

Make and then play with playdough. Or failing that mess - spray shaving foam on some baking trays. Let him stand up at the sink and run water into unbreakable things (rules are tap stays over the sink at all times. NO plug usage and you have to be compos enough to be able to grab him or the object if anything makes water spray everywhere)

Open a cupboard he's never seen before and allow trashage.

Go out if you can.

Playdate with understanding friend (let your house be trashed on the proviso that friend does most of the running-to-see what that crash was type effort.)

"cooking" - get shop bought cake or biscuit and a huge array of cake decorations (non chokable if he's little), plus a bowl of icing or melted chocolate. Accept that your DS will basically just eat it all, but will hopefully take a long time over it, and will be relatively static while he does. Good teeth brush and slow energy-release food for tea, he will come to no harm.

Bella, do you have a car? The thing that saved my sanity when DS had chicken pox was driving out to collect Daddy, give him lunch at our house and then take him back. (Could obviously be anyone who's either had Pox or doesn't mind getting it)

Go to the supermarket for a cup of tea . If DH is away and I'm shattered, I'll take them out for their tea - they can look at the toys first, eat some (admittedly not great) food, and I have a cup of tea. It can take an hour then it's home for telly, bath and bed.
Also agree that a quick walk in the park is great - you may not feel like doing it but it will pay you back IYSWIM.
I really feel for you x

I feel the same today I am 27 weeks pg and feel so shitty I am afraid that dd is watching curious george and I am basically ignoring .

I think I may go do the bath thing she loves her baths .

With regards to housework I have stopped cooking huge meals and we are living out of the freezer and Mr tesco is always at my door .
I use the slatterns thread because it motivates me most days if I feel like I do today I just set the alarm for 15 mins every so often and have a little spurt (put washing in /do pots/make some bads) .

Library is a good idea they get to have a walk outside and pick some nice books and you get to get yourself a good book and feel like you have done something good with them plus when you get home you can veg while they watch the dvd yu got from the library .

Make some beds .

I feel like I could definitely make some bads today CWWWM

MrsGB - thanks for the tip. DP works too far away for that though a visit from a friend yesterday really helped. Am thinking of advertising for people with children who have had cp to come and play as getting desperate. Most of my friends are also mothers of small children so most of them are avoiding us like the literal plague just now

Wow, lots of people I know were disappointed we stayed inside because they wanted their kids to get the CP. But young babies is another matter.

In truth? I shout a lot, cry a little and have CBeebies on.

I know that doesn't help you with constructive advice, but it might make you feel better if you are coping better than that!
Good luck.

Wow, thanks for all the tips, folks!

Some brilliant ideas there, though I am, as you say, struggling to get out the house I feel so crappy. Lack of sleep, majorly stressful w/end and not feeling well with cold.

Atm, I am doing what ShipsCat says - crying, shouting and watching Cbeebies! And yes, I feel better about it now!

We will write today off to that lovely trio and start fresh tommorrow with a trip to the cofffee shop up the road which he loves adn a visit to the 'toy' (charity) shop to play. We live in a really tiny town and I don't drive, so supermarket/softplay trips tend to be at the weekend. He loves going to Tesco - gets very excited! He also loves going to the swing park so we can do that too.

I am just really wabbit and a bit low after a weekend of time-wasting house viewers. Buggers.

Again, many thanks for all your ideas.
Mn is truly fab at times.

I was going to say pretty much the same as TheShipsCat, cos that's what I did yesterday morning.

Am 37 weeks pregnant and had virtually no sleep the night before last.

Yesterday afternoon I coped by DS and I going for a long and very slow walk for most of the afternoon. I encouraged him to look for 'tiny beasties' in the grass, and let him choose our route, which included standing by the same puddle for about 10 minutes while he splashed in it. I just had to walk around, very, very slowly, which I could just about do. A bonus was that DS became exhausted and fell asleep an hour earlier than usual.

So I cast my vote for TV, getting out of the house, and possibly some baking/craft stuff/whatever you can tolerate.

oops, cross posted with you, sorry!
Sounds like a plan, best of luck!

I will need the luck! Poor thing, I have bben so grumpy with him. In mitigation though, he hasn't been sleeping well and is knackered and therefore a pita!
Bah! Toddlers! SO damn cute but so pesky!

Too much telly
Feed them fishfingers and spaghetti hoop-type meals
Get them to help you with household chores - give them a duster and polish spray or whatever
Brief trip out every morning so you don't feel guilty about vegging for the rest of the day
Eat with them, and
Go to bed as soon as they have

I sympathise Nicky. I'm 33 weeks pregnant and dd3 is 22 months. I've been sleeping so badly that I just want to lay down during the day. To complicate matters, dd3 is deaf so we have to do lots of intensive face to face play, with me sitting on the floor at her level, to help with her communication skills and to encourage speech. This is really intensive and I find it quite tiring. I've found I long for dd2 (12) to get home from school so she might play with her for a while before she does her homework!

Cbeebies is a life saver. She'll watch it for far longer if I'm sitting down next to her on the sofa and that way I get a rest too. One of her favourite games is to transfer all my small change from my purse to a little box or bowl. This keeps her busy for ages. I have one food cupboard with lots of packets in it that I give her access to now and again. I give her a little shopping bag and she fills it up with stock cubes etc. Toy catalogues are very popular, she'll peruse them for quite a while.

I think the trick with all of these things is that they are only played with now and again so that they're fresh and exciting the one day or so a week when you produce them. I keep some toys put away too and she's always pleased to see them when I give them to her. She doesn't know where they 'live' the rest of the time!

A bit of a tagent here, but I'm so glad other people on here let their toddlers watch telly.
I started a thread about how to stop my toddler watching so many dvds yesterday and felt inadequate when loads of replies came back from people who said the telly was never put on for their DC - or they didn't have one!

Gateau - I always imagined that dcs wouldn't have the telly on, but dd1 got into the habit when I was PG and tired, and to be honest, I never stopped it. Happily though, she does get bored of it now and willingly turns it off, and so only watches a couple of her favourite programmes and that's it. My friend, who restricts telly with her dc, has more problems with it, as dc want to watch it all the time.

I guess as long as it's not on for most or all of the day then it's not a problem.
Was fretting about it yesterday, but I now think there's more to worry about!
DS likes it and he has learnt from it, so why deprive him?
Having said that, I would like to cut it down, which was the reason for starting the thread yesterday.

ShipsCat I've noticed that so much. Friends of my older kids would come round to play and you could always tell the ones for whom the TV was rationed. They would be sitting about a foot from the TV whilst my kids were happily playing and ignoring it.

It's the same with children that have one 'sweetie day' a week. Watch them at a birthday party sitting at the table stuffing their faces with chocolate after all the other kids have gone off to play.

definitely more important things to worry about, and he'll probably get bored of it anyway!

ladymac - maybe lazy parenting is actually better for them in the long run! There you are, nickytwotimes, no need to feel too guilty about slumping on the sofa with cbeebies

'sweetie day'
How sad.
I don't know what so many people have against chocolate for their kids. It's really okay, if there isn't other junk in it. All in moderation, of course.