Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Temper Tantrums

So Stella has started throwing Temper Tantrums. She just starts crying and crying and fake coughing and throwing herself around all over the floor, rolling around, trying to hit her head on stuff for dramatic emphasis. I kept moving her little walking toy and she kept scooting to bang her head on it. I'm not ready to have a willful toddler quite yet. I haven't gotten long enough with the fun older baby yet. I haven't studied how to deal with them. The only bit of advice I read was you can ignore them or distract them during a tantrum. I've gone with the ignore method both Fits she's thrown today and the first time it took too long for me to take and I wound up hugging her. This time, just now, it eventually worked. I guess she finally realized I wasn't really paying attention to her and she just stood up and started playing with her walking toy. Now she's back to her normal self, crawling and standing up all over the place, pulling books off the shelf and chatting up a storm. I do have to cut her some slack since she's cutting a tooth (her right center top) and she's got some diaper issues that I won't go into because they're gross and that we're seeing the doctor for tomorrow. Hopefully it's not a milk allergy, because then I'll probably get berated for giving her milk before she was a year (I started giving it to her last week and she's a year old Saturday). I think it's a milk reaction though. Poor thing. On top of that, I think she could start walking at any moment and I think her brain is just a mess!

In other news, Roxie refuses to take the stairs onto the new deck. We have the old stairs propped up there and she will use them to get down, but she pretends like they aren't there when it's time to come back up. So eventually we have to go out in the yard and get her, although she runs away when we try to get her. It's lots of fun having a dog with dimentia, lemme tell you. At least, that's what we're pretty sure she has.

1 comment:

dmd said...

Does it help if you put treats ont eh stairs for roxie? Thats what we used to do with macaws when they wouldn't go near a new perch, or training prop. We'd put them just at the base of the prop so they could easily reach it but would have to get close to the prop, then we'd move them a little at a time to get them to move closer, or walk onto something, or go past something. Sometimes it took 4 or 5 sessions, but eventually they did what we wanted.