Run away!

In ye olden days, my son might have been called naughty. Or at least mischievous. I think his behaviour is perfectly natural toddler behaviour. However, this doesn't make it easy to live with, especially when I'm feeling a bit frazzled myself and somewhat lacking in patience.

If there's a switch or dial within reach he wants to press it or twiddle it. If we're in a busy place, perhaps involving traffic, and I need him to stay close he will try to run away. If I ask him to stop bashing his little car into something (radiators, my legs, chairs, tables etc) he only does it harder. If he isn't strapped into his highchair he tries to climb out, posing a danger to his own head should he fall. All my baubles are now on the top half of the tree because he was pulling them apart. If we're at some kind of play group and there's an open door, he will run out of it. Getting him dressed involves me chasing him around with each garment until I can pin him down for ten seconds. When I'm trying to lace his shoes, he starts kicking his feet around and squirming away. Should I, heaven forbid, attempt to do some mundane chore that involves waiting in a queue or at a desk... he will of course run away repeatedly and will not tolerate staying strapped in a pushchair. Despite all this running away, if I want him to walk a short way with me he very quickly grabs hold of my legs and tries to climb up them until I pick him up.

And because I have been so busy and stressed I am dealing with all this as and when it happens in a less than ideal way instead of anticipating it and having some idea of how to handle all that toddler energy and emotion. And a raised voice simply makes him go into a frantic mode in which he tries harder to do whatever I don't want him to do more quickly before I can stop him.

So all in all my conclusion is this: I need a holiday. I'm thinking two or three nights (which I can fit around work) in a quiet cottage by the sea. Somewhere properly dark at night. Only problem is whether it's fair on the little fella to drag him off somewhere else before he realises that where we are now is home.

Have I mentioned that he was awake at four this morning and fidgeting for a good hour or so...? That as he goes about his toddler business he has taken to chanting 'mummy, mummy, mummy...', which sounds cute but (whisper it) gets a bit wearing after a while, that he cried inconsolably when we went for a play in the forest this morning and for a good half hour in the car on the way back for some reason that I certainly couldn't work out, that he is currently obsessed with cats (miaow), that he now has all teeth but the big molars, that he has been frustratingly on the verge of being able to talk to me for some time now but seems a bit stuck on the frustrated whinging stage. That he thinks my little statue of Buddha doing baduanjin is the troubliphone.