Yesterday my daughter cried for 30 minutes. I kid you not…30 minutes straight. You are probably thinking what’s the big deal my baby cries for that long every day before his nap. It wouldn’t be a big deal except that my daughter is three! Three years old not three months old!
It all started out innocently enough. She was opening a box that contained her new piggy bank and as she was trying to pull the porcelain bank out of the box she whacked the piggy bank against her lip. This started the crying jag. I tried to calm her down and inform her that there was not any “bleed” as she likes to call it and that she would be fine. Then she started asking for candy and from there our conversation went something like this:
Me: We don’t have any candy.
Sarah: But I want candy. (The wails starting to increase here.)
M: We’ll get more candy at Halloween.
S: That’s too long.
M: It’s not as far away as you think. We have summer vacation. Then the beginning of
school and then Halloween.
S: I don’t want to go to school. (More intense wailing starting now.)
M: Why not?
S: I don’t want Emma to start big kid’s school. (Emma is one of our neighbors. She will
start kindergarten in the fall leaving Sarah behind in preschool.)
M: But Emma’s 5 now and she has to go to kindergarten.
At this point the wails were inconsolable. The fat wet tears were hot as they slid down her cheeks and I realized there was nothing I could do. I decided just to leave her in her room and let her cry it out. Sometimes as a girl (or a grown woman) there is nothing better than a good hard cry. I was expecting this behavior from Sarah as a teen but not at the ripe old age of three! Is she experiencing PMS? What’s going on? If this is the kind of crying fit she can pitch now, what is in store for me in the future when her hormones kick in? I can hardly wait.
And just to illustrate that this cry really did last 30 minutes here are some of the things I accomplished while she was crying:
I washed all the dishes in the sink. I checked the 10 emails in my in box and responded to the one that wasn’t spam. I emptied the trash and replaced the bag in the can. I watered the flowers on the front porch and on the patio. I checked on Peter who was suspiciously quiet in his bedroom. I got the mail from the mailbox, reviewed it and threw the junk mail in the trash bag that was out in the garage. (I hate putting trash in a new bag so soon after I just removed the full bag. It’s a little pet peeve of mine.) I chatted on the phone with my mom. I scrubbed my bathroom grout a little more. I removed the clean clothes from the dryer and brought them upstairs to be folded.
At this point I checked on Sarah who was still crying. Admittedly at this point it was more of a hard whine and moan combo as opposed to actual crying with tears but the sound of it was still just as annoying. I asked her if she wanted to help me fold the laundry and the moaning/whining/crying stopped immediately. She actually started to smile when I told her she could put away her underwear. Geez…I guess I could have saved us all the trauma of this crying jag by asking her to scrub the toilets! I’ll remember this next month!
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