Ummm. What the heck happened this morning?

After a very short nap yesterday, the boys went to bed at 6:30 without a peep and slept soundly until 6:00 this morning. Bliss. I went in to get them all smiles and full of "this is going to be a wonderful morning, you are so well rested". We went downstairs and had our morning laugh and banana and then went to play in the play area. Ezra wanted to go into the kitchen for something but we don't play in the kitchen. I picked him up to see if I could figure out what he wanted but he was just pointing to everything - he just wanted to be in the kitchen. I said no and took him back over the gate into the play area. He was hysterical for 1.5 hours. I'm sorry. Aren't tantrums supposed to last for like 20 minutes or something. I tried distracting him. His response, like usual, was to give me this look like "I wasn't born yesterday, you aren't fooling me" and it did nothing. I got him to stop crying for 10 minutes when he we all climbed the stairs together to feed the cat but its totally not babyproofed upstairs so I had to take them down again and the crying started again. I gave him all sorts of things to play with that he doesn't ordinarily get to play with but he just wanted what his brother had. I sat and just read to Elias but Ezra was grabbing my hand and trying to drag me off the couch, hysterical.

An hour and a half?!? The only thing that saved me was that my nanny was coming at 8:00 and I packed a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies and booted it to work. What if this happens on the weekend? What should I be doing in this situation?

An hour and a half?!? What if he keeps on doing this?

Can I survive this stage?

 

Maybe they're getting sick? Mine wake up like little devils from time to time. Especially my son, especially after naps. I don't get why it is, but we dance around him on egg shells b/c the littlest thing will set off a crying jag.

 

Oh no!! :hug: That doesn't sound like fun!! I h.a.t.e.d. the tantrum phase, but fortunately it was only a phase. The one thing that worked like magic for me was ignoring. I didn't feed into her tantrums at all just left her on the floor near me and let her recover on her own. :hug:

 

Sometimes they don't know what they want and thats why ignoring seems to work. But I've never experienced a 1 1/2 hour tantrum either, so I may not know what I'm talking about. :hug:

 

Im sorry you had to go through that. Its hard. It does sound like he should have been well rested. .

In my own experience my DS used to act like this when he was over tired. He would ALWAYS reach for the kitchen and say 'eat eat' or cup or ANYTHING that was in the kitchen..but if I was to actually give it to him, he would say No and turn his head!! crying the whole time. . sometimes I would try to take him outside (this was early last summer) to get some fresh air and try to distract him and look at stars or trees or something. Usually he calmed down outside but if I went back in, he would start crying again. ..unless I waited juuustt long enough that he was ready to fall asleep..and i just held him.

His 'episodes' were always at night though, and I know he was just tired.

I hope this doesnt happen for you very often.

 

Ryan went through a phase of about 2 months long where if he woke up too early from a nap, he'd cry for over an hour (yes sometimes 1.5). He even went to the tantrum extreme of banging his head on the floor. He wouldn't let me hold him, but he wanted to be held. Nothing worked. Finally I just let him lay on the floor and get it out of his system. It seemed the only way to get him to stop. For us, Ryan's tantrum lasted longer if Jake was NOT around, so you may want to try and focus on the positive things your other son is doing.

 

Is there any possibility he was hungry? I ask because one of my daughters will completely melt down if she's hungry and nothing I can do will pull her out of the melt down. Your boys may be going through a growth spurt and need extra to eat. For me, growth spurts are always obvious because of the great night time sleep, long naps, and a desire to eat everything in sight.

 

Whoa, that is a long time. I am so sorry for the tantrum. We had terrible tantrums after naps too like a lot of the pps. So maybe he just woke on the wrong side of the crib today. I hope you have a better end to your day than start. :hug:

 

Here are some things that make one or both of my kids more prone to tantrums:

-hunger (as in going straight from zero interest in food to having too big a meltdown to eat anything)
-having just woken up
-teething (you can almost see the ibuprofen starting to work! they start calming down as it starts kicking in)
-coming down with something

And of course, they're toddlers, so sometimes all it takes is...nothing at all!

I feel for you! I always feel shellshocked after a really long tantrum. Hope things get better! :hug:

 

Jack will do that. This past week, when he was sick, he had quite a few of those hour plus long temper tantrums. He still has them when he is not sick but they do not last as long and he is not as inconsolable.

When he was having the longer ones this past week I just made sure he was on the carpeted area and told him it was okay to be mad and rubbed his back everyonce in a while and told him I was there when he was ready for a hug. I have tried the whole "do you want this, do you want that..." thing and it never works. I do not even try to distract him anymore. I just wait and eventually when I ask him if he is ready for hug he will reach out and let me pick him up and it is over.

I know it is not fun, but it is not that odd either - I just do not know where they get the energy to go on like that for so long!

 

OK. Even though I pray it will never ever happen again, I guess benignly ignoring while reminding him that I'm there when he wants me is probably the way to go. It just kills me because I know the frustration is real. I guess what you're saying is that he's old enough to realize that he's not going to get what he wants and he just has to deal. I am finding that I am regularly not giving them credit for comprehension and maturing.

By the way, he is going through a massive growth spurt and I didn't put that together as a possibility. It did start after we left the kitchen from their morning snack (they have a snack as soon as they wake up and then a proper breakfast at 8:00). He had his banana and I offered him our next stage snack which is bread with almond butter but he didn't want any (while Elias was shoveling it down) but maybe he just didn't realize how hungry he really was. They are eating a shocking amount of food right now.

That little red crying tear streaked face. How do you ignore that?

And yes, I felt totally shell-shocked afterwards.