The Scream(er)

Yesterday, Caleb and I started the day off in a completely typical manner. As I was getting his juice cup ready, he pointed to the fridge and said, "Gaps?" (grapes?). It's not that I really cared if he ate grapes for breakfast or not, but I was fixing something else, and I said, "No." So the child lay down on the floor and began to scream.

I watched him curiously and considered what to do. Ultimately, I finished getting his cup ready and then picked him up, took him out of the kitchen and sat down with him in the living room. Once the screaming passed, we went back to the kitchen and made breakfast - oatmeal, not grapes. Later on we went to playgroup and one of his little friends (almost two, like Caleb) threw a similar fit over a similarly small issue.

I knew to expect these sorts of tantrums, I'm just kind of surprised by how they seemed to come out of nowhere. I've told Caleb "no" thousands of times without that sort of response. So I don't/can't feel like he did it because I've been letting him do whatever he wants for the last 23 months and his sudden meeting with resistance pushed him over the edge. Instead, I feel like it must be something else (something typical of toddlers) bringing out the Edvard Munch in my little boy.


Well, Caleb's vocabulary has really taken off in the last few weeks. I think having both sets of grandparents in town in a short amount of time has something to do with that. He seemed to like showing off for them ;) He's discovered compound words and likes to repeat them over and over to amuse himself when he's sitting in his carseat. Since he was kind of slow to go through the whole baby babble phase, I'm particularly enjoying this. His favorites are kitty cat, ladybug, trash man (or trash truck), ice cream, pancake, and ink pen. So all that is extremely cute and sort of balances out the screaming episodes for me.