They Grow Up So Fast!

My little sister will be a whole two months old next week.  She's becoming quite the adorable little thing.  She's still nocturnal, but the reflux that was causing both her and her parents such misery, seems to be getting better.  It was so sad; if she wasn't eating or sleeping, she was crying from the pain.  Now she's bright eyed and smiling and there's that wonderful alertness now that she follows people and objects with her eyes.  Also, she's sitting up with help and starting to try to stand.  She loves to just sit and watch the whole family and it's so cute to watch my dad with her, she adores him.My step-mom's such a sweetheart; she lets me keep Bella to myself the whole time we're at their house and she's there to take her when she gets too fussy.

And then there's the little man... Precocious would be a nice change at this point.  

When he hadn't gone through the "terrible twos" by his third birthday, I thought that perhaps we'd been blessed.  Recently, though, I've been learning that like every other stage, every child get there in their own time.  For the last few months he has been getting increasingly difficult.  It started with the whining and then bursting into tears whenever things didn't go exactly the way he wanted them, but now it's reached outright defiance, argumentativeness, and this ear-piercing scream, as if he were in mortal danger.  The scream really drives me nuts.  We're having some success just ignoring it and making him do whatever it is we wanted him to do that provoked the scream in the first place, but it's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do to try to keep a straight face and a calm voice while he uses every ounce of breath he can muster to create the most agitating, high pitched scream I've ever encountered.  Yesterday he screamed for a good fifteen minutes after I put him down for his nap because he wanted to watch more cartoons.  I really don't understand how he keeps it up; it can't be fun and it gets him nowhere and it has to hurt his throat.  He's a joy when you're not trying to get him to do something he doesn't want to do, like eat his breakfast before digging into the candy corn.  He's sweet and cuddly and generous with "I love you" and hugs and kisses.  Which is why it's so difficult to comprehend why our sweet little boy has put on this bratty, smart-assed attitude.  He's testing us, I know, and I hope we're passing.  I hope that time outs and negative reinforcement will get rid of this nasty side and that positive reinforcement will show him that we're really much more fun when he isn't screaming...