Manipulative bedtime toddler is manipulative

As Kim’s pregnancy has progressed and it’s been about a billion degrees outside, our nights have gotten a little longer and getting up to face an oven outside has not been a particularly pleasant thought. There was also a bout thrown in of yet another toddler-borne virus that made all our stomachs unpleasant thrown in there.

The effect has been us sleeping in a bit later, and Maggie also sleeping in, which is great on weekends but not so much regular days.

I guess after two years of a toddler alarm clock at the crack of dawn, it’s become harder to get our assess out of bed.

Maggie’s taken her 7pm bedtime and pushed it back. I can’t really say I have a problem with it, 7pm now is daylight, and the toddler is solar powered, so we let her stay up until it’s dark, but the toddler has learned she can manipulate us with various ploys.

The newest is “I’m hungry.”

Since she is a toddler, this means getting her to sit and eat without a cacophony of other things going on is next to impossible. Even when you do force ehr to sit down and deal with the food, it’s really hard to judge because some days she eats like a bird, other days like a lion.

Some nights she legitimately can eat fourth meal.

But “I’m hungry” has been used recently to escape the bed, get to a position where she can grab remotes, books, toys, etc and stay up later.

She’s done this to ITMama a couple of times now, she did this to me twice over the weekend. We put her down to complaints, about 10 minutes later there are criest that she’s hungry.

Rather than get her out I ask her now what she wants and name off a few things. When we get to what she wants, I tell her to wait there, bring it to her, and feed her in the dark.

The first night I did this she was surprised, but ate two packs of applesauce, a yogurt squeezy, and a few other things, basically an entire meal before saying “all done, night night.” I felt a little bad as she obviously had room in her stomach even after having eaten a full meal earlier.

Last night was the same, I fed her, she looked a little resentful, but ate and passed out and slept soundly all night.