New Mummy Blog: The Art Of Toddler Negotiations

In a house in the full and sticky grip of the terrible twos, getting out the door on time is a power struggle, not a morning routine.

I get there in the end, but not without much negotiation, compromise and the meeting of demands of my iron-willed toddler.

I do actually think it’s a good thing, important even, to give consideration and validation to her wants and to let her know I take her seriously; it’s tough being two. But, if I’m really honest, it’s got less to do with encouraging her self worth and more to do with it being a darn sight easier. I’m not up for World War III first thing in the morning when I haven’t even had a coffee.

It all starts with the wake up. I’m blessed with a two year old who loves her bed and will often still be fast asleep when I go in to wake her some time after 7.00am (or even 8.00 to 8.30am at the weekend). Don’t hate me. It took a long, long time, a lot of protest (her) and a lot of pain (me) and coffee (me again) to get to this point.

If she is still asleep, then it gives me a chance to extract whatever random object she has insisted stays next to her bed to ‘watch her’ while she sleeps the previous night. It might be her giant cuddly My Little Pony. It might be a washing basket or the mop.

If she’s already awake and has seen her objet du jour, then her inexplicable attachment is reinforced and I’m going to have a tough time convincing her that she doesn’t need to drag it around with her all day long.

Then comes the tricky matter of getting her dressed.

“I want the dress the same as Martha’s,” she says cryptically. This means I have to decipher who Martha is (a girl at her nursery, as it turns out) and then begin the long and delicate process of decoding which dress it is that they both apparently own.

“What colour is Martha’s dress?” I ask logically, in the vain hope that logic is an effective tool when faced with a contrary two year old.

“It’s the colour of…. colour,” she says helpfully. Time is ticking and the minutes we have remaining to get out the house on time are getting fewer and fewer.

After some pressing, she eventually commits to yellow. Okay, this should be easy - she only has one yellow dress.

Except when she says yellow, she actually meant grey. But we have to go through every other colour, and every other dress in her wardrobe, to uncover this.

So, dressed at last, but not before a stand off over her pants. She wanted the Little Mermaid ones she’d worn yesterday. That they were yet to be washed was not reason enough to deter her, her logic being that she hadn’t had an accident so there was no wee on them and they were therefore perfectly acceptable to wear for a second day in a row. Eventually we settled on the Elsa ones, but only after she’d extracted a guarantee the mermaid pair would be ready to wear tomorrow.

[Copyright: Yahoo/Claire Sparks]

Then comes the hair. Blessed with a gorgeous mop of blonde curls, she gets a serious case of bed head and brushing it out in the morning is a power struggle. She agrees to sit still and let me, as long as I then style it 'like Trina does’ (Katrina is her nursery key worker). But it’s okay, I’ve got this. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this request, so along with her verbal reasoning, social awareness and physical development, hair styling was a pretty integral part of my conversation with Katrina at parents’ evening last month.

Only problem is that 'hair like Trina does it’ means a plait with tinsel woven through it (which Katrina did to her hair once, just ONCE, before Christmas) and I don’t exactly have any tinsel to hand, it being February and all. Cue yet more negotiating and finally a compromise that we’ll do a plait like Elsa’s (never mind that the mop refuses to comply, and she looks more scarecrow than ice queen).

So, we’re finally ready to head downstairs, only half an hour behind schedule. Now come the demands for breakfast, even though she gets breakfast at nursery. But it’s quicker to go through the motions than to argue, so I pop her up at the table.

“I want the high chair!” she shouts, just as I’m buckling her baby brother in to it. He’s been very patient throughout the getting up and dressed saga and now he just wants his banana and Weetabix.

I stop buckling and switch them over - her into the high chair, him into the booster seat as he’s all the while craning his neck to make sure his breakfast was coming with him.

“I’m not a baby! I don’t like the high chair,” she yells. The poor baby sighs in anticipation of yet more musical chairs before he finally gets his breakfast. This has happened before; he doesn’t need a firm grasp of the English language to catch the drift of the situation.

The toddler wins the high chair battle, again [Copyright: Yahoo/Claire Sparks]

Seating arrangements finally smoothed over, we then engage in the merry dance of wrong spoon, wrong bowl, wrongly cut toast (she wanted it “like the toast last week” whatever that means).

It really is time to leave. It’s long past time to leave. She needs a snack for the (five minute) journey, and her Barbie has to accompany her. No, she doesn’t want her coat on, but she does want to fill its pockets with treasure (stones from the driveway). And when she’s half way down the path she stops and decides she doesn’t want to go to nursery after all.

Another five minutes and countless goodbye cuddles later, she decides it is a good idea after all and saunters off to the car, where my husband is waiting to bundle her in before she has the chance to throw one more curve ball our way, without so much as a backwards glance.

I shut the door, exhausted. And it’s only just gone 8.00am. Back to the kitchen, and the baby, thankful that, for now at least, he can’t answer back.