Self-help 101

Ways in which parenting is making me a better person so far: severe limiting of my Sims addiction, I will be motivated to go to church tomorrow morning, I now get up at 7 am and go to bed earlier, I actually do the dishes after every meal in order to keep up, going to the laundromat today was actually fun for me because I got a break, and who needs the gym when you have a two year old? Ways in which this is driving me crazy: the whine. It all comes down to the whine. I'm trying really hard to not let us become slaves to the whine, but I'm not at all sure we're winning this battle. There's a whine for everything, usually for a thing that is being used as a guise for not doing something else- like eating and bathing and sleeping. The eating is happening on a small scale, but not enough, especially not at mealtime. Bathing is happenning, but with lots of "no" before being plopped in the tub. Sleeping seems to be the biggest battle of all. Sleep is for wimps. Patience for a bedtime story is only found after closing the book and putting her in the crib with no story, followed by lots of whining and screaming and negotiating for every portable thing in her room to be placed in the crib with her, followed by compromise of a story out of the crib but required to stay in the lap of the storyteller with no fuss, else being returned to crib. Gah!!! We're trying to be consistent, but I can't say I really know what to be consistent about. What counts to a two-year-old as motivation to eat and bathe and especially sleep? I do believe it's going to be a while before we figure this thing out.