Friday, Nov. 16, 2012 - 5:55 a.m.

Yesterday sucked. The bug seems to have passed, now.

Q is having such a rough time right now. Every little thing sets her off. Bumps that she wouldn't even have noticed before now are cause for wailing. And the full tantrums-- biting her hands, hitting herself in the face, kicking, screaming, thrashing around...for like 45 minutes at a time. If I'm holding U, she knows she can get me to put him down by hitting herself-- since normally I restrain her hands and tell her "I won't let you hurt yourself". So then I hold both her hands together, and she tries to pull herself away, and there I am holding her by her wrists, and it doesn't seem like the gentle restraint I meant it to. It's important to me that she not learn that hurting herself is an acceptable way to deal with frustration, but I wonder whether I should have let it slide at this point. I wonder if my drawing attention to it has made it A Thing where otherwise it would not have been.

I feel so bad for her. And me. I feel pretty bad for me, too. It's hard to remain unruffled in the face of that. Staying unruffled is actually getting easier, though. Practice, practice, practice.

I don't really want my mom coming back until after Q has worked this out some and has hopefully dialed it back to her previous level of tantrum. Having my mom sitting there observing all of that and trying to 'help' or give advice would make it a lot more difficult for me to handle it calmly. Either I will lose it completely or I will direct my anger at her, because she's too foolish to realize when I'm stressed it's not a good idea to...to do what she does. But it's thanksgiving and I don't know if there's any getting around it. Just hope nothing goes down while my uncle is here, too.

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