Do you ever have “off” days, sadly I don’t mean days off, if you have kiddos that is a thing of the past. I mean blah days, days where everyone and everything are irritating, where for whatever reason you feel just a little bit yucky, and the only way to improve things is to eat lots of cookies or go to bed, because cookies are awesome and 8 hours without talking to anyone is the best solution.

Kids have off days too.

Because I’m a grown up I have to cope with off days, sure I want to scream and hide in my room, but as that isn’t a realistic option, I get on with my life.

Kids don’t know how to do this. Kids having bad days is much worse than having one yourself.

My daughter is having an off day today. It has been… well sort of hellish to be honest. She work up at 9 this morning and has scream yelled ever since.

She didn’t want her brothers to touch her, but she wanted them to stay with her. Her favorite food, scrambled eggs, made her cry, she chose to throw it on the floor, but then was angry that she had no food.

She normally loves the store because there are so many people to admire her and so much to see, today she SCREAMED the entire time.

By the time we got home her eyes were slightly puffy from all the yelling. We were both exhausted from her bad day. I had big plans for today, today is the first day of camp for her brothers, we had things to do and places to see, I wanted to pack in as much cleaning, shopping, and cooking as humanly possibly with just one child… yeah that plan failed.

When kids have an off day it impacts the entire family.

The limited grasp that child has on reality is momentarily suspended. They have no control (or interest in controlling) over their emotions.

What little volume control they’ve learned has gone out the window. When your kid has an off day, it’s like being trapped in a burning building. You can hear the alarms going off, you want to get out of the way and on to safety, but you are stuck, everything you do makes it worse.

It’s basically like trying to put out a fire with a squirt bottle, in the end you’re just feeding the flames. And the worst part is that you want to fix whatever it is, you want to help them do what they need to do to be happy, but since their grasp of language is limited, or their willingness to stop screaming long enough to offer up a solution is basically nonexistent, you are left guessing.

Inevitably you guess wrong and the screaming continues.

You know what’s better than one child having a bad day?

Two.

Yep.

One would think that two kids having a bad day is just twice as loud as one kid having a bad day… that would be incorrect.

Two kids having a bad day is exponentially louder and more dramatic than one kid having a bad day.

When my kids have a bad day I think the solution is “alone time”.

This isn’t always possible, but take the Princess for example. She spent the last half hour just looking at me and screaming, not sad screaming, angry screaming. I changed her diaper, gave her a pacifier and a blanket and put her in her crib. She screamed for 10 seconds and then silence. My guess is she went to sleep, whatever she did, she’s done screaming.

Sometimes I think my attempt to solve their problems just results in more frustration for all of us.

Maybe what they need is just the opportunity to work things out on their own.

Whatever it is, kids having off days is the worst.

Next time you see a mom at the store with a kid losing their mind, consider that she’s probably tried everything and the kid is just not having it, look away, choose another aisle, or give her a smile that says “been there too”, or better yet buy her some cookies, cause sugar is the only way to get through it.