Week 18 diary

We feel so incredibly lucky that things are continuing to go well for us. Jamie has settled very well and although to start off with we were constantly worrying whether his tantrums or sulks were to do with the trauma of his move and his background, we are starting to realise that he is just a perfectly normal 3 year old.

The tantrums are incredible! He sometimes has them during the day - normally it's because he demands something totally silly, like an ice cream at 8.00 am! If I say no to that, then he runs through the entire contents of our cupboard, from biscuits to breadsticks to cake to chocolate.

Of course, he knows that I'm going to say no, and starts winding himself up. Then it starts - tears, stamping, screaming at a pitch that would break a glass at 20 yards! Normally, however, he does this sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, which we usually sit him on if he has been a little on the naughty side!

Its almost as though he knows that's where he should sit to have a tantrum! I've now learnt how to deal with these because its no use getting embroiled in them as you just end up getting as irate as they are! I normally sit where he can see me, but doing something else. I find that gently singing to myself or humming so he really knows I'm not bothered by it all, adds to the illusion that I'm not taking any notice of him!

After a few minutes (fortunately they never last longer than 10 minutes ... yet!), he normally is still crying but at a lower level, and at the same time sobbing "Mummy.... I've stopped crying". After a little while of lower level sobbing, he then stops and as soon as that happens and there is a millisecond of silence, I jump in with a tissue, explaining that Mummy doesn't like it when he cries and will only come and speak to him when he's stopped.

I also say that I love him lots, give him a cuddle, and then say, right, what shall we do now and its all gone and forgotten. Of course, this is fine during the day, but we then started to get them at night!

After a few weeks of going to bed as nice as pie, Jamie suddenly started to insist on us staying with him and holding his hand until he went to sleep. Of course, being complete novices at this lark, at first we obliged. Then we thought, hang on a minute, we can't keep doing this - he has to learn to go to sleep on his own.

Well, as soon as we started saying goodnight to him and leaving the room, denying him of his hand-holding, he would be getting up out of bed as soon as we left the bedroom . He would run after us, crying, screaming, stamping - you name it! He then started to try to vault the stair gate at the top of the stairs, which was a real worry.

Every time we went up to put him back into bed, he would be asking for us to do something for him. It would either be "I've got a runny nose", "I need a poo", "I've lost Bob" (which was normally because he'd thrown Bob down the stairs in a fit of temper!), "I've been sick" (he hadn't - he was just crying so much that he was coughing with all the tears and runny nose!).

We soon found out that he wanted us to do something for him before he went to sleep, so he had the upper hand. Tim and I were at our wits end!

Well, thank goodness for the Internet that's all I can say. After a particularly frantic evening of running up and down the stairs, I sat on the computer and did a search on "children, bedtime, problems"!

We came up with this superb advice which was to completely regiment the bedtime routine, and then if he got out of bed, just to go upstairs, not make eye contact, take Jamie back to bed and not say a word!

We couldn't wait to give it a go. Well, the results were pretty amazing I can say. He was completely thrown by the fact that we wouldn't talk to him - after a few runs along the landing out of bed, he stopped the crying. He was completely puzzled by it all, and after a while he got fed up and just went to sleep.

It was so empowering not getting into a conversation - we had the upper hand at last! Of course, the downside to this was that after about a week, it became a bit of a game and he was giggling as he was running out of bed and back again. This really wound us up, but we stuck with it! After a while, we also introduced a reward chart, which has proved to be a fantastic success!

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