BTW, for those moments when one feels like throwing them out the window,
Funny story...
When DD was 3 she threw some sort of fit (don't remember what it was about) and we told her to take a break in her room. She stomped upstairs (we have a two-story house), slammed her bedroom door, we heard some banging around, etc. A few min. later, guess who walked through our patio door, which was on the main level? DD. She had fallen, or jumped, out of her bedroom window from the second story, and then got up and walked back in the house through the back door. For years afterwards, we had her window locked so it couldn't slide open more than several inches without a key. I was debating putting bars on her window. It's not like she didn't have a window screen, she just opened her window, climbed on the sill, and went right through it.
She was claiming her stomach hurt, and I was a little freaked out so called the on-call doc, who acted like it was no big deal and I had said that DD just had a headache or fell off her tricycle. Like toddlers jump out their window everyday?
There were so many other episodes. When DS was around 3 I took him to a developmental ped and had to fill out a parent inventory and it listed "high parental stress" as one of the results. The high parental stress had nothing to do with DS (who is my "easy" one), it was from DD who about 4-5 at the time.
She does have ADHD and impaired EF so I can't claim that all the intensity and energy vanished. It's an ongoing saga. But it does get easier.
