What's gotten into her?

Paige set a record for time outs this weekend. I honestly lost count. I know it was at least three times this morning, at least twice this afternoon, once in Target, twice in the Mall yesterday morning, and at least 4 times at home yesterday. She also lost her Dora and her Goldfish (crackers) privelages today, and had her dolly taken away for the day twice (both Saturday and Sunday--she was throwing it). She's been throwing her toys, hitting, pulling hair, screaming, hitting more, and just having temper tantrums...about the only thing she didn't do was attack Ella, who wisely has been fairly absent this weekend. Toward the end of the day, timeouts were officially extended to a full minute from now on, up from 30 seconds. That seemed to help a little.

In between being a terror, Paige has been an angel. She can be incredibly sweet one minute and then be downright awful the next. She's gotten very good at saying that she's "sorry for ___" after her time outs. Almost too good--in the car ride home, she was doing high pitched screams followed by immediately "sorry for screaming." Apparently, saying "sorry" doesn't mean as much as it once did to her.

Three ideas on what's going on. 1) it's a stage where she's once again decided to challenge our authori-tay and see what she can get away with, 2) she hasn't been feeling good and is taking it out on us (we have no other reason to think this, except maybe for sleep habits), and 3) she's noticed that mom and dad have been a little stressed and distracted lately and is acting out in response. I imagine that all three could be true on some level.

The thing that's strange about this weekend's acting out is that it hasn't, usually, be in response to us not paying attention to her. That's usually when it happens. We actually had lots of quality time with her this weekend, be it playing with her, reading to her, or even going down to Lakemont Park to see the lights. If anything, I've had more time to spend with her since the semester ended a week ago. Hopefully she'll snap out of this soon--I'm not looking forward to long road trips with her acting like this.

At least she's going to sleep again. A few days ago, she started letting me pick her up and sing her a song before I put her into bed (as opposed to letting her climb into bed herself and then doing the singing while she's laying down). This is much closer to what we did when she was still in her crib, and it seems to really help. The last few nights she has actually asked to go to sleep after the second song or so. Not the same child we were dealing with a few weeks back.