Tired of this toddler bullshit

Just venting here. Three year old has been out of preschool for the holidays, and I'm waaaaay past losing my mind. The whining, the meltdowns, the lying, the disastrous sleep, the endless (truly endless, every single fucking minute) demand for attention, the whole shitty bag of tricks that is three-year-old-dom, I'm over it.The thing is, she can be (and often is) so much fun: we go on adventures, we have dance parties, we cook together, we draw together. But no matter how much fun we have, at some point that fun ends, and it always ends HARD. We can play together for an hour or two, having a blast, my attention totally focused on her, and then the second my attention flags or turns elsewhere, things fall apart. She just never turns off. And no matter how much we give her—attention, time, fun activities—it never, ever, is enough.I'm trying to encourage her to do more independent play, with blocks, puzzles, drawing, etc. But her "independent" play is just her writhing around on the floor, whining for help or attention, while I either ignore her, which doesn't stop her whining, or reinforce the boundary ("You know how to build a castle by yourself, I'm going to finish doing X right now"), which also doesn't stop her whining. The only time we get genuinely independent play is when she's stalling from something we've asked her to do, or when she is doing something she knows is against the rules.My husband and I are on different pages with this. He is an amazing father, and has far more patience for toddler shenanigans than I do. When I say that I feel like our toddler is running the show, he says she's just being a kid. And he's probably right. But I feel like I am out of control in our home, and that basically every day that we're parenting her is just an endurance marathon where I desperately long to reach the finish line. And even the finish line barely exists! She usually takes an hour or more to put to sleep, and wakes once or twice each night sobbing and screaming for us, only to get up for the day at some ungodly hour (this morning it was 5am). We are beyond exhausted, and it honestly feels like our daughter is destroying the family from the inside out.In addition to this unruly three year old, I have a newborn who is straight up ruinous—colic, reflux, horrible sleep. And yet 9/10 times I would take watching the newborn over watching my three year old, because the latter is SO. MUCH. WORK.Ok. Rant over. This has been brought to you by the generosity of a pair of grandparents, who are watching my daughter and baby while I hide away in a bedroom. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2tixims