The first night was scary. We showed them their rooms and the new toys we got them. Thing 1 wanted Thing 2's toy--we went to walmart to exchange his for an identical one, as he was completely uninterested in the one we picked out for him. Thing 2 immediately grabbed any and every cup and can he found and drank out of it, so we spent the whole evening removing our drinks from his hands and replacing them with his own. They went to bed easier than I expected but we were wrung out when that magical hour came around.
I don't think the sinking feeling that we had made a mistake ever relented that first weekend. It felt they were just hell bent on getting into every thing they could find that would cause the greatest amount of damage. Thing 2 climbed. They both wanted to jump on or off things. They scared one of our cats so badly that he ran away--and has never returned.
And the tantrums, oh lord the tantrums. We would tell Thing 1 to do something, anything. Go into his room. Take off his shirt, go potty, anything and he would refuse or ignore us, so we would count down, if I get to three its time-out...one, two, three. No movement. So we would send him to timeout. Ignore. We would carry him to his bed. He would start screaming, hitting, grabbing tables, lamps, door frames, anything, thrashing about. We would put him in the bed and he would begin yelping and slamming himself into the bed frame, or pacing and go catatonic. It was terrifying.
I cried. If I wasn't actively doing something with them, I cried. I was so stressed I couldn't eat. I wasn't sleeping at all because I was afraid that they would wake up. We went to a friend's children's birthday party and so I was constantly paranoid that they would hurt themselves in a new environment, which Thing 1 did--falling off a swing on his back and scraping it up pretty badly. We called in and reported it to the on-call guy. He just said to clean it up. Didn't ask how things were going (though if I he had I might have lost it right there and told him to come and get them).
That first weekend was the start of about 3 to 4 weeks of sheer hell, terror and sleeplessness.
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