Our own personal dictator

Please forgive my photo editing skills. They're about as terrific as my math abilities.

This is Kim Jong India, our personal household dictator. Her preferred torture methods are sleep deprivation and the piercing of eardrums with screams. These are sometimes used together.
 
She's never been delighted about going to bed, but for a bit she was nice about it, and I thought we'd turned a corner, but it was short-lived. So now I read to her and Jordan, and then I leave her in her room and let her scream while I put him to bed. After she's raged for some amount of time, she's ready to settle, and I can sit with her and she'll agree to go to bed.

If she isn't done raging, however, you cannot get her into bed without a struggle. And then she will rage again. She puts her mouth at the base of the door and yells, "MaMA! MaMA!" She'll cry, she'll scream...and she'll be all fine and delighted when you come in.

It's making me pull my hair out. It takes about an hour of this before she actually goes to sleep.

And.

You will often hear her pad down the hall at 6 or 6:30 in the morning yelling, "Jo-dan! Wake up Jo-dan! Wake up!"

He'll whimper, "Please, India. I don't want to get up."

"Get up, Jo-dan! Get up!"

Then she drags him down the hall into our room, by which time he's fully awake and ready to have some fun.

This means that by the end of the day he is absolutely spent, and by 8 pm you can set him cozily in his bed and kiss him goodnight.

While you take another hour with the back-and-forth with Ole Kim.

And now! Now she's started this terrible phase of waking up WIDE AWAKE anywhere between 1:00 and 3:00 am. Sometimes she will come sleep with us but more often she is ready for a dance party. You can take her back to her room and she will scream like all hell.

Last night she strolled on into our room at 1:30 saying there was a spider in her room. She climbed into bed, stayed an hour or so, then went back to her room. At 3:00 am Nick heart the floor creak, looked down the hall, and there she was, turning on the light in Jordan's room.

Hell broke loose when Nick took her back to her room.

Initially I thought maybe she had a cold or something that was waking her up. But it's been long enough that I'm starting to wonder if, at age 2 1/2, she's been recruited by the dark side.