Addicted to "cran"

It's official, my 3-yr-old is a cran addict.

Let me back up a little bit. This past week has been rough with him having meltdowns almost every evening (not counting extra crankiness during the day). Probably it is because his big brothers were at camp during the day this week so his routine was impacted. After all, even though they enjoyed camp, the routine change had CB and BH out of sorts for the first couple of days too.

So, here we are, at the end of a long week and here we go again. The crying, screaming, rolling, and yelling "no, no, no!" (now that he's re-learned that word, he's all about using it at any opportunity), and the most frustrating part, where he tells me wants something and when I try to get it for him he decides that's not what he wanted and goes ballistic. That's always fun. One of the things we've worked really hard with him on is to be able to say "I want _____." He doesn't actually say the "I want" part except very rarely, but if we say it to prompt him, and if it's something he knows how to say, he'll usually fill in the blank for us. It's especially helpful when he's upset, because sometimes he'll calm down when we prompt him and try to tell us what he wants instead of screaming.

The catch is that sometimes he can't have what he wants, which just makes the crying and screaming all the worse because not only is he upset but now he's frustrated because for all he knows, we just didn't understand what he said and if he could only say it again... and again... and again... and maybe punctuate it with some head-butting and dragging us to the fridge (check again!), then maybe we'd understand him. At least that is what his logic appears to be.
Which brings me to the part about cran. Cranberry-apple juice (which he calls "cran") is his absolute favorite juice of all time. He loves it. He will drink other juices, and occassionally if he gets "cranned-out" he'll even prefer another juice for a short period of time. But he always comes back to ol' reliable, cran. (So if you hear me referring to him as "the cran man" that's why). Well, guess what he wanted today? And guess what we are out of? ugh. We were going to stop at the store to pick some up today but we had a couple of other stops to make and unfortunately we reached our "quota of allowable stops" (which changes based on how the boys happen to be doing on any given day) before we made it to Wal-mart.

So when he asked me for cran, I had to tell him "cran's all gone." Wrong answer. I tried to find the "backup cran," a powdered version that mixes with water for cran-on-the-go, but couldn't find any. Later, when dh came back in from doing yardwork, he found it and made a cup for LB. At first he pushed it away, but changed his mind when he realized what it was. After nearly two hours of meltdown, he finally relaxed and drank his cran until he fell asleep in my arms. Sigh.