Toddler Tidbits (Tips)
Now that I'm a grandmother, I usually have two or three toddlers under my watch at once, and some days it's closer to four. There would be more, except a few of them haven't graduated from diapers yet. For the record, the diapers I grew up changing were the cloth kind held shut with pins.
A toddler will ask you for something, and your instinct is to go find it or make it right away. Resist that. Give it five minutes, maybe ten, fifteen at the outside, and odds are they've requested two or three other things and completely lost interest in the first one. Jumping on the original request is effort poured down the drain.
Lying isn't really a toddler trait. What they have is a wild imagination. The one exception is tattling, and even that isn't lying so much as it's getting ahead of blame, pointing at somebody else before anyone can point at them.
Their internal clock runs on a different setting than ours. Two minutes in the corner, or parked in a chair after they've ignored the same instruction one too many times (or while a tantrum is in full swing), can stretch out like an hour to them. Don't lose sleep over it. They'll have moved on from the whole thing long before you do.
If there's a toy you'd rather they not fight over, the simplest fix is to put it out of reach. In toddler law, whoever is holding it owns it, and good luck prying it back to return it to the actual owner.
The thing toddlers want most, whether they could tell you so or not, is love with no strings on it. When you pull your affection away over some small offense and keep it pulled away even after the discipline is done, a toddler can't make sense of it. It doesn't register as a lesson learned. All it says to them is that right now, you don't love them.