Mummy my tummy hurts....

As Little H approaches her 4th Birthday in a few months time, I'm realising more and more that she is moving away from being my sweet little baby.  She is now going through what my other half refers to as her "egocentric phase". He is an Early Years Lecturer so don't get me wrong he knows what he's talking about, however, giving it the right name does not make it any less of a pain in the arse to go through with her.  To you and me what this phase means is "Me Me Me and a bit more Me"

I am finding this harder and harder to deal with everyday and she makes every day and every activity and come to think of it every little thing about her.  I try to balance the amount of attention I give her and Mr Moo but recently if she is not getting all the attention she starts to create a storm of pain.  Here's an example of some of the classic lines we get now when she's not getting her own way:

I'm not your best friend

You don't love me

I don't love you

You're not being kind

I'm going to call the Police Man

I'm want to stay with Daddy ( this is the one she uses to really hit me where it hurts)

Your a poo poo head

Your house smells of  poo poo head

Mr Moo is a silly Poo Poo head and so on and so on and so on.

The point of all this background detail about my constant daily battles with the little love is that we now have a new popular phrase of "my tummy hurts!"

And there you have it....."my tummy hurts"

I always treat it as a serious thing and say that she needs to calm down and stop messing about for a minute to see if it feels better.  I don't let her have anything to eat that might make it worse and I quite often sit with her on the settee with warm milk to help settle it.  After doing all of this the poorly tummy always seems to feel better and I've come to realise that most of the time it is just her way of getting some one-on-one time with me.

But now how do I stop it?  How do I teach her that there are other ways of getting my attention with out having a tummy ache or a bitch fit every 5 seconds?  I'm very concious that I don't want to ignore a tummy ache just in case one day it is the real deal and I don't do anything about it, but at the moment she is very much the Boy who cried Wolf.

Steve says this phase will pass and she will learn to share me again but while she's using a tummy ache to get my attention I really don't know what to do for the best.  This is one of those times when I really wish my Mum was still around to give advice as she was so used to dealing with my bitch fits (of which there were many as I'm told by my Dad!)

All suggestions would be VERY welcome xxx