There are some days that my kids can be screaming terrors and I, with my limitless patience, can roll with the punches, unphased by the obnoxiousness. And then there are days like today where the whining, whinging and nit picking gets to me and my “endless” stashes of patience are more like patience? What patience?
Tonight after dinner, both girls took good scrubby baths and got all scrubbed up and ventured downstairs to watch some television. A friend of The Princess’s came over to see if she wanted to play, so she dashed upstairs to get some play clothes on (Note to my neighbors: Why are y’all sending your kid over to get my kid at 7 p.m.? Note to myself: Why did you let her go?). She played with her friend until I yelled for her from the back deck at 7:40, and when she came home, she wanted to make a peanut butter sandwich for her bedtime snack.
Problem? No bread except the loaf in the freezer. Whine, whine, whine about frozen bread. I told her that she needed to pick something else, and that for whining, she’d be going to bed five minutes early. Pumpkin started hounding her older sister, “Make me some too!” (The alternate snack being peanut butter on graham crackers).
And that’s when The Princess, my beloved six-year-old said to her little sister: “You are soooo annoying!” To which Pumpkin (in her glorious copy-cat phase) repeated, “YOU are so annoying!” Then The Princess hit her little sister. Then Pumpkin hit her big sister.
And then I proceeded to lose any miniscule shred of patience that was hovering in the far recesses of my brain. I bumped up bedtime thirty minutes and The Princess essentially got so extremely pissed off that she was stomping and whining (you know, in that voice that only dogs and parents can hear). Pumpkin started crying about her freakin’ graham crackers. And me? I sat on the couch, cracked open my book and said, “I’m done with you both. Eat your graham crackers and then GO. TO. BED.” (I honestly can’t send my kids to bed hungry – they are like I am, and hunger escalates irrational behavior).
I sat on the couch, tuned them out and Hubby came downstairs. He tried to talk to The Princess and she tried one of those “talk to the hand” gestures at him. He yelled that if she ever did that again, he’d ground her for a month (Ugh! You know who suffers when kids are grounded for long extended times like that? ME! ME! ME!). The Princess stomped upstairs, crying and hiccuping and doing that horrible breathing like she was hyperventilating.
A few minutes later, I went up to knock on her door. She was holding it closed. I knocked again, “It’s mommy and you need to let me in. I want to talk to you.”
“You already talked to me!” she sobbed.
I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her down to sit on the floor with me. She squirmed and wriggled and tried to resist me. “You know that even when I don’t like the way you are acting, I love you very much?” I told her.
“Uh (deep gasping breath) huh…” she said.
“You need to remember that in our house, it’s not okay to hit people.”
“She hit me first!” (I was watching and know this is not the case, but let it go.)
“Even if someone hits us first, it’s still not okay to hit. And Pumpkin is going to bed early too – because just like we don’t want you hitting her, it’s not okay for her to hit you.”
“Well, if hitting is wrong and we’re not supposed to do it, then WHY DID THEY INVENT IT?”
And that’s where I just squeezed her a little harder and gave her a big smooch on the noggin. She then started rambling about mosquitos suck our blood so they can have baby mosquitos that will also suck our blood and just this neverending lifetime of mosquito suckage. I am not really sure where she was going with it, to be honest.
I’ve just read her a story and tucked her in. Some days, being a mom is the most gratifying job on the planet, and some days it’s so hard I wonder who the jackass is who forgot to give me the parenting manual when my kids were born.
I feel your pain, sister!
OH I have so been there! **HUGS** Neither daughter has TV till next Monday..I’m pretty sure they’ll be a fit or two over here!!! I hope you are feeling better!
OM software provides organization to a series of tasks that are interdependent. That series of tasks includes receiving orders, billing, shipping label creation, shipment pickup scheduling, accounting, inventory control and others. These tasks introduce, in the ecommerce business, a difficulty factor and a plethora of details that can sink even the most determined entrepreneur. The decision to streamline those tasks is related to the pain threshold of the business owner and to the need to improve the bottom line. That pain threshold is usually about six pieces of shipping each day. Learn more with List Easy