Yesterday I spent a large portion of the day upstairs communing with my laptop and catching up on deskwork. The older children spent at least half the day cleaning their bedrooms (cleaning in this case is a relative term) and the downstairs and then messing both back up again in a successful effort to irritate their father into near insanity (he was on kid duty while I was upstairs).
The first two days of this week were just sort of a write-off, you know? The kids were all wacky and I was too tired or too busy catching up on all the things that slid while George was gone to really de-wackify the kids. Makes for lots of teeth gritting all around.
Today was much better. Although Henry slept lousy last night (my fault; I was busy working and didn’t pay close enough attention to the fact that he basically slept all day) and I didn’t really start moving around until 9:30, I decided we just weren’t going to do crazy house today.
I set the timer for the kids to clean their room back up and presto! Twenty minutes later, clean room. Ditto the downstairs. After such diligent work, I let them play the wii and goof all while I cleaned the fridge, which is one of my least favorite jobs but needed to be done because it was belching toxic fumes at us whenever we opened its door. So rude! As far as attitudes went, the kids were still a bit on the grumbly side.
My Mother has been coming over on Wednesday to help out for a few weeks while Henry is a bitty blip, and it has been sooooo nice to be able to rest a bit or get a good nap or whatever. She was here today, which was good timing because I was taking my friend Amy out to lunch for her birthday (yay! Out of the house with an adult and not six children…). When I got home, I finished up the fridge and made dinner.
Dinner has been a rather frustrating endeavor at our house for the last couple of weeks mainly because my older son has been loudly proclaiming every night that he doesn’t like the food, doesn’t want to eat it, it looks weird, etc. This makes Mommy want to shout at him, and in a terribly unsuccessful effort to model good behavior to my children, that is exactly what I did tonight. After barking at Georgie to shut UP and I don’t want to hear ANY MORE about how much you don’t want the food, I went to go actually feed my younger son who was also complaining loudly but this time because he wanted his dinner. Urgh.
Typically I don’t yell at my children to shut up, so I spent the time that I was feeding Henry in the other room (the quiet, unpopulated other room, I might add) thinking about this lovely new home dynamic we have here and how to best return it to the happy, not-quite-so-deranged one that I prefer.
After dinner was finished (which Georgie ate an acceptable amount of with no further complaining of any sort), Georgie and I were the only two left in the kitchen. He was unloading the dishwasher and I was clearing up the dinner mess, and I decided it was a good time for a little instruction.
I explained to him that it takes a lot of thought and planning to make meals for everyone. It takes time for me to sit down and plan what we’re going to eat all week and figure out something healthy so you kids can grow strong. It takes time to make the shopping list and for Daddy or sometimes me to go shopping and buy all the food. At this point he interjected that it was probably expensive too. Yes, it is! He was thoroughly shocked when I told him how much we spend on groceries every week. Of course, anything that costs more than an underwater Bionicle is overly expensive to him.
I continued on and told him that after all that, then it still takes time to actually make the food and I really do not like making it for little boys who are ungrateful and I wasn’t going to do it anymore so next time he complains, he’s going straight upstairs with no dinner, dessert, or anything and will remain there until bedtime at which point he will be going to bed (duh!). This applies whether it’s Family Dinner Night (which means no Doctor Who with Grandpa and Uncle Jonathan and everyone else) or not. He seemed a bit concerned about that.
Then he asked me what ungrateful was. I told him that as soon as he was done with the dishes he could go get a piece of paper, look the word up in the dictionary, write down the definition, and bring it to me. He started to complain about that so I told him that now he could also do the same for the word “obedience.” That took care of the griping. Hehe.
He followed through on his sentence with a remarkably cheerful attitude. I told him that if I had to send him upstairs for complaining, I would be sending him with a dictionary and a Bible and he would be spending the evening writing out things I tell him to numerous times. He seemed quite happy by the time he went to bed.
With Georgie’s success, I started thinking about Trinity who has taken to scowling like a Doberman when we ask her to do something she’s not keen on doing and, I learned today, has apparently been doing this at school lately as well in addition some other overly grumpy behavior (helps having the teacher be your best friend; makes it much easier to gang up on the kids when they misbehave).
After Trinity finished her evening chore of loading up the dishwasher, I had a little chat with her. Lately chats with her have ended in a shower of tears on her part, but tonight she was all smiles. Come to think of it, she was cheerful and obedient most of the evening. This seems to have started about the time I yelled at Georgie….
Anyway, we had a discussion about attitude and we talked about a few Bible passages relating to a cheerful heart. I told her she would be looking up and copying down dictionary and Bible passages as well if her crummy attitude continues. She looked downright thrilled to get to sit up her bedroom and read the Bible and the dictionary. Knowing the tender heart that Trinity has, this will probably have the same end result as it will have with Georgie but for a completely different reason.
Anika got a brief talking to after picking a fight with Georgie, and this new strategy with the older kids won’t work with her yet so I’m going to have to keep a close eye on her tomorrow. Kyra and Faith were both in trouble several times today (Kyra for lying to me and then for pushing Faith out of a closet; Faith for too many things to remember and keep track of) and duly reprimanded. I’m hoping that if I keep at them for the rest of the week, they’ll be back down to just maintenance level discipline by the weekend. We’ll see.
When the older three kids came to kiss me goodnight this evening, I told them that tomorrow there would be no TV, no wii, and no computer and that they would have to use their imaginations and find something to do. This was directly on the heels of all of their other chats and they were apparently all trying to show what wonderful attitudes they were capable of displaying because all three of them enthusiastically responded that they had excellent imaginations and could do that (that was Anika announcing her excellent imagination).
In a fit of chivalry, Georgie asked if we could do that for the rest of the week (!!?????!!). Naturally I did what any self-respecting Mother would do and said yes! He only looked mildly confused as to how the conversation had ended up where it had. A minute later when he realized what he had done, he sheepishly mentioned that he had actually been sort of planning to watch Mythbusters tomorrow. This is his usual Wednesday evening ritual; but since was looking up dictionary definitions for me tonight, he didn’t get to watch his show. I told him that if he was really well behaved all day, I would let him watch it tomorrow.
Yep, the post-dinner portion of this evening went pretty well. And, I’m expecting tomorrow to go much better in terms of attitude. They’ve all been zombified into TV goons for the last few days, so they’ll probably be a bit rowdy tomorrow while they reboot their brains. Who knows though. Maybe they’ll go upstairs and have a birthday party for Draco or someone instead (Draco is Georgie’s six foot long stuffed dragon; they throw birthday parties for their stuffed animals and/or dollies with some regularity). Hmmm, I’ll have to keep that in my back pocket and remind them of it if they get to weird and don’t come up with it themselves. That will just leave the younger ones to straighten out plus of course, Henry to look after. No problem! (And would be the sleep deprivation talking there….).
Henry is napping next to me so I am going to go soak in the tub and give myself a facial for the next twenty-five-ish minutes and then I will either go fold laundry and watch the rest of my Hubby’s lame movie with him if it’s still on or head for bed and blow off the laundry until tomorrow (stupid laundry is eating my couch alive as usual).
Good night!
Rachel
Written by Rachel Shubin ~ Fiendish friend for effusive fun!
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