I Think I'm Losing My Mind This Time

This time I'm losing my mind.

Dear God in Heaven above, don't let me hurt my children. Amen.

This is a picture of hour 22 in the "Clean Your Room and I'm not Going to Help You This Time Because You're Just Sitting Around Playing!" standoff. We don't usually let these things go on multiple days...but something about their arrogant assumption that I would come in and do it for them set me off.

So this started yesterday afternoon at about 1 pm. "After you clean your room you can have a popsicle. And we'll go to the park if it's not too late." Several hours later manaically giggling Stinknasty is seen chasing manaically giggling Stinkerbell in and out of Charlie's room while he was finishing up his cleaning. "GET OUT!!!! GEEETTTT OOOUUUTTT!!!!" He screams, fighting back his tears.

"Alright girls...if you can't work on your room, you can help Charlie finish his." So they are forced to help him finish up. And he goes outside and plays on his scooter for the rest of the afternoon. Fastforward a few hours...the girls are still sitting around on their bony bottoms, not cleaning anything. Sad little eyes imploring me to help. By this time I'm nearly in a Mommy Dearest rage so I call Will,

"Bring me a Dr. Pepper on your way home." 2nd Dr. Pepper for the day. Bad mommy.

"Are you ok?"

"Yeah. But the girls are yours when you get home. Grrrrrrr."

Fastforward to dinnertime. By this point I've confiscated Juliet's Texas Bear and Ava's pink blanket, their two most treasured possessions. "You'll get them back when your room is clean." Picture the screaming wails of tortured baby sea lions and you'll hear the noises I've endured for the past 22 hours. We've done time outs. We've done some yelling. We even did a pop on the bottom when Ava defiantly growled "No!" and swiped her sad little arm in my direction.

They ate their dinner last night alone at the table and were sent straight to bed. No breakfast this morning. No lunch until it's done. Some parents would read this and say, "I wouldn't let my kids get away with this. I would 've got them in line hours ago." No doubt you would've. Some would read this and say, "What's the big deal? Just help them and get it over with." It's a matter of principal. They sat there for hours waiting for me to come and help...they even made a bigger mess while waiting. When given a choice between time out and cleaning they actually chose time out.

So here we are. We're actually making some headway as I write this. I'm not helping but I'm instructing from the computer. "Pick up all your Barbies and then come and tell me when they're cleaned up." Then I tell them something else to clean. It's dumb but it seems to be working. The glorious miracle in the story is that I didn't actually lose my temper as I often do in these situations. Neither did Will. Three cheers for us! We're maturing! Hip hip hooraay...hip hip...

Now that's just sad. Alright. I best go check on those bad girls. They probably skipped town while I was writing that last paragraph.

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