A Rough Morning

It has been a rough morning here at Casa Caballero.  I woke up late (again) and that always means a lot of yelling and rushing which is bad enough in and of itself.  My kids do not seem to understand that "we're running late" means move faster, and I get frustrated.  Even more frustrated than having to get up at all makes me.

This morning, the oldest was really pushing my buttons.  First he comes downstairs in just a t-shirt and jeans.  It is currently 28 degrees outside.  I told him that he will need to go and put on a long sleeved shirt, which causes him to slump his shoulders and roll his eyes at me.  I continue to prod everyone along, calling out "25 minutes until the bus is here!" then "20 minutes!" and "15 minutes!" and I find him sitting in the floor in front of the space heater in the den.  The same kid that I just made go and change into long sleeves, is trying to get warm and just sitting there.  I can feel my temper rising....

Then there is the problem of breakfast.  We have no less than 6 different kinds of cereal, Eggos, Pop-Tarts, breakfast bars, and bagels. However, my 11 year old claims that there is nothing to eat and wants to just have a fruit cup.  As I was explaining to him that a fruit cup is not breakfast, and he is arguing that he'll just eat an orange, I hear the trash truck.  Great.  I missed it.  So now, with 10 minutes to go until they need to walk out the door, he is grumbling into his Cheerios and I am still providing the countdown as I try to get a brush through the 6 year old's hair and the 9 year old is rushing around looking for her library book.

Finally, I yell into the kitchen where he is sipping the milk out of his bowl like he is at a garden tea party without a care in the world that he has 4 minutes to get his teeth brushed, get his jacket & backpack and get out the door.  He gets up and slams his bowl into the sink, splashing milk everywhere and stomps upstairs to brush his teeth.  I am zipping the 6 year old into her jacket and yelling up the stairs to him that he is out of time and he comes slumping down the stairs at a pace that is just above standing still. 

He won't look at me.

The girls both give me hugs and kisses and head out the door towards the corner where the bus picks them up, and I say to the 11 year old "Hey, what is wrong with you this morning?"

He still won't look at me, but I can see his eyes turning red and welling up just a little bit and he says to the wall "Apparently I can't do anything right because I was trying to do what you said and you just kept yelling at me."

Dagger to my heart.  There is no time to address this because the bus is a block away, but I tell him that I love him and that we will talk about it when he gets home.

Sometimes, it is hard for me to remember that he is just 11.  He has been the oldest, my helper, the responsible one, for so long that I expect more of him.  But he is just a kid.  And he is a sensitive kid.  And I can be insensitive without meaning things the way that he takes them.

Yes, I was yelling all morning, but I was not intentionally yelling AT him.  At least not ONLY at him.  I was yelling because it is my nature to freak out and yell to get things done faster.  I yell out the time they have left to make them all move faster, I yell because they are in three different places in the house and I need them all to hear me, and I yell because I am, in general, a loud person. 

He isn't.  He is quiet, for the most part, like his dad.  And his dad often tells me to "quit yelling at him" when I don't realize that I am.   I am also sarcastic with my kids, and usually they love it and laugh, but running late at 6:30 am may not be the best time for me to look at my kid and say something like "Seriously?  A t-shirt?  It is 28 degrees outside and you are wearing a t-shirt? Go put on something with long sleeves." and then follow that with a shout out about how much time they have and that they need to hurry up. 

I will tell him all of this when he gets home.  I will try to explain that I was not mad, just frustrated.  I will point out how he contributed to that frustration, and I will apologize for my reactions to...well, to everything this morning because it was not his fault.  It was not his fault that "we" woke up late.  It was mine.  It was not his fault that the trash didn't get to the curb.  It was mine.  It was not his fault that I was yelling.  It was mine.

Hopefully, he will understand and he will forgive me. 

Probably, he will be over it by this afternoon and not want to talk about it because a heart-to-heart with your mom when you are an 11 year old boy is not something that you look forward to.

But it is definitely going to happen because even if he is over it by this afternoon, I won't be.  I need him to know that I love him and that I am sorry.  I want him to know that he is a good kid and that I am proud of him.  I can't just assume that he knows. 

It's Never Over

So it's Friday night, and I wanted to write a blog because I have been writing freelance stuff all week.  I started this afternoon.  I stared at the flashing cursor thingy (which was totally mocking me, by the way), and I thought "What is wrong with you?  You have written over 14,500 words this week on traumatic brain injury, premise liability, boating safety, and other legal issues.  That was new.  This is YOU.  THIS is your thing!  Write!" 

And still I had nothing.

Sure, I started a few things.  I would write a few words, or a couple of sentences -- I even managed a whole paragraph once -- but I always "backspaced" them away because, well, they sucked.  I was really getting discouraged.  I thought I had lost my blogging mojo. 

I went back and looked at some of my most popular posts and I realized that it wasn't me.  It was my kids.  They were growing up and they weren't doing the same stupid stuff that they used to do.  They weren't shredding the mattress cover or cutting each other's hair or coloring the walls.  My kids are acting more normal and depriving me of great blog material.  No wonder I had nothing. 

Then, as if on cue, the 9 year old proved me wrong.

She was having a friend to spend the night.  We were going to order pizza and watch movies by the fire.  I sent her 2 brothers over to my mom's to hang out until bedtime so they could have girl time (her little sister stayed).  I gave them a snack and I started to watch "Revenge" from last Sunday on the DVR, telling them that we'd order pizza in a half an hour or so.  They went upstairs and I heard giggling and laughing and all was well.

Or so I thought.

Skipping the commercials, it took me 40 minutes to finish my show.  I started upstairs to ask what kind of pizza they wanted, and was met on the stairs by my 9 year old. 

"Mom, I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"We were pranking [her big brother] and....and...."(dissolves into tears).
"And what?"
"And I told her not to but she did it anyway."  (More tears)
"Okay.  Hold on.  Take a breath.  Start over."

This is the tale I was told:  My daughter and her friend wanted to "prank" her brother while he was gone.  It started fairly benign with molding clay on his light switch.  Then they decided to spray perfume all over his room.  Again, although incredibly smelly, also fairly benign and easily fixed.  If they had stopped here, we would have had a little scolding, and gone on with our evening of pizza and painted nails and Disney movies. 

But they didn't stop there.

They took his hair gel and squirted under his comforter and all over his sheets.  Sheets I had just washed.  Now it was getting annoying.  I was going to have to rewash his sheets and his comforter and I was going to have to figure out how to make his room smell like a boy again.

Then she told me that her friend had the idea to paint on his wall with glitter nail polish.  (I don't know why, we were not to the whys at this point, we were stuck on the "what-else-did-you-do").  So the friend got the glitter nail polish, even though my daughter told her not to do it.  She didn't come get me.  She took it into her brother's room and painted on the wall.  She still didn't come get me.  She didn't want to get her friend in trouble. 

So instead, she decided to try to fix it.

(SPOILER ALERT: She made it worse.)

My daughter is very artistic.  She received lots of art supplies for Christmas.  So she went into her room and got her acrylic paints and took them to her brother's room to try to paint over what her friend had done with the nail polish.  Now, to her credit, she expertly mixed about 6 different colors and matched her brother's wall color almost perfectly.  Not that it mattered, since her brother's room is painted with a satin finish, and she was using acrylics.  What did matter, was that in the process of all of this mixing, she got paint all over the carpet. 

THIS is when she decided it was time for her tearful confession. 

I turned to the little girl (whom I happen to like very much) and asked her if this was true and she said yes.

I made my daughter show me the damage.  I got some cleaning supplies and did what I could and I called her mom, my friend.  I relayed what had happened and we both agreed that they should come and get their daughter.  I told her (and her daughter) that I really liked her and was glad that she and my daughter were friends, but they had made a mistake tonight.  I also told her that I really hoped that she could come back another time, but that tonight they had abused the privilege of having a sleepover. 

Now don't get me wrong, I applaud my daughter for coming to me, even though it was a little late.  I let her know through the long discussions that we had tonight that I was proud of the fact that she told me but that I wish she had come to me sooner.  I let her know that there would be consequences beyond the end of the sleepover, and I talked to her about how I understood not wanting to get her friend in trouble. 

I explained that in the grand scheme of life, this was a very small thing; but that I wanted her to remember 3 very important lessons from it that would serve her well throughout life as the bigger things came up:  1) I want her to remember that she made a mistake.  She knew it was a mistake, but instead of confessing, she tired to cover it up and in the end it was a much bigger mess than she or I could handle.  I told her that if she remembered that, she could save herself a lot of trouble in the future.  2) I wanted her to remember that sometimes telling on a friend will keep them out of trouble.  If she had come to me and said "My friend wants to paint the wall with nail polish even though I told her it was a bad idea."  I could have kept all of this from happening and no one would have gotten in trouble.  3)  I told her that I loved her no matter what she did.  I told her that I would get angry at her and at what she does sometimes, but I would always love her no matter what.  We talked a long time.  She was very upset because she knew that she was wrong and because the evening had not turned out like she had planned at all.   She apologized to me, and in the morning she will apologize to her big brother.

I was going to wrap this up with a clever remark, but I am being verbally assaulted on my Facebook page right now and I cannot focus on being witty or clever.  The bottom line is, I realized that my kids still have loads of potential for future blog posts.  They may not be about how they are domestic terrorists who destroy the furniture or how they lock me out of the house so that they can have a butter and cheese picnic, but this is a parenting humor blog (for the most part) and I am a parent forever.  I will always find the humor in what they do and there will always be lessons learned. 

As for the verbal assault on my page, well, that is just more blog fodder for another day.