Warning: A Mom's gotta vent.
I wrote this early on Saturday morning after a long, rough day on Friday, and I actually considered not posting it. I felt better after just venting... but then I thought, What's the point of having a blog if you are selective about which experiences you choose to record? It's all part of raising a family and going through the toddler stage (x 2) and at some point we will look back on it and remember the good and bad days. Everyone's got them.
So here it is -
Well, this weekend hasn't started off great.
I would say my least favorite thing about being a mom is having to discipline them. I hate it. I doubt anyone
actually does? But at the same time, both Andrew and I are really aware of what will happen if we don't.. so we're on the same page, but it's still not fun at all. Something I have noticed with twins (or specific to ours at least) is that they are such little angels when they are alone, they're calm, they listen really well, they behave. It's when they get together that they decide they can be bad. Or, I should say, do things that they know they aren't supposed to.
When I say discipline, it's not really 'discipline' with toddlers, it's more of taking a hard stand, and sticking to your word. If something has to be taken away from them for misbehaving or not listening, whether it's a toy, an acitivity or doing something fun, the situation usually ends up being pretty crappy. Which translates into the mood for the remainder of the day, or part of the day at least. And that's really what I don't like I guess. I'm much happier when everyone else in my family is happy. So if Andrew is in a bad mood, or Emma and Drew are having an off day, it rubs off on me pretty quickly. Long story short, I just like the days better when we are all happy and in good moods!
Anyway, last night when I got home from work (in the middle of a snow storm might I add) the kids were in rare form. Ganging up on me, and I swear it seemed like they were finding anything they could to push my buttons. There was about a 2-3 hour gap between when I got home, and when Andrew got home and oh.my.gosh. Just a snapshot of about the first hour or two: They ran up to their room and literally took every tub or container of toys and dumped them upside down. You couldn't even see the floor of the room. This is not a new thing or a first time occurance, so they
know that they aren't supposed to do that. If they were actually playing with the toys I would have no problem with it, but they just enjoy the act of dumping the toys out. I asked them no less than 10 times to clean up the toys, and they refused to.(By the way, Emma has this new thing where she has all the energy in the world to make messes like a little tornado ripping through this house, but the second you mention cleaning up, she does this thing where she just looks lathargic and her eyes get droopy and she tells me how sleepy she is and she must take a nap, instantly. She has another sneaky trick like that with avoiding dinner - I'll get there later so I don't get too off track.) So toys are everywhere, I get a call for work on my cell phone so I go into the other room to take it because the second I get on the phone they decide it's time to run after me yelling things at me. Every time, without fail. I get off the phone and go back in to start orchestrating the clean up session when I found that they had emptied a big plastic storage container of their spring & summer clothes from last season that Andrew had spent a ton of time doing last weekend. Every so often we have to filter through their clothes because they grow so fast, so it gets sorted and organized and we store it, for who knows what. Then, Emma decides she deserves fruit snacks for a treat or a prize (????) and she must have spotted some on the counter, so she decided to get at them, she would just pull my purse off the kitchen counter which dumped all over the floor. Ugh.
Andrew got home and put his (blue) gatorade on the kitchen counter and, as we were talking in the family room Emma and Drew went into the kitchen, helped themselves to the full bottle of blue gatorade, opened it, and then must have had a struggle over the bottle and spilled it on the rug on the kitchen floor. Blue. Nice.
I was just thinking about getting a new rug for in there just the other day, but I didn't want it to happen this way.
They decided that they wanted goldfish crackers for dinner. Uhhh.... No. I explained, as I have several times, that golfish crackers are not dinner, but if they ate dinner and were still hungry, they could have some. (I'm not going to lie, I've probably had golfish crackers for dinner on multiple occasions, or worse, but we're not going to start that. One of my new years resolutions was to really focus (even more so than I have in the past) on their nutrition. Trying to form good eating habbits early.)
Well, that conversation didn't go well. They absolutely did NOT agree that goldfish crackers weren't a good choice for dinner and both of them threw the biggest temper tantrum ever. Lately Emma has been trying to manipulate situations in her favor. I'll usually make sure they've had enough to eat after meals by asking them if their tummies are full... or if they haven't eaten much in a while I'll ask them if they're hungry, because sometimes they get too distracted playing to take a break to eat. I usually have to remove them from whatever situation it is so that they concentrate on eating for long enough to eat a meal, or most of it. She was crying for the goldfish and I told her that she had to eat dinner first - she said "But I think my tummy is too full to eat dinner." and, somehow she thought I would then agree to giving her snacks instead.
Eventually they gave in and had dinner, and of course wanted goldfish after, so I stuck to my word, I gave them each a few goldfish and Emma decided to crush hers all over the place, into a million little messy crumbs instead of eat them.
I was exhausted, I had a headache, I was fed up... not usually the way I like to end my week. The toys that didn't get cleaned up got taken away. They (as in the toys) are in 'time out' in the guest bedroom, door locked. They didn't get to watch their night time TV show, they really didn't like that.
Earlier this week they were playing a little kid game on the computer, and they had the hang of it, they were doing good... Andrew and I were getting ready to work, and the next thing we knew there were pen scribbles ALL over the computer monitor.
Really?
But before that it was actually pretty funny, I got into the shower - both kids were asleep. Got out of the shower and this is what I found:
She had gone into the guest bathroom, got their little potty and moved it into the computer so she could reach. Interesting choice...
Speaking of those little potties, and we have 3 of them to cover all basis, so that no matter which bathroom they are closest to, it doesn't matter. Well, Drew was doing really well and we were happy about that and he has now decided to un-potty train himself. How does that happen? How have we gotten back to square one?! By the way, potty training twins is really not an easy task.
It was bedtime, and they had to go to bed with no show, no book. We were stickin' to it.
So they're laying there in silence, and Drew comes out with "Aw mi god, Awkward...." and dramatically covers his face with his hands. I could not help myself I had to laugh. And then I had to ask him where the heck he even got that from.
He also was doing something last night, I forget what it even was, and he said 'Look at me mom, I look like a gork (I'm assuming dork? Which again, no idea where he would have picked that up either because even on our worst days I don't call my kids dorks) I said 'Well, what's a gork? Where did you hear that?' he said 'Oh mom, it's just a dude thing.'
So at the end of the day, I was laughing. But what a rough one!
I will say however, for every rough day we encounter, we have several good ones in between. And thank god for those!
