My child is a fucking brat. No two ways about it. What I can do about it is a puzzle to me. Should I remove my own feelings and just try to deal with her, like maybe the way some sort of emotionally removed therapist might? Do I have a duty to tell her of my feelings, demonstrating them by my tone of voice? It's such a frustrating situation that I find myself emotionally disconnecting from her.

I've been thinking about the whole Non-Violent Communication and why it doesn't work for us, beyond the fact that I don't use it, that is. The NVC books actually deal somewhat of criticism that people will feel psychoanalyzed. The response is to go even more simpler, in ways that aren't as comfortable or normal to us as people as this faux analysis is. To actually reflect the feelings on a very basic level. And if you are wrong, the person will correct you. It seems from the time she was old enough to understand what I was doing with trying to reflect her feelings, she fought against it.

When she was 4:
Me: "You're sad because you can't have the toy you want."
Bug, screaming in rage: "I'm not sad! I'm not sad! I'm not sad! I'm HAPPY!"

When she was 5:
Me: "You're sad because you really want the toy, but we can't buy it."
Bug, screaming: "I'm not sad, I'm MAD. NOW BUY ME THE TOY!"

Now that she's 6:
Me: "I understand you are really sad and angry about this, but we can't buy that toy right now."
Bug, nastily: "I am angry and it's your fault! If you weren't so stupid and only cared about yourself, you would get it for me."

These are just my memories, and I don't know that they are completely accurate, except for her screaming through her tears that she was happy and I couldn't tell her she wasn't because I don't know her brain. I have tried to reflect her feelings from an early age, even before she had a voice to do so. She didn't talk until late, and she's always had some of the emotional intensity found in the "spirited children." Bean seems to me a very typical two year old, doing two year old things, having huge screaming hitting tantrums at times, but they seem more easy to deal with, more like a normal toddler meltdown. Maybe I'm just better at reading her.

With Bug, most of the time I just tried to soothe her through the tantrum, and if it didn't work or I found myself getting too angry, I left her alone (on the floor while I sat in a chair or stood nearby). Sometimes I'd try giving her words for her emotions. But as she has told me, I don't know her brain, I don't know how things are in "Bugland" and apparently there are completely different laws in her own world.

So the reason NVC doesn't work to me when I try it in earnestness is manifold, from all of us being unused to this type of communication, DH not finding any value in it, me trying to overanalyze instead of just objectively reflect. And maybe even sometimes it is working, but I expect it to be easier. However, I am reluctant to even try and use NVC because I don't believe it will work. I am afraid that my child will prove to be beyond the capacity for empathy. For so long she has been incapable of empathy, and I always felt like that was my fault, that her own emotional needs were not being met because of my own tendency to get angry and close down when the going got difficult, which is how I've responded to things for most of my life. So I've kept trying, alternately trying to model an empathic caring response (even if it wasn't what I felt) and then flying off the handle and snapping at her. This has created the worst of both worlds (permissiveness vs. authoritarian). I rarely strike the balance of assertive parenting, the kind that has useful limits that can be accepted, maybe not easily, but eventually.

Recently I've begun to realize that Bug just doesn't know or understand that some things are hurtful. She truly doesn't know. I've gotten much more likely to punish her by sending her to her room once I feel that trying to be playful, reflect and empathize is going down like a plane on fire. She doesn't get that telling someone in a sarcastic tone, "and just where did I say turkey in that sentence" or saying "I've never felt sorry for you or cared about your feelings" in a sincere voice can be hurtful. She thinks she is telling the truth, and I have certainly told her enough that I'm not going to punish her for her feelings, I want to know them.

But ultimately, when I move into what I see as an NVC dialogue, in the back of my mind I know I am doing it not because I really want to understand her, but just because I want to fix her. I want her to feel empathy, and I want to get my own way. I'm not truly prepared for the discourse to move in it's own direction, with maybe me having to give up some of my desires. Goodness knows I've given up enough of my desires on matters to let my child have hers. In the back of my mind, however, I feel like it is a compromise. There is an unwritten score card, and I'll be able to pull out my, "Hey, remember when you got to have this? Now it's my turn" card. And it doesn't work like that. I give up things I can and that won't hurt me too much so that down the road I can stand my ground on the one thing that really matters. And it doesn't work, because Bug doesn't really understand or even care that this is what I'm doing, and our interactions lose that honesty that they should have if we were both truly open.

We went out to dinner tonight, which is a rare thing around here these days. I was in the mood for vegetables, so I got a cup of vegetable soup with a sourdough roll, and a salad. Bean got macaroni and cheese, which is what she always gets from Claim Jumper. She claims it is super delicious. I didn't realize she had even seen The Brady Bunch movie.

Bug got little corndogs and french fries because, well, radioactive, partially hydrogenated dog poop was not a menu option. She didn't actually eat the food, however. She ate one of the cheese sticks that DH got for an appetizer, but spent most of her time savaging the large leaf of kale that was the garnish on her plate. She even asked for a fork so she could stab the kale with that. Then she pulled pieces off and chewed them up, gagging in places. "I eat a leaf!" she proudly exclaimed.

Because I had also shared in the appetizer of panko breaded fried cheese, I was really too full for my salad. After eating about half of it, I realized that Bean might like it better than the kale. I fed her a number of bites of dressed lettuce from my fork, then set the whole plate in front of her. She really enjoyed the salad. I know that she likes greens and will eat up swiss shard or spinach before touching anything else on the plate, but it continually amazes me. Next time we go out, she's getting salad!

Nuts, I forgot something. I don't actually like kids all that much. I knew that at one point, when I was deep in my maiden aunthood status, but then I went cross country with a man and I decided we needed to reproduce.

Today when my husband got home, I asked him to do something for me. " What?" he asked, in a tone both weary and wary. "Remind me not to have kids in my next life," I said. "Oh, no worries about that," he replied.

Bug is in the midst of a development phase I've decided to call the Satanic Sixes. If you remember that story The Ransom of Red Chief, she is much like that boy. Horribly spoiled to the point of having utterly unrealistic expectations. That, combined with Bean's quite normal Terrible Two phase (not really terrible, just very tiring), and the fact that Bug has an honorary sister, Katherine, who is over here just about every other day, it's crazy making. I'm not even getting mad anymore, I'm just confused. I think Bug has some problems that go deeper than I thought. Or maybe it is just the dynamic with the friend, a poor diet and a lack of sleep.

DH has put her in her room twice in the last 3 days. Two days ago, it was because I just could not take her snarling rudeness and completely imperious demands anymore. At times anything I said was not met with whining, but wriggling, stamping howler monkey like behavior. She flatly refused to do any such thing as go to her room, so when her father led her up by the hand and she realized he was serious, she started screaming, "I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't do anything wrong!" Yeah, and bears don't shit in the woods, either. She ended up throwing the slats of her doll bed at the bedroom door, causing a terrible racket. Then after a period of quiet, she opened the door, asked to go to the bathroom. We told her she could come back down if she was ready. She was, and she was fine after that.

Today she had to go back to her room more just because she got into a pissing contest with her father and lost. I decided to let her fight her own battles and let her see where it got her, so I said nothing. DH cautioned Bug that if she couldn't control her attitude any better, she would have to go to her room. After some arguing back and forth, she asserted that no one could make her do anything, so he showed her that he could. Of course, she could have come right back out again, what is what she always used to do, but she didn't. So she's already bowing down to authoritarianism some. Whew!

While she was up in her room, I discovered that Bean really HAD broken some Christmas ornaments. Of course, why not. The front parlor is nothing but a playroom. I am undecorating the tree and trying to get the room cleaned up, but even with all the other places to play here, all the children wants to play in that room. They want to take all the cushions off that couch and build forts, even though that is the nice couch. We have four couches in this house, btw. We just keep adding them and not getting rid of any. Two are in the basement, were all the toys and the big tv are. But the tiny front sitting room, that holds the allure.

So a bunch of broken Christmas ornaments which I discovered while I was in the middle of vacuuming and doing other chores. Bean's hand was bleeding and she asked for a napkin first, then a paper towel when I told her we had no napkins. I told her I thought she should have a Band-Aid, and she said she wanted a Blues Clues Band-Aid. The girl knows a lot of nouns.

Tonight she picked a dime up off the floor and showed the money to her father proudly. He told her it was a dime. She went around saying, "It a dime, it not a penny." She punctuates her conversation with numerous meows, especially liking them as a form of greeting. Pretty endearing, although I think I liked her growling phase even better. Nothing cuter then when she would hold a toy cow up to you and show you how it growled.

Bean came down from her room into the kitchen where I was rolling out bread dough, and she wanted to have some dough to play with. I broke off a hunk and she added more flour and water and pretended to cook, making quite a mess. I helped her get cleaned up, and then she asked to help me make my thing, so I let her roll out the other half of my bread dough. I was using it to make runzas and not actual bread. She started talking in that affected mannerism she has when she wants to show she is very serious. At least I think so, i've never figured out why she gets this higher pitched, clipped way of speaking, like she's telling a fairytale. But I think it's cute as hell, actually.

So both children were pleasant to be around in the evening, although DH says Bug's constant Mommy, Mommy, Mommy would drive him up a wall. I can deal with her enthusiasm in wanting to ask or tell me things as it is so much nicer than the attitude I often get. She still scares me sometimes, though, when she forgets what she said, forgets what question she has just asked even as we are answering it, or insists I said things I never said. I think I'll watch it a little while longer and see how things pan out.

I guess I like kids well enough.

Oh, something funny Bean said as DH was trying to put her pajamas on her. He told her, "I'm going to put your pajamas on" and she replied laughing, "No, jamas not fit you!" Bug is constantly asking me to help her get dressed by asking for me to put something on, so I often make a big production of trying to put it on myself. Then she laughs and says, "No, not on you, on ME!" So the fact that the two year old was pointing out the error in her father's speech was pretty amusing.

It's after midnight and I should be sleeping, but the children didn't go to bed until 11 pm.

The past couple of days have been so tiring. Yesterday I was actually feeling pretty down until I decided to go out and take a walk. I did three .6 mile laps around the block. Bug came with me for the one, and then went back inside. The sun was still shining when I started, and I did some jogging too. The fresh air and exercise really perked me up, and I came back inside ready to start dinner. We had two guests, George and his daughter Jane (I've written about them on this site). Jane's mother, Judy, moved cross country taking her daughter with her, but George stayed here. He's been there to visit once, and Jane was able to come out for Christmas this year. Jane and Bug got together to play a couple of times and decided that they wanted to get together on Christmas Eve to exchange gifts, as they have done every year. So I invited George to dinner, and he stayed for awhile and had drinks and watched the Aloha Bowl.

My plan was to get some tamales and serve rice, beans, chips, salsa and that sort of stuff. Plus a ham for DH since he doesn't eat foods with more than one ingredient. Then I downscaled and just got some frozen tamales from Trader Joe's, but still planned on making beans and rice and a salad. I ended up making the ham, then deciding we needed bread with that, so I whipped up some whole wheat biscuits. I was going to make a salad, and I had fruit and homemade chex mix out on the table, plus a pie for dessert. But I needed stuff that I knew the girls would eat, so I asked them if they wanted mac and cheese or fishsticks. Jane chose fish and Bug chose mac and cheese. I made the mac and cheese in a pot and made the cheese sauce out of sharp cheddar and american. We had just gotten a box of frozen fish fillets when Jane was here the last time, so I heated those up as well. I ended up just serving ham, macaroni and cheese, breaded fish sticks, salad, biscuits, fruit and pie. It wasn't fancy, but it was still work, however, and there is always more work because the kids ask for more food, more water, what have you as soon as you sit down to eat. And guess who they asked? Yeah, me!

It felt very stereotypical of some era-the harried woman doing all the work while the men and children sit-but I mostly do it because it is easiest. They helped clear the table, and I did the dishes.

Our guests left around 10ish, and I went to church at 11 o'clock, and planned to wrap some gifts afterwards. Staying up late on Christmas Eve is a tradition for me. A solitary tradition as the manofthehouse always goes to bed. When I got home from church, he was sitting bleary-eyed on the floor while the children slept on various couches. We had had some drinks while our company was here, and that combined with the carbs he ate made him sleepy and hot. He went to bed, even after I asked him to help me carry up the spring horse from the basement. His last words to me were, "don't hurt yourself trying to carry it up from the basement." He wanted me to leave it there and he'd get it in the morning, but that is unacceptable to me. The presents have to be set out, doggone it! It's the glimpse of the room transformed which always awed me as a child.

There was more work to be done than I had realized, and I stayed up until 4 am. Even so, I forgot to put out one of the presents, the present that DH got for Bug. I had remembered it earlier, but it was feeling slightly overwhelmed after 3 am and I was in a hurry to finish for fear Bug would wake to go to the bathroom. So in the morning, after all the gifts were open, DH had to whisper and ask me what had happened to the robot raptor. Nuts!

After picking all the tape off the wrapping paper and folding it for the recycle bin, something I did as much to distract myself from the fact that there were very few presents for as for any environmental concerns, I decided I was too tired to stay awake anymore. I took a nap right there on the couch until I could no longer sleep with Bug's incessant need to ask me questions about her new toys. So I got up and made lunch. Bacon, scrambled eggs and a sweet potato hash made from bacon, onions and yams. No one likes sweet potatoes in the house, so I was the only one who had any. I wouldn't have made it, but I really need to work through all the yams I got from the food co-op.

It was a rather blah day. I was just too freaking tired and overwhelmed by the mess, and the numerous twist ties on the toys still in their boxes. DH was snapping left and right everytime Bug got whiney and loud, and two bitching people was just too much. I can take Bug's loud mouth, but every time DH yells it pisses me the hell off. Bug actually got everything she wanted for Christmas, but just did not seem excited at all when she came downstairs to the tree. I was having fun putting all the stuff out for Christmas Eve, but I didn't manage to convey the magic of Christmas, or something. Sigh. Or maybe she is just reserved about these things.

Bean liked her spring horse, loved her Clifford and played with the train set quite a bit. She threw her candy all over the floor, and we had a blast watching her run from the Robot Raptor. That was the highlight of the day for me, her hiding in a box, and then running for the bathroom and slamming the door closed. DH did show me the present he had ordered for me, which was a 2 drawer filing cabinet for our telephone nook. I get tired of the mess of papers all around and complain about it periodically. I had tried to buy a small filing cabinet a few years ago, but couldn't find one that would fit there. I guess it seemed like a good Christmas gift, but I was hoping it was something fun, to tell you the truth.

I served leftovers for dinner, and ended up lying down around 7:30 to take another short nap, while listening to Classic Christmas on the XM station. Of course, when I took Bean to bed at 11ish, all the XM Christmas stations were gone. It is so depressing to me. I loved Christmas so much as a child, and every year I try to make it fun and special, and every year I wind up feeling stressed and depressed. I don't get to see my new grandnieces or be with my extended family, I got the wrong dvd for DH, one of my presents for Bean never got here. And I spent the day in a haze of exhaustion as 2 days of little sleep was just 1 too many.

Part of it was that as a child, we had the time off from school, and my mom was usually home since the real estate business wasn't necessarily hopping at that time. My dad loved Christmas and buying presents, so he always overdid it. It was fun, getting to eat and drink things we didn't normally get to have, and getting the things we had been denied most of the year in one big festive flurry. The festive atmosphere lasted until New Year's Day when we took the tree down and the post-holiday blues set in, but by then we got to go back to school and get back in the routine.

So every year I try not to start celebrating Christmas too early, but I do Advent stuff. And every year the Christmas music is off the radio before Christmas is even over, and the news starts talking about taking the tree down and having it mulched before Christmas Day even gets here. I'm really not sure what I want, but it isn't having my husband come and kiss me good night while I'm vacuuming the floor after the kids just went to bed. I want fun and celebration and game playing and joking, but all we get is tired, cranky snapping.

I'm thinking maybe next year I'll have a party in the week between Christmas and New Year's. I always want to go to the Messiah Sing Along, but it hasn't worked out for me yet. I bet it would be fun to have a Messiah Sing Along/Play Along party right around Christmas, and I know some people who would come. I'd like to have a party or some type of celebration that was a tradition. It just seems to be me going to church, me playing Santa, me cleaning up. I'm not sure why I expect so much from Christmas, but I always do.

Conversation with my 2 year old yesterday in the car, on the way to yet another store for Christmas shopping. She asked for water, so I gave her the bottle of 3 day old water that was still in the car.

"Dis water yummy! I like water!"
"Oh good, I'm glad!"
"No, you not gad, you MOMMY!"
"You're right, I am mommy." Small pause, "I feel happy."
"I feel happy TEW! hahahahahahaha"

What would u look like as a fairy??.::PiCs::.[MORE RESULTS]
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OK, I saw it on TinyButterfly's blog and had to do it too. I'm such a follower.

You Are Cherry Pie

You're the perfect combo of innocent and sexy Those who like you enjoy a contradiction

Interesting. Cherry is my husband's favorite kind of pie.