After five days of sickness, cold temps and behaviour inspired by the hounds of hell from both of the boys, I clocked a sleep that broke the 6 hour mark last night (!!) and I’m feeling ready to take on the week.
Too bad it’s Friday already.
Hands down, the lowest point in the week was Wednesday. Nixon was home from kindy with that green-snot nose and relentless cough, Ethan was home from school with a minor cold but was able to swindle me because of my own raging head cold and hacking cough. My Mum Faculties are running on empty at the moment so this wasn’t a particularly hard task and that child can pump out the waterworks at the drop of a hat!
So, 2 boys home, rain all day, and…………… a scheduled power cut from 9-3.
I KNOW.
We were at the very top of a major downhill slide, compounded by the fact that all 3 of us were sick so it wasn’t like we could go visiting or hang out with people with wifi or anything. In hindsight we should have just packed up the iPads and parked outside McDonalds for an hour, that would have kept everyone happy – plus Coke Zero.
The slide plunged deeper on Thursday, culminating in a barrage of terrible behaviour from both boys.
Nixon – Threenager
Life with Nixon runs something like this at the moment;
“Nix do you want to go for a walk in the stroller with Mum and Nana or stay here with Dad?”
“Stay home with Daddy”.
“Ok, see you in a while”.
Cue massive, thrashing, deafening tantrum because he wants to go for a walk. You might receive a black eye, lose some hair, a window could get smashed, definitely some toys thrown or books ripped. Repeat every time you have to add or remove clothes, change diaper or toilet him, require him to eat a meal, or defy him by not purchasing a fucking $7.50 cookie stamp in Farmers yesterday – the fact that he seemed to know it was in a 60% off sale and was like “Mum, are you really going to put yourself through this, for the sake of $3 and change???” didn’t deter me. I WAS NOT CAVING.
He was carried kicking and screaming out of a department store in my weakened state whilst I also manhandled a giant bag of 6 bath towels because who can resist a Thursday Manchester sale at Farmers right??? It. Was. Exhausting. Nix is 18.5 kilos and when you factor in the thrashing and kicking force and the fact that I’d been bedridden for 2 days, I was out of reserves. He wasn’t finished yet. After calming down, I thought we’d go for a walk through the mall seeing we hadn’t seen any other humans since Monday. That was not acceptable to the threenager who dug his heels in and starfished his way around the floor in a tight loop until I eventually gave up and took a second to breathe and raised my head upward, eyes closed, searching for patience………
Cue friendly stranger – “Just wanted to say hi, I LOVE your blog!!! Looks like he’s having a moment there?”
“Oh him. THIS IS HIS STATUS QUO, just ignore like I am”.
Jesus. Of all the days of all the moments to meet a reader, it happened on this day. The day of Exit-the-House desperation, the day of I-may-have-showered-or-I-may-not-have, you be the judge. The day Nixon is shooting death lasers out of his eyes and his butt, all of them aimed at my head. I actually just wanted to lay down on the mall floor with him and just succumb, wait for someone bigger than both of us to do what I knew I’d eventually have to do – put Nixon under my arm in the horizontal tantrum hold and march his ass (slowly as he’s so freaking heavy and there’s the shopping bag…..) back to the truck where we can sit and cry breathe with no one watching our collective meltdown.
Ethan – Tween
I’m not sure I can funny up this situation as our eldest son just seemingly hates me 24 hours a day right now. Which, he tells me, is because I am always mad at him. This is invariably the truth. I am mad at him 95% of the time and I don’t like it. I hate feeling this way and honestly it’s affecting the whole family dynamic. But to be fair, he is an asshole 95% of the time. Not a ‘Bad Kid’, just an asshole doing normal asshole stuff, back-chat, not self-managing, disrespecting all of the adults in our house, picking on and antagonizing his brother which is basically just throwing petrol on Nixon’s extremely ‘bright’ flame and invoking more chaos.
So yeah. Combine that with a couple of revelations about how small and seemingly irrelevant my blog is (ie my WORK that I pour my heart and soul into) in the grand scheme of things and it’s been a pretty blah week.
One thing I read this week that I totally loved was this post from Lisasaurus which actually was the kick-in-the-butt I needed to sit down and write > Living My Truth.
How was your week guys? Anyone else got some amaze threenager or tween stories to share? Obvs I DID get new towels so there’s that I suppose………