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Sunday, December 15, 2013

I Need to Get Back

So, I abandoned my blog for a while.  I'm not sure why, but I'm unabandoning it with a very honest post.
I think of this blog in many ways as my outlet, when I just need to anonymously vent about all things related in any way to parenting, or even my life.

We have hit a new chapter in parenting, and frankly, I need to share out of nothing but sheer frustration.

The biggest one is 10.  I had no idea that 10-12 was so freaking difficult.  It is.  If you have girls, when you get to this age, if you don't drink, you will, and if you do drink, have someone start watching you to make sure you don't get out of hand.  The stage is that hard.

This weekend, we had a big troop sleepover.  I'm not sure what started it, but something, somewhere set off a chain reaction with the big one that set off an atomic bomb of attitude, with a mushroom cloud of nasty behaviour that could be seen for miles.  It was off the charts.  I haven't seen her this bad since the last time her dad deployed and it got super ridic.
I'm seriously at a loss.
I managed to make it through the night.  All the parents in my home saw her behaviour.  I apologized.  I vented a little.  They empathized, but mostly, I was embarrassed and frustrated.  There was nothing I could do in the moment with 20 girls in my home who needed to have a good time, and 1 who was determined not to.
So, the dealing with it came the next day.
Yesterday, for the first time ever, I made The Biggest One scrub the toilets.  Seriously. I vowed a while back that this was the next direction her punishments would be going, and I stuck to it.  Taking things away seemed to be doing nothing.  Her arm has been broken (a story I need to blog about to catch you up anyway) for a while and she already lost out on her archery lessons until that is healed.  So, I really needed a new effective deterrent that I could go with.
Now, let me say that it was totally supervised, and frankly, I don't think there is anything harmful about cleaning a bathroom, at all, but at the age of 10, it sucks big time.  She hated every single second of it with a passion.  When we were all done, I ask her if she ever wanted to do that again.  It was a resounding no.  Then I told her to consider it every time she opened her mouth to be rude, every time she wanted to stomp out of a room, and so one.  From now on, the response would be to clean a toilet.  If you have crappy behaviour, you get a crappy punishment (see what I did there).  I feel it fitting.
Now, one of two things will happen, it will help some and she will think before she acts, or we will have the cleanest toilets in the world.  Either way, I win.
In all honesty, though, I'd much rather clean the toilets my self and have a daughter with improved behaviour.  Really.  In fact, I'll even take that for Christmas.

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