Gah!!!!! 😈
Today. A day of frustrations, a day of wanting to smack my palm against my forehead, a day of wanting to have a remote control to aim at people to ‘mute’ them!
Anyway… I finally went to bed around midnight, waking Ady up to go and sit with the mad piriton’d up dancing crazy girl in the lounge as I’d crashed and burned singing ‘Love is in the air’ with her having been inspired by Joyce’s blog post of the same title! I seem to recall some sort of musical beds thingy went on, apparently we’d woken Davies up with our singing 😳 and shortly after Ady went downstairs he came into bed with me, the next thing I knew he was downstairs crying cos Ady told him to go back to bed (it was about 1am)! The next thing I knew after that is was 8am! Ady recuperated further for an hour or so and then when he got up and the coughing from all corners was driving me insane I snuck my book upstairs under the guise of going to get dressed and closed the bedroom door, laid on the bed and read in peace. Bliss. For all of about 10 minutes….
Ady was first up bringing the camera with some photos he wanted me to ok him deleting, swiftly followed by Tarly with her cuddly toy tiger who apparently *needed* me to stroke him. Hot on Tarly & Tiger’s tails was Davies who wanted me to listen to his newly made up song… 🙄 I sent them all away again but really my peace was shattered and shortly afterwards Ady started clearing out the cupboard under the stairs (always a sensible task to begin doing when you are due at the in-laws for lunch in half an hour) which meant he was calling up the stairs to me every couple of minutes about whether I still wanted x,y or z?
So we were late getting out of the house (surprise! :roll:) and Dad and Ady headed off to get some logs, Davies and Scarlett were entertained by Mum for a bit so I got my book out of my bag and tried a read over there but Mum kept talking to me so that didn’t work. Dad and Ady came home then so we started to eat lunch. Now Davies does this admittedly *very* annoying thing sometimes when he’s eating of sort of humming and yumming as he eats. I’m always telling him off for it and it really irritates my Dad. So he starts doing it while eating a chunk of cheese, Dad tells him to stop, he sort of eyes Dad up and then carries on so Dad really yells at him. Davies dissolves in a sobbing heap and has to be placed on my lap. Not content with having managed that Dad continues to rant at him and then starts on me about discipline, pandering to my children and if I won’t teach them how to behave then he will!! I imagine anyone who knows me already knows I can be fairly harsh on my kids myself so I certainly didn’t agree with any of that. I started to answer back and it very quickly degenerated into a shouting match 🙁 . I got the kids and Ady getting their coats and shoes on and demanded that unless he apologised for reducing a small child to tears because he was utterly out of order for doing so then we were leaving. Cue a stand off between me and Dad, Mum butting in, me in tears and Ady shepherding children out of the whole scene. Dad finally did agree that he hadn’t meant to make him cry, that indeed it was not his place to discipline my children anyway and that he shouldn’t have shouted so I got Davies to apologise for ignoring Dad’s first telling off and Dad to apologise to Davies for shouting and making him cry. So we stayed.
I felt slightly hypocritical (and indeed was accused of being so) as I have shrieked and shouted at my kids so much these last few weeks myself but that is just a tiny percentage of the time I spent with them that although it may be unpleasant it certainly does not characterise my relationship with them. When they only see my parents once or twice a week for a few hours shouting at D until he cries is something that will have an impact on his relationship with my Dad. What he did was basically bully D by using his size, authority and volume to scare him to tears – that is not acceptable and on the occassions when I know I have been guilty of behaving wrongly to the children I always apologise. Anyway it appears to have been forgotten now so rant over.
We ended up having a fairly pleasant afternoon after that little episode and Dad agreed he would pay for a course for me to learn a new skill which could help with some freelance work – not being deliberately secretive about it but I still have some thinking to do on it and maybe some chatting to a few of you next week so I’ll save it for then.
We came home to meet Frazer who popped round after work to try and work out what exactly is the matter with my pc that died after Xmas, so Ady dealt with the children’s bedtime and got dinner cooking while me and Frazer dismantled, hoovered and finally gave up on it having decided it was likely a virus of some sort. He’s taken the tower away and is going to put windows XP on it using one of my laptop discs so all the computers will be on the same system and hopefully it will get shot of the virus too – or something! I don’t really understand what he said actually but he seemed confident 😉
Of course all that took *hours* so Davies ended up starting to watch ET which predictably he loved and Ady is recording the later repeat for him to watch tomorrow, dinner was really late getting on and Davies has only just fallen asleep. Off to have a bath, drink some wine and eat a very late roast 🙂