At least it wasn't Bernice Bobs Her Hair...

Well, it happened.  A rite of passage I had hoped we'd skip over.  Kiddo gave herself a haircut.  It could've been worse, I know - it really was more of a trim than a full-on cut, not even severe enough to require an emergency visit to the hair salon.  (Yet.)  I didn't even notice it until the day after it happened.  But still...


There we were the other night, Kiddo and I, in her bathroom after her bath, me tending to her wet hair.  I was about to braid it, so I began combing and parting it in the center when I noticed some very short hairs, right in the front at her hairline.  I didn't think anything of it at first - her hair does tend to break right at the front from frequent ponytailing and barretting, so a few flyaway, shorter strands aren't unusual.  Then I looked more closely.  This was more than a few flyaways - this was at least two locks of hair.  Right in the front, right in the middle, where a widow's peak would be if Kiddo had one.

 

Her hair was still rather wet, so it was hard at first to determine the extent of the damage.  It was already clear, however, that this had been cut, and not by any professional.

"Kiddo," I said in my stern parenting voice, "Did you cut your hair?"

"Um..... I don't remember." came the Reaganesque reply as she stared intently down at the sink - more so as not to meet my reproving look than because she'd actually noticed all the solidified-into-something-stronger-than-cement toothpaste globs she never, ever rinses out of the bowl when she's done brushing her teeth.

"Kiddo.............."  I decided to throw her by changing questioning tactics.  I haven't watched approximately seventeen thousand hours of the various flavors of Law & Order for nothing, after all. I can interrogate with the best of them.   "When did you do this?"

"Um......" Kiddo paused, hoping perhaps that I'd have one of my short-term memory lapses and forget what I'd just asked her, but finally she cracked under my withering gaze, doubled by my reflection in the mirror.  There was no escaping this.

"I did it when I was doing my presidents homework."  Okay, that made a little sense, as the "presidents homework" involved cutting words out and pasting them into a Venn diagram about Washington and Lincoln.  So, she had scissors handy at the time already.

I absorbed and processed this for a moment, then let go with the dreaded follow-up question: "WHY?!"

She really had no good answer.  She tried "I don't know" and mumbled something about how she "didn't mean to" and her hair was "bothering her" and she "didn't realize" and wrapped up with an apology.  Had they been studying explorers instead of presidents in first grade, she would have been able to pull a George Mallory and answer "Because it was there."  That seems to be the real reason, from what Detective Mommy could discern anyhow...

By now, sufficient time had elapsed (along with the heat of my glare) to dry enough of the hair for me to get a fuller picture of what a pair of Fiskars in the hands of a not-closely-enough-supervised six-and-three-quarters year old can do.  

I should pause here to mention that I tried to have Kiddo's hair cut in bangs once, when she was a toddler and finally had hair in quantity and length enough that "keeping it out of her eyes" was something requiring consideration.  It was a mistake.  Kiddo's hair was way too curly to allow for decent bangs.  What she wound up with was a frizzy fringe that more sprang outward and upward than lay smoothly across the forehead, keeping out of the eyes as had been my hope.  Back then, I swore I'd never do bangs for her again, as tempting as the idea was in terms of keeping her hair neat and out of her face.  While Kiddo's hair does seem to be more "wavy" than outright "curly" now that it is longer, I still haven't dared attempt bangs again for fear of reliving that horrible, unmanageable, frizzy fringe look.

Kiddo, however, dared and did.  Ugh.

Detective Mommy had one, last follow-up question before turning the case over to Judge and Jury Mommy.

"What did you do with the hair that you cut?"

And with the mumbled "I put it in my boot" response, I knew that she knew that what she'd done was wrong and was something she'd therefore tried to cover up.  Perhaps not premeditation, but definitely a clear indication of guilt.  (As a quick aside, here, her boot?  That was the best hiding spot she could come up with?  My kid is definitely not a criminal mastermind.  Well, yet, anyhow...)

She stood there, tears beginning to spill down her cheeks and generally looking pathetic, with that damned row of hair high atop her forehead like a peacock's feathery 'do.

I considered appropriate consequences, the fitting punishment for this crime.  I quickly realized that just having to live with it would be punishment enough.  I shook my head sadly with a sigh for full effect, picked up the comb and began to comb her hair again.

"Well, Kiddo," I said, my voice laced with disappointment and regret, "there's nothing I can do to fix this.  We'll just have to wait for it to grow back in again, and that's going to take a very long time."


"Like how long?" she asked, a glimmer of hope in her eyes that she'd managed to escape a harsh sentence.  "Until..........April?"

"Oh, no, no, no.  Much longer than that.  Like, until you are eight or maybe even nine."

I wasn't exaggerating that much, after all.  I mean, hair grows at what?  A half inch a month?  Prior to her Edward Scissorhandsing, her hair came to just below her shoulders, so about eight or nine inches long.  Nine inches = eighteen months, which puts Kiddo at closing in on her ninth birthday.  Well, past her eighth birthday, anyhow.

This news came as quite the shock to her.  She looked positively chagrined.  "And," I continued in the same disappointment-shot-with-regret tone, "it is going to look MUCH sillier before it looks normal again.  I'm not going to be able to hide it that well, either, since it is right smack-dab in the middle of your head."

That was it, the killing blow.  Kiddo crumpled and of course, Evil Judge Mommy felt my heart crack a bit at seeing her misery.  This misery continued through dinner, with much snuffling and weeping (exacerbated, as it was, by the specter of the Disappointed and Upset Daddy next to whom she was seated).  By bedtime, she was so thoroughly defeated that I felt the need to relent a bit and attempt to mitigate her woe.  I did so by telling her the following story (at bedtime every night, Kiddo always asks each of us to tell her either a story about When We Were Young or When She Was a Baby - with "Baby" loosely equivalent to "any time she can't clearly recall herself") -

When I was a kid, my sister and I were huge Sesame Street fans.  Even at the age of almost seven, which is when this story took place, I still was quite fond of Sesame Street - all the PBS lineup, really - mostly because it was one of the very, very few shows my mother would let us watch.  When your choices are that limited, you'll watch whatever you can.  Anyhow, our loyal Sesame Street viewing period coincided with the time when one of the people on Sesame Street was Olivia (played the by the recently deceased Alaina Reed-Hall), Gordon's sister.





Now, along with having a lovely singing voice and performing a great rendition of the Sesame Street classic Sing, Olivia, as you might have spotted in the clip above, wore her hair in a style that included beads.  My sister and I were in love with Olivia's hair.  We were envious of Olivia's hair.  We wanted Olivia's hair.  Well, one day, as my mother was distracted with the care and tending of our infant sister, my then 4 year old sister and I decided we were going to give ourselves Olivia's hair.  We sat there in our room and pondered how to do this.  Okay, fine, I confess - I did most of the pondering.  My sister really was just going along for the ride on whatever scheme I came up with.  My eyes darted around the room, trying to figure out what we could use to simulate those awesome, super-cool beads.  Finally, they alit on the artist's kit Santa had brought me for Christmas the previous December.  A-ha!  Inspiration struck!  This kit included no less than ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY EIGHT magic markers, in every shade of every color on the planet.  Well, in every shade of all the "big" colors, anyhow.  I explained my plan to my sister and got her agreement that I would do her hair first.  (I should point out that my sister's hair was the exact opposite of mine.  Whereas mine was brunette, short and full of unruly curls, hers was blonde, straight as a pin, and right around shoulder length.  Much more conducive to my brilliant plan.)  She perched on the edge of her bed and I got to work.

My plan was simple - we'd imitate the look of a head of braided and beaded hair by removing the cap from a magic marker, wrapping the end of a section of hair around the tip of the marker, and then jamming the cap back on to hold it in place.  My sister's favorite color at the time was blue, so I used all the blues, purples and greens on her head - almost half of the markers in the kit.  There was a bit of trial and error at first - not enough hair to keep the marker jammed in place, too much hair to get the cap wedged back on - but I got the hang of it pretty quickly and in about fifteen or twenty minutes, it was done.  She looked glorious, and immediately began to gently swing her head to and fro, making the markers-posing-as-beads click and clack in the most magically wondrous of ways.  I urged her to get my hair "beaded" too, but alas, being as short and curly as it was, the markers really didn't work in it.  It was just too difficult to get enough hair to wrap around the end and then, if she did manage to get a marker applied, it jutted out from my scalp at an odd angle, rather than cascading softly down around my shoulders like hers did.  I was quite disappointed, but still proud of my handiwork, which we immediately ran down the hall to show off to our mother.

(At this point in my tale, I paused to ask Kiddo what she thought my mother's reaction was.  "What did you DO?!?!?!?!?" came Kiddo's response.  She was pretty much right on the mark with that.)

Yes, our mother, rather than either being pleased at our ingenuity and creativity or just impressed by our beautiful new hairdos, flipped right the heck out.  In retrospect, I'm sure that the sleep deprivation that comes with having an infant, along with the generally being run raggedness that comes with also having a four and six year old, two dogs, one cat and no nanny or cook or maid around, may've dulled her sense of wonder and awe a tad.  As it was, we were told in no uncertain terms to get those markers out of our hair RIGHT NOW and then grounded for an eternity following the grim discovery that not only is hair porous enough to soak up magic marker ink when it spends some quality time jammed up against a magic marker's tip, but that said ink will in fact be as permanent as the art kit promises and not wash out of that hair.  We were summarily taken in for hair cuts before being sent to our room and the lovely, fantastic art kit with all its rainbow shades of markers was confiscated, not to be seen again until over two full years later when I had a Social Studies project to do for school and needed something with which to color in my feeble attempt at an artistic rendering of a Lenni Lenape village.

So, I told this story to the still sniffling and small Kiddo, and she was mollified somewhat, as she generally is by tales of my miscreant youth and its errant ways.  The following morning, I attempted to hide the pieces of hair by sort of smoothing them over to the side, but I do fear that in another month or two, it's going to look like a teeny, Charlie Chaplin moustache, right there in the middle of her forehead.

 

And if it does, that will be the point at which I take her to a salon and see what, if anything, they can do.  Maybe her hair has lost enough curl that bangs would be an option after all.................

The perfect gift idea

This morning, as happens almost every schoolday morning, I found myself saying a variation of "Hurry up/finish your breakfast/you're running out of time/you're going to miss the bus" for the seventeen-squillionth time, to which Kiddo responded "I'm so SICK of hearing you SAY that!" in that I'm only six-and-a-half but I'm totally practicing my sixteen-and-a-half sullen, pissy 'tude way that is guaranteed to tick me off. (As she is only six and not sixteen, I cannot take away the car keys just yet, so usually I wind up taking other things away instead - iPod, whatever book she's reading instead of eating, etc.) Well, this morning when she snarked about how sick she was of hearing me SAY that, I snarked back "Oh yeah? Well I'm sick of saying it!" because neither of us are particularly morning people and if she can channel sixteen and a half, I can certainly bust out my inner six and a half year old every now and again. And truly, I am just as sick of hearing the Nagging Mom voice as she is, and nothing is quicker at getting my morning started off wrong than having to recite the Get Yourself Going mantra seventeen-squillion and three times in a ninety minute period.

That is when inspiration hit me. I figured out the perfect gift idea for Christmas.

I need someone else to be the Sayer of Such Things. The Nagger. The Nudger. The Incessant-Repeater-to-Counter-the-Terrifically-Annoying-Selective-Hearing of the kid. But who? Not Hubby, because she can tune him out almost as easily as she tunes me out. No, clearly I need bigger guns.

I pondered for a bit, as I assembled her lunch and made sure her snowpants and library book were packed in her backpack. I thought about folks who have voices I wouldn't mind hearing all day long instead of Nagging Mom Voice.

Alan Rickman!



Alan RIckman has the best voice EVER! I once listened to him read a book-on-tape version of The Return of the Native (after waiting over three months for my hold request to come through at the public library) even though the only place I could listen to the 18 tapes that comprised the audiobook was my minivan, so it took weeks of hearing a paragraph or two at a time to hear the whole thing. He's got a kickass voice. Oh yes, I'd much rather hear him than me hustling Kiddo along as she dawdles over her bowl of cereal that has turned to mush or her fried eggs that have congealed and gone glacially cold on her plate. Definitely Alan Rickman. Or Jeremy Irons!



He does sinister quite well - just think of his Scar in The Lion King... (Incidentally, a study was conducted a few years ago that concluded that the perfect speaking voice would be a blend of Rickman and Irons. So apparently my ears have a very good ear for such things.)

But would either of them work for Kiddo? Not sure. I think I might need even bigger guns to get her going and save my sanity in the mornings.

Finally, I hit upon the perfect choice.

Oh yes.



James "This....is CNN" Earl Jones. I'm pretty sure that if Darth Vader were telling Kiddo to hurry up and finish her eggs, she'd hurry up and finish her eggs, and even clear her place without reminding, too.

Do you think Mr. Jones could be here by Friday?

Oh, and as for Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons, I'd gladly take them both as well. Just for everyday reading sorts of requirements. For example, I have to read a lot of labels at the grocery store to figure out if something is a safe food item for Kiddo. "Sugar, Corn Syrup, Modified Corn Starch, Citric Acid, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Mineral Oil, Carnauba Wax, Artificial Colors: FDC Red #40, Yellow #5, Yellow #6, Blue #1" would sound a lot more pleasant to my brain if spoken in a well-modulated, British accent. Kiddo's endless stream of school-related paperwork would sound better British, too. I'm sure I'd pay much more attention to the upcoming PTSA meeting agenda or the deadline for Box Tops in that case. I don't have a GPS thingy in my car, so I am forced to rely upon printed out directions from Google Maps (how old-fashioned, I know!) and would feel much better about finding that next exit if instructed by Alan or Jeremy.

It could go even further - Facebook! Twitter! Status updates and tweets sure would sound more posh, if not funnier, if read by one of them. (I could even get James Earl Jones in on the action, since he'd be available during the schooldays when Kiddo is gone and doesn't need the Maternal Nagging.) Clearing my blog reader would be more entertaining (and less eye straining) with one of those gents reading aloud. But then, a lot of the blogs I follow are written by women, and have a distinctly female voice. So, I'd need a chick, too. How about



Emma Thompson? That'd keep it classy...

So there you have it. The perfect gift idea for my house this Christmas. I'd better go get the spare room made up...

Not the best 24 hours of my life...

12:36am - wake up to Kiddo calling "Mommy! I was just coughing so hard I threw up on the floor!" Even less exciting than the call about middle of the night barfing was the knowledge that (a) we'd had pasta with red sauce for dinner and (b) we had two showings scheduled for today.

Got her and the floor all cleaned up, couldn't fall back asleep for the longest time. Woke up this morning (Hubby let me sleep in) still groggy and grouchy, spent the morning getting everything all tidied up for our two showings and vacated the premises. Hubby went to run some errands and Kiddo and I went over to visit some friends who had been kind enough to invite us over for lunch. After spending a delightful afternoon catching up with our friends, Kiddo decided to throw a class A temper tantrum when I gave her the two minute warning about it being time to leave. This devolved into a 35 minute long temper tantrum in the car for the entire ride home. Walked in the door and sent Kiddo immediately up to her room for a time out until it is time to head out for the next showing at 5:00.

At least Hubby and I had been heartened to know that Hubby had driven by our house about 20 minutes after the designated showing time and saw the agent and the prospective buyers standing in the driveway talking. They were there, talking in the driveway, for another 15 minutes before they left. That sure seemed like a good sign, right?

Nope. Our agent's assistant just called to tell us that the showing agent couldn't get into the house because the front storm door was locked. As in, the door that is outside the front door with the lockbox on it. So, they never saw the house (but apparently didn't call our agent or Hubby certainly could've been home within 5 minutes to let them in!) and now, our agent isn't sure that they want to reschedule and come back.

Now, that door was locked by one of two people - either me, because if the inside door is open, I tend to flip the bolt on the storm door, or Kiddo, because she likes to play with the lock on the storm door. So, Hubby can very clearly claim self righteous anger over this latest development. I certainly am blaming myself entirely anyhow for not thinking to check the damn storm door before we headed out this morning. So, I'm pissed at myself, Hubby is pissed at me, I'm pissed at Kiddo who is persisting with the obnoxious, argumentative behavior. Outside, it is pissing down rain on top of everything else. Just need the cat to piss on the bed for the cherry on the sundae of my day! Yeesh!!!

Oh, and by the way, I hate the word "piss" and never use it, ever, but right now, it just fits my mood. I'm in a pissy, pissy mood. Grrrr.

I was so hopeful about the two showings today, and now I blew it for one of them. Damn. Well, I'm off to build myself a doghouse in the back yard and go crawl into it until our next showing.

"This is going to hurt me more than it will you."

That's one of those things parents say to their kids, usually when doling out some punishment that invariably seemed like it had to be much more painful to the kid in question, and that kid could never imagine how this punishment could possibly be worse for the grown-up involved.

Well, tonight was one of those "This is going to hurt me more than it will you" moments for me. The trouble occurred during gymnastics today. Now, she had been doing pretty well prior to this class with sitting still, listening to the teachers, all that good stuff. (I was asked to stay and observe for the entire session, unlike the other parents who were requested to leave after dropping their kid(s) off, I think mostly because the teachers, two college-aged girls, were uncomfortable with having a kid with SPD - especially Type I, the Sensory Modulation Disorder type - without extra supervision in the class. Granted, I'm 99.99% sure that their entire knowledge of SPD comes from the minute and a half talk I had with them on the first day; they brushed me off at the time but I think it made them nervous nonetheless.) We always talk in the car on the way to gymnastics about how if Kiddo doesn't behave, we will leave.

I want to digress for a moment here to talk about how we discipline in our family. The discipline system that has worked best for us has been the 1-2-3 Magic system. If you aren't familiar (and I do highly recommend it because it works so well for us) basically, the child gets to a count of three to modify their behavior, and if they don't make the needed adjustment, game over at three. Some offenses are an immediate "three" and the child doesn't get a second and third chance to correct. A typical consequence is an immediate time out, or else the ending of whatever activity was going on at the time of the three count. We also talk a lot about choices and consequences - Kiddo can choose to behave one way or another, and the consequences of each choice are X or Y. Nothing revolutionary, but it works for us. Additionally, I should mention that we are not a corporal punishment family. We have never, ever struck the kiddo and do not intend to ever do so. (I suppose I should further note that my parents did believe in spanking, and did spank us when they felt the situation warranted.) We began using 1-2-3 Magic at our pediatrician's suggestion when Kiddo was in the throes of some very Terrible Twos, and it improved behavior quite dramatically. So, 1-2-3 Magic has been our main system of discipline for almost 3 years now.

Anyhow, the kiddo missed class last week because of the head lice situation, so she'd had a disrupted routine. Now, consistency is key for most children, I daresay, and I know for an absolute fact that it is extremely important to a sensory processing disordered kid like Kiddo. She also had an incident at her summer program this morning - another child pushed her into a pile of mud, water and goat poop, getting her quite muddy and upset - and she had generally been a bit cranky regardless of anything else. So, we had the odds a bit stacked against us even as we walked into the Y.

The kiddo was not doing a great job at controlling herself from the moment we got out of the car - she was pretty hyped up. Despite our pre-class talk (during which she "Yes Mommy"ed me repeatedly) and my strict reminder that she needed to stay calm and quiet before class started, she took off running as soon as we entered the gymnasium. Uh-oh. I spoke with her twice in the 4 minutes before class started, warning her each time that she needed to stay calm and focused or we'd be out of there.

Do you see where this is going? *sigh*

It completely didn't help matters that some of the other kids in the class were utterly misbehaving today, either. They were messing around, goofing off instead of sitting quietly in their "butterfly" positions and watching the teachers. There are a few kids in particular who always goof off, and I've spoken with Kiddo about how she should just stay away from them instead of letting them suck her in to the misbehavior. (I know, wishful thinking...) Today, the teachers were giving out the consequence of missing turns and the kiddo missed two turns for goofing around in the first half of class. I went over after the second time she was skipped over and spoke with her again. This time I started a count and told her if she hit three, we were leaving.

With about five minutes left to go, the class was at the balance beam, which is close to where I was sitting (with a lot of the other parents - the side of the gym was full of folks waiting to collect their kids at the end of class). Kiddo got up from where she'd been told to sit, moved over and sat down next to this other little girl who is generally a huge instigator of bad behavior and then looked over at me, all "Ha ha, what are YOU going to do about it?" as I glared. Sure enough, the second the kiddo's butt hit the mat, the other little girl started pushing Kiddo and generally roughhousing. I called over to Kiddo that this was TWO. She looked at me, snorted and went back to roughhousing. I stood up menacingly, in that Mean Mommy way. She pretended not to see me. By this point the other little girl was leaning into Kiddo's face and blowing on her, hard. Kiddo looked over to see if I was watching - and I was, and still standing as well. Then she leaned over and began blowing a spitty sort of raspberry with her tongue sticking out at the other girl.

Oh no, she didn't.......... Yep, she did. I walked over to her, bent down and said "You are on TWO. You need to behave RIGHT NOW or we are leaving." (Yes, there were only about 4 minutes left in class at this point - Kiddo wasn't aware of that.) In response, she rolled her eyes, stuck her tongue out AT ME and told me with her most major Junior Wiseass attitude "You go AWAY, Mom." She then proceeded to continue blow/spit at the other little girl, who was cracking up and totally egging her on.

Oh NO she didn't... I told her "That's it. That's three. Stand up, we're going."

And this is the point at which this particular disciplinary consequence began to hurt me more than it hurt her. You see, the kiddo doesn't get embarrassed by her extreme behavior. Not even in hindsight. (Boy, I hope that age - the age of being embarrassed in front of her peers - comes soon.) She immediately began screaming at me "I'm not leaving! I want to stay and have FUN with my FRIENDS. You go away, Mommy!" and then in almost the same breath, added "I want a last chance! I'll cooperate!"

This is where that split second of "Oh man, it would just be so much easier to cave in and give her another last chance" ran through my head. We were right in the middle of the gym, the kiddo was squalling loudly, eyes were riveted to the drama, and I was fairly certain that if I did relent, the kiddo would toe the line for those last, few minutes of class.

But.

Relenting is so, so not the right parenting call, right? I will admit, there have been times when Hubby and I both have caved a bit and given her "one last chance" (so, essentially, going to four instead of three, by repeating the "two" count) but this was not going to be one of those times. Kiddo had been disrespectful to me and to her class. The screaming was entirely uncalled for (oh ha ha ha...) and the telling me to go away plus sticking her tongue out at me was also completely unacceptable, and Kiddo knows that darn well. Furthermore, she knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that spitting at anyone is never, ever okay.

So, with grim determination, I hustled her off the floor and over to the bench where her sandals were sitting next to my purse. She decided to kick things up a few notches and began screaming even louder. At this point the entire gym was frozen, except for the reverberations of her screeches around the cavernous space. All eyes on us. I stayed utterly calm and kept my voice low. Kiddo broke away and made a dash for the mat, sticking out her tongue at me and telling me "NO, I'm going back with my friends now!" I caught her before she'd made it more than two feet. I calmly gave her the choice of putting on her sandals herself or having me do it. She snatched a sandal out of my hand and threw it at me.

I then gathered up the sandals and my purse and picked her up. This began the walk that always seems so much longer when one has a tantruming child... that walk past all the collected onlookers. I did catch a few sympathetic glances among the "Huh, that lady sure is nuts" looks. Whatever, I'm not parenting to impress y'all, Looky-Loos, I'm parenting my child in the hopes that she will grow up to be a kind and respectful sort of person. We got out into the hallway, Kiddo still yelling bloody murder, and I set her down on a bench to try once more to get her shod. No go - more throwing, yelling and then hitting me. I scooped her up and carried her for The Long Walk Part Two: Out to the Car. We definitely turned heads (and probably induced several headaches; I know by this time my own skull was pounding). Whenever the kiddo screamed at me that she wanted to get down or go back to class (which at this point was over anyhow) I calmly and quietly repeated that her behavior was unacceptable and we were going home.

She tried once more to get away from me, barefoot, in the parking lot. She attempted to accomplish this by biting me on the arm that was holding her. If I had set her down at that point, I am certain she would've run, without looking, back towards the Y. I got the door to the van open as quickly as possible and strapped her into her booster seat. She proceeded to tantrum all the way home (coming perilously close to making herself throw up from the extreme levels of drama, which really didn't help anything). When we got home, I carried her (still barefoot) inside and set her down. I then grabbed the largest trash bag I could find and headed upstairs. I wound up doing a Stuffed Animal Round-up, collecting every last stuffed animal (or as Kiddo calls them, "guys") and putting them into the bag. Kiddo was by this time sitting on her bedroom floor, watching. I then ran the shower, got her into it and washed as she snarled every mean thing she could think of to me - "I only like DADDY and NOT you!" "You're NOT my friend ANYMORE!" "You're SO MEAN to me, Mommy!" - dried her off and got her jammies on and teeth brushed. Then I told her it was bedtime and that her guys were in Time Out until tomorrow.

By this point, Remorseful Kiddo had reappeared. I stuck to my guns and sent her to bed regardless, though I did accept her apology and reassured her that I still love her, no matter what, even when I'm upset with her and she's upset with me. She got in bed but was still awake a half hour later, so I let her come downstairs and eat dinner before returning to bed (obviously, with no bedtime stories or evening TV). I do not really like the idea of sending a child to bed without dinner, I mostly just wanted her to calm down first - though if she had fallen asleep as she sometimes does after a tantrum, I wouldn't have gotten her up again just to eat.

So, that was my evening today. Yes, I really think it hurt me more than it hurt her, too. I mean, besides where I now have her teethprint in my upper arm along with various scratches and bruises caused by her during the meltdown. She won't bat an eye at going back to the next class - there will be no embarrassment on her part to see the people she was wigging out in front of so completely today. I, on the other hand, will feel somewhat embarrassed, but hey, nobody said being a parent was easy, right? While debriefing with Hubby when he got home, I was glad to hear he agreed with me that removing her when she hit the three count was the only call to make. I was tempted to ignore the behavior, but who does that really help? It might make things easier for me (like the other parents who just idly watch while their little darling acts up something fierce - hello, dad of Spitty McPushyhands, wanna do something about it? Possibly keep your eye on your little darling as she goes wild instead of keeping your eyes on your BlackBerry? Yeesh!) but Hubby and I feel like we need to stick to our guns and stay consistent with the rules. Sometimes, it just isn't too fun being Bad Cop.

Here's hoping tomorrow is a better day for Mean Mommy and the Drama Queen...