Sometimes I can be such a doofus. When my kids decide to become rotten, everyone can turn and point the finger at me, because it will be all my fault. (Notice I said when they "decide"...because right now they are awesome, sweet and wonderful but I'm working really hard at changing all that.)
Case in point #1:
Dylan has this (what is actually super annoying although I'm realizing now that I shouldn't think so) habit of wanting everything done RIGHT NOW. If he needs a paper signed for school, he will literally follow me around the house nagging at me to sign it RIGHT NOW. If he has homework to do and he needs the computer and I'm on it, he will sit next to me bugging me that he needs to do it RIGHT NOW. When he's doing chores and he doesn't know what to do he will hassle me to come and straighten it out for him RIGHT NOW. It literally drives me crazy sometimes. So a couple of weekends ago I decided to teach him a lesson in patience. He had a permission slip that needed signing, and it was a Friday...we have all weekend to get that baby signed...but when does it want me to sign it? At 3:05 on Friday, five minutes after he's walked in the door, naturally. I told him to put it on the table and I'd get to it. And then I deliberately proceeded to ignore the paper so he would get the message that I would get to it eventually and he should stop worrying about it. I was determined to wait until Sunday night to sign the paper and give it back to him...and that's exactly what I did, even though it drove him crazy all weekend. And when it was all over, I realized I'd taught him a fabulous lesson in PROCRASTINATION! Who doesn't want a kid that waits til the last minute to do everything? See what I mean?...I'm a doofus.
Case in point #2:
A couple of months ago, Colby came to inform me that he was out of pens and pencils in his binder. "Where did they all go?" I asked, because I had given him a ton of them at the beginning of the school year. He told me how he had loaned them all out and people hadn't returned them. When asked why he was giving them all away, he said "well, people can't do their work without a pencil so I thought I should share"...So naturally I lectured him on how it was their own problem and they could just sit there and not get their work done because it wasn't my responsibility to provide pens and pencils for the whole school. Nice, eh?
I have, in the past, gotten after him for loaning out our bicycle pump, shovel, duct tape, and his bike...even though all of these things WERE returned in good order.
Tonight he was wandering around looking for his old ipod cords because a friend had locked himself out of his ipod and had lost his own cord and couldn't unlock it without plugging into the computer. My response? "Why is this your problem?" He said "well, I have a cord and I don't even use it anymore... I just thought it'd be nice to give it to him." I told him to go tell his friend to jump in a lake because he couldn't have our precious cord... (okay, I didn't really...but I might as well have)
Apparently I need to work a little harder to make Colby be SELFISH and UNKIND. Whatever I've done so far isn't working. Doh!
Why I want to change these very fabulous characteristics about my kids is beyond me. Next thing you know I'll be demanding they pick their noses and fart in public...and shovel all our snow into the neighbor's driveway. Maybe I'm just trying to make them be unkind, selfish procrastinators just like me...and THEN I can be so proud!
Needless to say, I went and apologized to Colby and told him I was glad he was a kind and sharing soul. I told him the next time I do something like that to remind me that he's trying to be kind and I should just crawl back into the nasty little hole from which I had emerged to try and make him be mean and selfish.
Maybe, just maybe, if I watch real close these kids can teach me a thing or two....
Ahhhh, I love this post Wendy!
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