I was dreading last weekend because I had several assignments due for my last class in my master's degree program and I would be home alone with the kids. I am two weeks away from finished and I can't begin to describe how anxious I am to be done. Working when I was all by myself with the three little monsters was not going to be easy. The worst part though would be getting groceries while dragging and fighting all of them through the store without being turned in for child abuse. I decided that rather than risk taking the three monkeys out in public by myself, I would just skip groceries and stay home. So Saturday I spent all day working on homework while the kids played on their Kindles. I felt bad about it but they were happy and I got my work done. And it was somewhat entertaining to watch them. Every now and then I would look over to see what they were playing or doing. At one point, Michaela had the Kindle propped against the frame of the bedroom door, she was standing on her head in an upside-down sitting position with her knees also against the door frame. She was sucking her thumb and watching a show on the Kindle. Jake was kneeling leaning against the couch cushions watching the Kindle in the seat and he was kicking his feet like he was swimming. Then I caught Michaela watching TV this morning with her feet sticking up the back of the recliner and her head hanging down on the ground. Maybe spending so much time upside down is what gives her those crazy ideas. These two just don't do normal. Anyway, I did feel bad about letting them rot in front of a digital screen all day on Saturday so I thought maybe we would venture out Sunday afternoon after all. I could get just a few groceries and I needed a new phone. (Okay, needed/wanted, what's the REAL difference?) Michaela was already mad at me because we skipped church. I just couldn't see it going well. I think yelling and cursing at kids in the sanctuary is frowned upon. So she was really excited when I told them we were running some errands. Jake, however, was less than pleased. He started yelling and screaming that he didn't want to run errands, he hated errands, and he wasn't going. I proceeded to tell him that yes, he WAS going and to quit screaming and get in the shower before I had to put him in there. Ten minutes, lots of tears, and some soaked clothes later, Jake took his shower. This was not off to a good start.
Finally we were all dressed and ready to go and we headed out. I had to run by Staples first because I needed a couple of things for my new job I was starting on Monday. I warned the kids that they would not be crazy in the store or we would go home. If they were good, we would stop and McDonalds and get a treat on the way home. We got inside and Michaela spotted the paper and some art supplies. I thought they were going to lose the treat at the first stop. She insisted that if she didn't get some paper and art stuff she would "lose it". I reminded her that they had agreed to no crazy in the stores. "But it's ART SUPPLIES!" All wide-eyed and pulling on my arm. "That's one. Two more and no McDonalds." She settled down and I got what I needed. We were on our way to the checkout when she saw the package of pencil grips and erasers. Apparently the wooden pencils she uses are scientifically engineered to create bone defects and skin abrasions on children's fingers and after normal use in kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades, now in 3rd grade she is experiencing intolerable symptoms which she had not thought to complain about until that second in Staples when faced with the obvious solution to her problem. She simply HAD to have the package of pencil grips and erasers or she would never be able to write again. Thank goodness it only cost me $4.00 to save my poor child from a lifetime of pencil-induced finger pain and deformity. It was a small price to pay to get out of the store with so little incident.
Then we went to Best Buy. They were really pretty good so far and I REALLY wanted a new phone. If they misbehaved here, I could always skip the grocery store. We didn't need milk and bread that badly, we could do without for this week if we had to...but I needed my phone. And I was pretty sure about what I wanted. It was either going to be an iphone or a Samsung Galaxy. So before we went in I reminded the kids about McDonalds and let them take in a toy. Jake had a transformer and Michaela had a notebook and a sharpie. I was a little scared of letting her take a sharpie into a store but it was Best Buy, what could she really write on anyway besides boxes? (I know what you are thinking but thank God, she didn't write on any merchandise! Believe me, I kept one eye on her the whole time we were in there.) We went to the phone section and I told them they were not allowed to leave that section or we would go home and I would be VERY angry. And nobody likes it when mommy is angry. Apparently they really don't like it when mommy is angry because again, they behaved! I was beginning to think someone had traded my kids for these two that didn't act like wild animals. Even baby Joey was being agreeable. He didn't cry once the whole time we were out. I talked with the salesguy and after some very well-thought out questions and serious comparison of the two phones, I decided on the Samsung. Actually it won out because it was on sale and I could get it free while the iphone 4S would be $100. Since they were pretty comparable otherwise it wasn't that hard of a decision! So I was sitting at the table while the guy activated my phone, transferred my contacts, blah, blah, blah, and Michaela brings me a little square of paper she has drawn on. "This is the phone Jake wants. Be sure and ring that up too." Um, ok. Then she tears out another piece of paper and folds it and starts drawing. "I want this computer too. Make sure you get both of these when you pay." Ok Michaela. In the meantime, Joey is sitting in his carrier on the floor cooing and laughing and I look over and this other salesguy is talking to him and making goofy faces at him. The kid looks up at me and raises his eyebrow. I swear it was like he was saying, "Mom, check this guy out. What the heck is he doing?" I couldn't help but laugh. Right behind me, Jake starts talking to this lady who's waiting to be helped. He starts telling her all about his transformer and then about the "phone" his sister drew for him and how he was going to use it to call daddy because he was at work. I'm sure the lady thought we were all nuts. But they didn't fight, scream, or disappear once so I counted it as a win! I got my phone and we left, all of their merchandise, fixtures, and salespeople still in tact. Score. So we headed to Walmart.
I almost went home instead. I had such good luck with them so far and I knew I should quit while I was ahead, but I decided to press my luck. Remember that game show "Press Your Luck" with the Whammies? Yeah, I wouldn't have won that game. We got to the parking lot and Jake started in, "I don't wanna go to Walmart, my legs are tired, it's too much walking, I wanna go home!" Fine. Jake sit in the back of the cart. We weren't getting many groceries anyway so he wouldn't be in the way. Then Michaela started. "I wish I could sit in the cart. I don't wanna walk either." I can't fit three kids in the stupid cart. Besides, she's almost nine years old. "Michaela, you don't need to ride in the cart." "Can I at least stand on the side while you push it?" "No, you can walk next to me and quit complaining!" "But Mommy, I'm tired too!" "That's two." She folded her arms and pouted while she stomped along beside me. Good enough, she wasn't griping. So we got the few things we couldn't live without for the week and went to the checkout. Jake had to go to the bathroom. Now I don't think I've mentioned it before but when Jake says he has to go the bathroom, you don't waste any time getting him there. He has a bad habit of waiting til the last possible second and then it's a race to see if he makes it or not. Sometimes I think he does it as a fun little game. I could see the bathrooms from where I was in line so I sent him by himself with strict instructions, straight there, flush, wash your hands, straight back. That probably would have been fine but then I sent Michaela to wait for him outside the bathroom so he wouldn't get distracted when he came out. I see him walk out of the men's room and she grabs him and shoves him back in. I guess maybe he didn't wash his hands? Then he comes out again and she grabs him and drags him into the women's room. I can hear them yelling at each other. I can't tell though if they are laughing or fighting. The clerk is talking to me and I keep looking over her shoulder waiting for them to come out and she's oblivious talking about working two jobs or something. I was just about to go over there and drag them both out when they both come running out. Jake is chasing Michaela and she stops and turns around to tell him something then she runs over to me. Both are laughing and I'm almost done checking out and the lady says "Oh, I thought you were here by yourself!" I kinda thought the infant carrier was a giveaway but maybe she meant besides the baby. Then the big kids ran off again. This time they headed towards the door and into the cubby store by the entrance. (You know where they have like a vision center or picture place...) I finished paying and headed that way. This sales cubby had shower stalls. Not something I would go to Walmart to purchase but whatever. Jake and Michaela were nowhere to be seen. There was just a salesguy sitting at a desk at the back trying not to pay attention. Then I heard one of the doors rattling. I could see a very blurry Jake stuck in the shower stall, now banging on the door trying to get out. Michaela then popped up from behind a half door in another stall pointing and laughing at him. "Michaela, go open the door so your brother can get out of the shower displays!" Another one of the many things I never thought I would say. I'm pretty sure the salesguy was hiding at the desk laughing but I've been enough places with these two, it doesn't bother me anymore. It's not like I'll ever see him again anyway. They did good enough, we would get their treat at McDonalds.
So we get out to the truck and Jake's face is bleeding. Apparently while they were using Walmart as their own personal playground Michaela had accidentally scratched the top off of a war wound Jake had sustained two days before at school. He had scraped up the entire right side of his face last Friday at extended day. He was outside on the playground and he was running somewhere when he tripped, SMACK! Unfortunately, he fell face-first into the gravel and cut up the whole side of his face. His cheek was all scraped halfway up to his eye, his lips were torn up and peeling and he even cut the inside of his mouth on his teeth when he fell. Michaela saw him fall and came over to help him up. She apparently noticed there was a rock stuck in his nose so as he's crying and bleeding, she starts squeezing his nose and trying to slide the rock out. The rock is cutting up the inside of his nose because she is squeezing it so he is crying and fighting with her but apparently it is a priority for her to get the rock out because she forced him to sit still while she removed it. We've had problems before with Michaela and rocks in other people's noses but that time she was putting them IN not trying to get them out. I have no idea how she got that first child to sit still or agree to having rocks put in his nose, but there is a lot I don't understand about Michaela. We must have made it clear enough at that time that rocks don't belong in noses though becuase she made sure Jake got his out right away. Anyway, so now Jake has scratches and scabs all over the side of his face. It is healing pretty well and really wouldn't be a big deal but of course, they had pictures this week. We have a picture of Jake when he was about a year and a half and his nose is all scratched up. When he was two, we have a picture that was taken right before he knocked his front tooth out so we refer to it as the last picture with all of his teeth. And now we will have a picture of the scab on his cheek to commemorate the incident with the rock up his nose. Hopefully we won't have "the last picture with all four limbs" or "the one with the eye patch". But with Jake and Michaela, we never know.
Someone from the school tried to call me when Jake fell but I couldn't answer my phone because I was teaching. I wasn't real anxious to answer it anyway because I figured it had something to do with his behavior. He has had a really bad case of the wiggles this year and we are constantly having to talk with him about how to behave at school. He is even seeing the counselor who may be evaluating him for ADHD. I got an email from his teacher the other morning that he was having a really bad day. He wouldn't sit still, he was taking his shirt and his shoes off and putting them back on, he was patting his cheeks, and slapping his legs. The teacher had to pull him off of the teaching carpet and sit him in the corner so she could continue the lesson. When I asked him later what his problem was he whined that he was itchy. I have no idea what to do with him. He got a green (really good) on Monday with a note that he was "still very very wriggly but manageable." He didn't do so well at lunch though because Friday, the note that came home said Jake has an assigned seat at lunch from now until he learns how to control himself. He claims that Lilliana was talking to him but I'm inclined to believe it was more than that. Already getting into trouble over girls. One day he had been crawling on the floor in the lunchroom under the tables. I think the child just can't sit still and control the urge to do whatever jumps into his crazy little mind! Impulse control is not a strong point but that seems to be genetic. (I HAD to have a new phone bad enough to take these kids out in public...) I think this is a lot of Michaela's issue too.
Michaela usually does pretty well behavior-wise at school. She just has little "slips" here and there. I think her teachers dismiss it most of the time because it seems to be random bad decisions but I see patterns in some of the things she is doing. I'm kind of concerned about this one particular strand of events. She is really good at being sneaky and lying. I don't like all of this dishonesty and forethought that goes into some of her activities. She almost always gets a green at school but the other day she came home with a yellow. She said she got her color changed for cheating on an AR test. I know AR is used in schools across the country but for those of you not priveledged enough to have a child working on AR it stands for Accelerated Reader. It doesn't have anything to do with being accelerated though, the kids read books and then log in to the computer and take tests over them and it evaluates their reading comprehension. At both of Michaela's schools, she has had AR goals and she hates it! She is not alone, I have a good friend in Texas whose son claimed at the beginning of this school year that "AR is ruining his life!" (Heather, I feel your pain and I think I am glad that Michaela and Ethan are in different states. If the two of them ever thought to work together, I think we would be in deep trouble!) We have fought and fought with Michaela about taking her AR tests and she even lost a birthday party one year because she refused to take the tests when she was supposed to. Well this year she has been taking a TON of them. She is only half way through the nine weeks and she has passed her goal for the quarter. Come to find out, she and a friend were both reading a book and then when they took the tests, they would tell each other the answers so they could get credit for both books after only reading one. Until they got caught. This isn't the only time Michaela has found a way around the rules. When she was in preK she was in trouble ALL the time (like Jake is now) and she didn't get very many stars. It took her until mid January before she had almost filled up her first star chart, all the other kids were on their second and third. She only needed five more stars before she got a prize and she came up with the idea that she could put her own stars on the chart and then show her teacher that it was full and her teacher would say, "Now how did that happen?" and Michaela would get her prize. We had to explain to her then that although it was a clever idea, it was cheating and she could not put her own stars on the chart. She also came up with solutions to other kids' problems. She had a friend who got sent to the classroom next door for a time out and she decided she wanted to play with him. So she snuck out and went to the teacher next door and told her that her own teacher had sent her to get the child to come back to their classroom. Her teacher noticed a few minutes later that the kid was somehow back in the room all of a sudden. I don't know about you, but I didn't think of these things when I was 3 or 4. And now she's getting worse.
We had a box of 60 candy bars that we were supposed to sell for Joey's daycare as a fundraiser. We don't know any neighbors yet and both of us have big changes going on at work so we just paid for the chocolate and I figured we would eat it ourselves. Within one week 50 candy bars were gone. Michaela swears she didn't take them but I know I only had four. We found five wrappers stashed in her room and there's no telling how many she got to school in her back pack. We may have to go back to checking her bag everyday before she leaves. In second grade we had to buy her a clear bag to take to school so we could see everything that was inside. She had been taking clothes to school and changing in the bathroom after she got dropped off. She still found a way to tuck small stuffed animals between folders so that if we didn't search the bag we wouldn't find them. Now she's even conciously trying to avoid police detection! I was taking the three kids to meet Ed for supper one night last week and as we pulled out of the apartment complex, Jake started crying that his seat belt wasn't buckled. There is a light right after the turn and it was red so I told Michaela to unbuckle and help him. She went through this elaborate process to look around first then she unbuckled and crawled down on the floor. She got Jake's seat belt buckled then climbed back into her seat and buckled up. She explained that she had been really careful to look for police first and then she got on the floor so if a cop did drive by he wouldn't see her and would think there were only two children in the truck. Jake was still crying so I asked him what was wrong and he said, "I don't want you to go to jail!" At the time I agreed with him but after more consideration, it might be less stressful there.
With everything that goes on between Michaela and Jake, I tend to lose focus really easy. I forget to pay attention to other aspects of life because I'm so exhausted from paying constant attention to their antics! This morning, I was making breakfast and I had put coffee on while I fed baby Joey. After I fed and cuddled with him for a while, I decided to make myself some microwave pancakes to go with my coffee. I got a phone call and was talking while I put the pancakes in the microwave then I started fixing my coffee. I sipped the coffee and talked and I heard the microwave going in the background and it didn't occur to me at first that the pancakes only take a minute and 15 seconds to cook. Then I smelled the smoke. I told my friend I'd call her back and hung up on her so I could go tend to the possible fire in the microwave. I panicked and started pushing buttons trying to get it to stop and finally I just opened the door. Smoke came billowing out but no flames thank goodness. (Unlike last summer when I turned the oven on with a plastic plate of brownies inside. I had to throw a cup of water in the oven and spent the next morning scraping "dripping" plastic off the oven rack.) But I could still hear the microwave going and the light was on. I started yelling at Ed that I couldn't get it to turn off, I figured it was still putting out radiation too, and he needed to cut the breaker. He ran to the fuse box and found the breaker while I opened the outside door and started fanning the smoke detectors to get them to stop screaming. Oddly enough, they quit pretty quickly and didn't come back on but when we make toast in the toaster, they go off and keep going off for like 5 minutes. With a room full of smoke though, nothing. I'm not so sure I trust these smoke alarms anymore. Ed turned the breaker back on and the sound started again. He hit a button and it quit. He asked me about it, apparently when I panicked and started pushing buttons, I hit the vent fan. That's what was on, not the actual microwave. We sent the kids outside to sit on the balcony and get some fresh air while the smoke cleared out. Burnt pancakes do NOT smell good. I guess when I started them in the first place I hit an extra button so it was way too much time for the pancakes. I had to text my friend back to tell her everything was ok and I would call her later. I made me some more pancakes and paid attention this time.
Sometimes they can be such sweet little angels and I can't help but smile. Sweet baby Joey gets so excited when he wakes up and sees you there to pick him up. He laughs and smiles at me and makes me feel so loved! Of course he also laughs and smiles at the rest of the family, and at the cat, and at football games, and the Big Bang Theory. I approve of his taste in TV. Earlier, Jake was asking for some Hershey's kisses and I gave him some but there were only 3 left. He came back to me and asked for more but I told him there weren't any more. He said "what about the small cylinder ones? We have a lot of those." I looked and he was talking about Tootsie Rolls! I never thought of them as "small, cylinder Hershey's kisses" but I guess I can see it. Then Michaela ran up to me, grabbed my arm, and asked with huge eyes, "Do you know how to make funnel cake?" Me: "No, why?" Michaela (falling to her knees): "I LOVE funnel cake!" Me: "So where did that come from?" Michaela: "Remember, the state fair? It was SO good, crunchy with sugar! Get on your phone and look it up!" She grinned and ran off. My bossy little drama queen. It was so sweet though. Random, but sweet! I almost want to go learn how to make a funnel cake just to see that big sweet smile on her face. As long as it doesn't require a microwave I might have to try it...
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