Bloody Nose and more...

If you were to walk into my house at this moment, you would not believe the scene that was taking place a couple of hours ago.

The two girls are in bed as they usually are at this time. My son is sitting reading to my sister. At five, he's doing quite well. The fact that he's quite calm in doing so is a dramatic change of what was going on earlier.

My husband had watched the kids while I took a nap. When he went upstairs to get me (since he had to go to bed himself) he warned me that the kids were constantly fighting. I groaned. This meant that not only will I be too busy settling disputes to get anything done, but chances the house will be a mess by the time I go to bed is high.

I let my son use my husband's computer to play his favorite game. Not too bad. Then getting some snacks out of the cabinet, I got the two girls to eat the snacks in the livingroom. So far so good. I manage to put away the clean dishes before I heard the youngest crying as if she got hurt - bad.

So I ran into the livingroom to find blood all over the front of my two-year-old. I scolded the older for hitting her. I guess the younger was trying to get something the older already had. I had explained to her that if the younger does something that she doesn't like, come get me. Not that I want a tattler, but I definately don't want her to hit.

Anyway, I sat on my rocker with the 2-year-old on my lap and cleaned her up, then rocked her for a while.

Minutes after that episode was over, my son was screaming through-out the house like a deranged maniac. I don't what set him off like that except that maybe it was because of the 2-year-old laughing her head off at the sight. Perhaps it was because he was trying to make her feel better, but I will never know because he ran into the open bathroom door.

He's okay, fortunately - but the day pretty much went that way. Someone was getting hurt somewhere and usually because of usually discouraged behavior - just for that reason. For some odd reason, they didn't get it today even though I reminded them several times of why they got hurt.

In spite of all this, the house isn't trashed, thanks to my sister and husband who cleaned the livingroom. I got the kitchen pretty much clean tonight and the bathroom is quite clean. The diningroom is the only room that needs to be cleaned. The diningroom, being in between the livingroom and kitchen seems to be the central gathering point for stray items. If they don't belong in the kitchen, they ended up in the diningroom for me to take into the livingroom and if the objects don't belong in livingroom, they end up in the diningroom for me to take on the way to the kitchen, but it never seems to end up that way. They kind of just end up in the great diningroom abyss somewhere.

I need to develope a system where the items actually make it to the rooms that they belong in.

One day...