Kids.... what can you do?

Last week the kids brought me a special gift from school. It's the snot faucet flu. On Saturday I sat with a double size roll of Charmin quilted double ply on the desk next to me and it was devoured by my nose goblins by mid afternoon. I had hit a gusher, that's for sure. Sleeping was impossible because it would back up inside my head and in my lungs and I would have to run to the toilet and cough up about six gallons of slime. It's was the consistency of half formed jello. That's how I've been all this week.


Now that I've painted that picture for you...

My kids are going through a stage, the youngest one likes calling her brother a bastard. He comes and tells me, I put her in time out, she screams and kicks her wall for about 3 hours until she passes out. I explain to her over an over that she will never get away with calling her brother a fuck, a bitch or a bastard and will be punished each and every time.

As soon as punishment is over she goes right up to him and does it again, I put her in time out, she screams for 3 hours while kicking the wall and passes out. I'm trying to get through to her that this is not a productive way to spend her free time. She is really smart but also stubborn and irrational. Her older sister (by 9 months) did the exact same thing at the exact same age. Luckily it finally dawned on her that this behavior was getting her nothing. I'm still waiting for the youngest to come to that realization.

So in the middle of this, I get a package in the mail from the state. It's the case file from the adoption, about 2 1/2 years late. Previously, we had only read the girls case file. This time we got 4 phone book sized packets about their biological family.

Let me just say, these people were fucking worthless. The mother continually refused to show up for drug and parenting classes, the supposed biological father(s) were felons with no job or permanent address. The grandmother got custody for a while but refused to take them to school, doctors appointments and speech therapy so the state had no choice but to put the girls in foster care.

That's when I read, that the girls had a problem with profanity...great. Not that it would have affected my decision to adopt, but it would have given me a head start on fixing the behavior.

Luckily, they don't cuss at school, because they see those people as authority figures to be feared and respected. Unfortunately, I am regarded as just the big mean kid who punishes them based on being ratted out by their often beleaguered big brother.

He loves his sisters, entertains them, dotes on them and protects them, but as soon as they start acting shitty and calling him names he comes and gets me. This pisses them off a great deal because he violated the code of silence. the law of the west... This is an unforgivable sin coming from their perspective.


Yesterday, I walked out into the hall and my oldest girl is crying, She is covered head to toe with permanent blue marker. She claimed her sister told her to close her eyes so she could put makeup on her. Shit! I rushed her into the bathroom and scrubbed her down with rubbing alcohol and got most of it off...even her eyelids. It's seldom that I get genuinely angry and this was one of those times. Hell, that was just a fucking mean thing to do.

A little while later, I went down stairs to get a soda and I noticed that my oldest girl had drawn all over the white refrigerator with the permanent sharpie maker. How do I know? She is in first grade and learning to write. I guess she thought it would be a great idea to put her prose on the biggest white appliance we had.

Apparently, she was mad at her little sister for drawing all over her, so she wrote in giant blue letters:

My sister is bad.
No soda for her
Only Me
Dad
Mom
and Brudder.

My wife walked in and started laughing. I would have probably laughed too if I hadn't been dealing with this insane bullshit for the last four days.

I went upstairs and threatened to write on their foreheads and send them to school like that.... I think that finally got through to them.