Martha (age 11) has been particularly obnoxious the past couple of days. I know why; it's because she's anxious about starting middle school next week and she's doing a regression thing. I feel for her, since I'm also deep in anxious denial about school myself. But nonetheless, there is no excuse for sassing Mom or pestering siblings unmercifully. This morning, she got grounded.
It's amazing how she changes when she's grounded. For example, whenever I make lunch, she demands to know what I've made, and if it's something that doesn't sound appetizing to her, she protests and sighs and acts like a nincompoop. I despise this behavior, but she is so doggone impulsive that no matter how I punish or flatly refuse to back down, she still does it.
Unless I isolate her.
Then she's so glad to get to come downstairs to the kitchen and mingle with other humans, she's as meek as milk.
I had some extra weenies from making hotdogs the other day, and I needed to get rid of them. So I made some black beans & rice and sliced up the weenies in it. Isaac and Alice were tickled; Isaac came to me and said, "Mom, you should make this EVERY day. Not the cucumbers, though." (I had sliced cucumbers to go along with it, since everybody's gotta have fresh veggies)
I braced myself as I called Martha down for lunch. She's notorious for disliking this kind of stuff, but hey, she's over a barrelhead at this point. She eats this, or she gets nothing, and no chance for snacking later because she's banished. Still, though, her impulses are so hard to overcome, I half expected her to make some nasty comment about it.
Nothing.
She quietly consumed her sliced cucumbers first. Then in a little while, she came to me and showed me her empty bowl of beans & rice. "Can I have some leftover corn-on-the-cob from last night? And I really liked the beans and rice, Mom. I never wanted to eat black beans because I thought they would be crunchy, but they're not."
Oh yes. I will win.
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