A Lesson Learned (hopefully!)

What a week! Forget Gaza, Afghanistan or Iraq....I have been living in a war zone for the last 7 days. It all began last weekend when Steven asked told Tessa to tidy her room on Friday evening. Over the weekend he had asked her a further three or four times and each time she'd apologised for forgetting and said she'd do it soon but apparently still didn't. I was completely unaware of any of this until I remarked on Steven's bad mood on Sunday evening - effectively ripping the pin from the grenade....

Steven and I have quite different approaches to parenting. I will occasionally ask them to clean their rooms if I notice how bad they've got but generally if I can walk in and out to say goodnight without tripping over something I can pretty much block out the worst of it. Steven likes their rooms to be tidied every day and will make a point of going and checking every couple of days and telling them. I don't often ask them to do their chores because I usually find it quicker, easier and less stressful to do things myself than risk asking them and being ignored. If I do want them to do something I try and wait until they want something first or I make sure the modem mysteriously stops working for a short time and then spookily starts working again when the chore has been done. I don't nag them to do their homework either, I remind them about it by way of asking if they have any - after that it's up to them whether they do it or leave it and get detention. Steven is a much harder task master - I think I'm too lazy to be tough.

Tessa is stubborn. She hates to be told to do anything and the more she's nagged the deeper she digs her heels in. On Sunday evening, despite Steven letting her know in no uncertain terms how cross he was that she still hadn't tidied her room (unwittingly prompted by me), she still didn't want to give in so she ignored him and a huge row ensued. As punishment Tessa was banned from the internet for the foreseeable future - a sort of virtual grounding as practically all her socialising is done through her laptop. On Monday she finally tidied her room (a job that only took about 15 minutes!) but refused to apologise for arguing about it. With each passing day she became more and more upset and miserable, not helped by Mollie who fed off this and wound her up and teased her relentlessly. I was piggy in the middle, constantly on edge, waiting for the next argument to erupt, trying to mediate all the time and with each passing day I felt more exhausted and depressed.

Thankfully on Thursday evening Tessa finally gave up and managed to claw her way out of the enormous hole she'd dug herself into by apologising and making friends with her dad again....unfortunately by this time I reckon I'd aged about 10 years!

I hope Tessa learns something from this. Hopefully she understands now that sometimes we all have to do things we don't want to do if we are asked to and that not doing something can actually be a whole lot harder in the long run.

Last weekend, before all this happened, Tessa was begging me to blog about her....not sure this is exactly what she had in mind at the time!

The weather forecast tonight says snow. I hope it does. Not just a little but a lot. I want a snow day (or two), I want enough that it makes my journey to work completely impossible not just difficult, I want the schools to be closed, I want my children to be able to build their first ever proper snowman and still have snow left for snowballs.......so, fingers crossed......let it snow!