When I arrived home from work, everything was quiet. Kid X was quiet, Ernie was laughing as usual and wife A told me how good they both had been during the day. I sat down to eat dinner and it all went downhill from there.
We have 3 options for our after dinner routine, muck around and bath, muck around and shower with mummy or muck around and shower with daddy (that’s me sorry about the 3rd person mention). Normally any of these options is accepted with a smile, except tonight. I needed to have a shower, no really I needed to shower and I asked Kid X if she wanted to have a shower with daddy? The answer tonight was “no I want to have a bath”.
I said “well we are having a shower, daddy needs to have a shower”. This only stirred the hornet’s nest as kid X’s volume rose and in came this new thing she does the fake cry. It’s a horrible noise that hurts your ears.
It quickly escalated to DEFCON 3 and after a tantrum in the bathtub, ironic at best, but very good at making the point, finally she got in the shower. The tantrum continued for most of the shower.
Then after the shower, she wouldn’t let me dry her and went and stood dripping on the carpet. Then I repeatedly asked her over and over again to come over. I started to plead with her to come over as I tried to hold onto my fragile patience. No luck. I had to send her to the naughty corner still dripping. I dried her in the naughty corner.
Then it was a tantrum over putting on PJ’s, then the last straw, the tantrum over cleaning the teeth. I cracked it in the middle of shoving her toothbrush in her mouth. I ripped the toothbrush out of her mouth and chucked it into the sink. The toothbrush bounced in the air and landed on the floor and I stormed out screaming, sounding a little like that fake cry she does and told her to go straight to bed. She got upset at this point and I felt so bad so I went in to read her a book and finished off this night with a peaceful lullaby.
How many things did I do wrong here?
