My kids have no respect for the bathroom. If I am occupied behind the locked bathroom door, they feel no hesitation about pounding on the door and shouting to me. <\/p>\n
That was the case this morning.<\/p>\n
First I heard my oldest’s voice raised in an angry shout. “But you have to! I’m bigger. You have to do what I say!”<\/p>\n
A brief moment of quiet followed this pronouncement, and then the big guy burst out crying. No that’s not quite right. It was more like wailing. Full-throated, from the gut, wailing. <\/p>\n
Then came the slap-slap-slap of bare feet running and a pounding on my bathroom door.<\/p>\n
“Yes?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Daddy,” my oldest wailed. “WAAAAaaaahhh! Daddy!”<\/p>\n
Behind the crying, I heard a quiet, low chuckling. It sounded kind of like Muttley from the old Dick Dastardly cartoon, but lower and less breathy.<\/p>\n
“He’s laughing at me,” my oldest screamed. “He’s laughing!”<\/p>\n
“That’s not okay,” I said. “Hold on, I’ll be right there.”<\/p>\n
I exited the bathroom as quickly as biology would permit and then confronted the two boys. “What’s happening?”<\/p>\n
“He’s laughing at me,” the oldest cried, pointing an accusing finger.<\/p>\n
I looked to my youngest son, who was not even trying to hide his smile. “Well,” he said. “He told me to get the rope.”<\/p>\n
“And you didn’t want to get the rope?”<\/p>\n
He shook his head.<\/p>\n
My oldest couldn’t contain himself. “But he has to! I’m bigger and he has to, um.” I think it was my raised eyebrows that stopped him. I’m not sure. <\/p>\n
“I mean,” he tried again. “He needs to be helpful. I needed help and he didn’t help me. That’s not right!”<\/p>\n
His little brother started to speak but I held up my hand. “And when he said you had to get it, that’s when the laughing started?”<\/p>\n
They both nodded.<\/p>\n
The list of issues here seemed too long for 6:30 in the morning – being helpful, not laughing at other people, not bossing others around, not telling on people… I didn’t want to deal with it. “Well,” I said. “Okay then. Let’s go get dressed.”<\/p>\n
They didn’t know what to do with that. They looked at each other, then me, then they broke down laughing and ran off to their room. <\/p>\n
I think I’m going to try this no judgement thing more often. It may not teach anything, but it sure is less stressful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My kids have no respect for the bathroom. If I am occupied behind the locked bathroom door, they feel no hesitation about pounding on the door and shouting to me. That was the case this morning. First I heard my oldest’s voice raised in an angry shout. “But you have to! I’m bigger. You have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}