Anger management - Part 1 in a 1,302 part series.

Day one hundred and eighty three.

It's been one half a year, give or take a couple days that I might have miscounted. It's the girlses' half birthday (or it was on Saturday...I'm not good with calendars). As for the blog, we're halfway. Halftime. Top of the arc. 1/2. The return trip. One more to go. Cresting the hill. Gleaming the cube. Starching the shirts.

Considering the special occasion du jour, I'd love to spend the night's post gushing boorishly on the fine daughters that we've raised these past six months. Trust me...I'd love nothing more.

Tonight's slice of life didn't quite roll out like that. After bath time, I brought the kids downstairs for some light entertainment while Jen did some drawer reorganizing in their room. Here's a rough breakdown of those 45 minutes:

- Abby cried almost non-stop. She's been doing this whine/cry thing for a month or so now, and it drives us up the wall. We have no plausible hypothesis on what is causing it, which drives us to fear that most default of fears: that it's possibly mental and not physical.
- While trying to soothe Abby, Lily managed to pull an entire tub of cut up watermelon onto the rug.
- Lily proceeded to snatch up a couple pieces of said watermelon and cram them in a disastrously inaccurate way into her face. Most of it ended up in her hair, ears, shirt, toes, etc. Remember this happened during that uber-clean stretch of post-bath, pre-bed time. I love that "There's a good bath wasted" feeling.
- Abby continued crying.
- We brushed our teeth. Lily did okay, but Abby was bawling because she wanted both toothbrushes and I wouldn't let her. She did get happy when she brushed my teeth, but this morphed quickly into a hideous exercise in "stab Daddy in the gums" for both of them. Yay.!!....OW!..mother of god, that hurts.....
- Lily closed the front door twice. Our front door is a quality piece and weighs just this side of 12 tons. Lily is strong enough to get it seriously moving and slam it pretty hard. If Abby or any part of Abby or even a hint of dog or cat are loitering about the threshold at this inopportune moment, there will be a seriously rushed visit to the doctor or veterinarian, as appropriate. I'm obviously more worried about Abby, but only because the animals are smart enough and fast enough to be scarce. They tend to keep a wide berth of Lily in general these days...clever housepets.
- I have to continue about the door thing, because it is really bad, and I worry to the core (the kind of worry that breeds incessant visualizations of "the worst") that Lily will close that thing on Abby. It would crush her little ribs. I need to find a way to neutralize the door, but in the meantime I've been giving Lily some ineffectual timeouts and telling her both gently and firmly that the door is not to be touched. I'm wasting my breath, and when she did it tonight, I was furious. Furious enough to know not to even react.
- Abby finally managed to get both toothbrushes. I saw them both in her hands and mouth, about 4 minutes after I witnessed Lily chuck hers into a particularly pet-hair-ridden corner of the living room. Meh.
- I tried to keep them occupied with a quick bit of crayons and paper. Simple. They hated every damn minute of it. Squirmed. Whined. Thrashed. Ate the crayon. Disastrous.
- During a moment of either preoccupation or poor parenting (I'll let you guess which!), Lily managed to move her chair to the tall table on which we store snacks. She got up on the chair, tiptoed herself to where she could just barely reach her grubby digits in the bin, and pulled out a box of teddy grahams. I found her a few minutes later, sitting on the floor, elbow deep in the box, munching away without a worry.
- I took the box away and calmly told her that this just would not do. She reacted exactly as you'd expect. It got pretty ugly for a long bit.
- Since they were obviously hungry (committing grand larceny to get some crackers and all), I fed them a lot. Still hungry, I cut up a banana. Abby devoured it, but whined the whole time since I kept the plate well out of her grubby little reach (again, this is post-bath time).
- Jen came back down right around then. I think I blacked out for a while.

These kids. They drive me nuts. And of course, I miss them right now...damn them!

6 more months of blog!

Grrr....

Aaaaaaacchhht.