Selective hearing...

What is it with our children and only hearing the things they want to?! Seriously they must learn at an early age how to tune our voices out. Yesterday was a good reminder of this. The day started out okay and there was no indication that it wouldn't be a great day until I picked Malia up from preschool. She did everything I asked her to in the morning to help me get her ready to go. When I picked her up from preschool however, it was a completely different story. She had gotten in trouble at school for being inappropriate with the books when they were doing their learning centers. Now, I'm not sure what is meant by inappropriate so I can only assume she was not reading the books and was possibly throwing them around or something like that. Needless to say she was not alone in this and had her partner involved in this as well. Her teacher had asked her to stop doing what she was doing and instead of listening she just kept on doing it. So she got in trouble. She was not happy when I picked her up from school and even more upset when she got in trouble with me for not listening to her teacher at school.

So, the day progresses, we go to Costco and all seems to be going okay. We get home and I tell her 3 times to go to her room for quiet time. This is a daily routine for us so she knows and I shouldn't have to tell her 3 times to do it. During quiet time she decides to dump out all of her toy bins. Now I will never understand the thought process behind this because it's not like they can find the toys they want to play with in all that mess. So I told Malia she needed to clean up her room before she could go to dance. This was an hour and a half before she had dance. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this. She decided the mess was too big to pick up by herself and needed help picking it up, even though she didn't need help making the mess.

So in that time frame she not only didn't clean up her room, she went into my bedroom and sprayed Makai in the eye with some perfume. Mason came home and instead of doing homework like he had been told to do several times, he decided he would play with toys. So while I'm trying to close a Scentsy party I have Malia refusing to clean her room, she's late for dance class, Makai is screaming his head off for 20 minutes straight because of his eye and Mason isn't listening. I called Thad at work in hysterics and asked him to try and come home early. He did manage to come home and help me get things back in order. I was able to flush Makai's eye out with water and he was fine. Mason finally sat down to do his homework but still failed to do his reading. Malia took another hour and a half to clean her room and missed her dance class. I would like to say this is where our day got better, but it's not. Malia managed to climb her bookcase and it fell on her pinning her beneath it. Why she was climbing on it I don't know, she was supposed to be cleaning up her room. Then later while I was at a Scentsy party she managed to take all of the books out of the bookcase in the playroom, which she knows is wrong. Her day was just filled with bad choices and not listening. I just wonder, did she wake up thinking she would be naughty, or was it something that evolved throughout the day?? I guess I will never know or understand.

So it does seem one bad apple spoils the bunch and when one child is acting up the others join in. I just hope and pray today goes better. And I'm also wondering why we thought we could handle having a fourth child when 3 is a handful already. I guess we are gluttons for punishment or we just really like a challenge!