Demonville, incorporated 2007

Was it just a few days ago that I was raving about how "delightful" and totally wonderful my son is? I feel like I'm emotionally unstable with this kid around. One minute he IS the most delightful, fantastic boy, and I can't believe I totally lucked out to have the most perfect child in the world. And the next? I think I gave birth to a demon child that was put on this earth to make me crazy and push every single button I have. Last night was especially horrendous. Meal time is always a bit of a struggle. While he usually ends up eating most of everything on his plate, it often takes some coaxing, bribing, games, or sitting for eons waiting him out until he decides that eating his broccoli is indeed a fair trade-off to play with his cars. I have grown accustomed to this struggle for the most part, since I do it 3-5 times/day with him. But J usually only witnesses it at dinner, after a long day at work. So this is the way we started last evening - the usual mealtime struggle, before which we had to fight with him to get him to wash his hands. And one of the reasons I was looking forward to coming to Indonesia was that we'd be able to eat together as a family every night, instead of rushing home from work and feeding C something quick and J and I not eating until 8 after he was in bed. What was I thinking?! Now we eat as a family, but it is not a very relaxing, enjoyable experience. Evidently C is supposed to be getting something positive out of eating with his family, so "the" pediatricians say. I wonder. Maybe it's just an evil ruse to make the parents even more frazzled than they already were.

After dinner we moved on to trying to get C to help us clean up. Then came brushing his teeth. What he does these days when we ask him to do something is head in that direction, and then veer off in another direction like it's a big game. And even when he knows it isn't a game to us, he still refuses and there are more bribes, games, coaxing, etc. to get him where we need him to be. So brushing his teeth ended up in tears, raised voices and threats of time-outs. And when we finally got that done, we had to go through all of this again to get his pj's on. Well, this ended with me getting kicked and that was our last straw. He got his first time-out since we've moved into our house. I suppose that's pretty good considering we've been here for 6 weeks, but usually the threat of a time-out is enough.

Finally the monster went to bed, but instead of relaxing J and I had language lessons. It was a very tiring evening, and the thought that we're adding another Demon Child to this already taxing situation was hardly comforting.

And my poor little monster has a lot ahead of him, little does he know. He starts school next Monday. That following weekend we're hitting the potty training hard core. Soon after that he'll be getting a big boy bed. And then we'll be going to Singapore and he'll become a big brother. And then we'll come home. It's a heck of a lot for a little guy, I know, but unfortunately we just don't have any ways around it. With all these changes we'll probably be living in Demonville for the foreseeable future.