Bless her heart

The other night Niv had a meltdown. It was past her bedtime, but she really wanted to draw a picture and write a long message to her friend who’s mom just had a baby. I sat with her and patiently spelled out every word of every sentence. It was not a short letter. She drew a lovely picture of monkeys and asked to put it all in an envelope.

And then she made a mistake on the envelope and went stark raving mental. She was clearly tired and past her coping with failure threshold and the fallout wasn’t pretty. I let her cry and tried to calm her but the final straw was her shouting rudely at me. I said “right, enough”, and told her to go to her room. Aha. Sure. At this point Moran came into the room, grabbed the envelope from her and threatened to tear it up. Lovely. Just great. Because that will most definitely calm the beast. He didn’t rip it up, but he did pick her up, fighting like a wet cornered cat, and put her in bed.

That’s when she stopped crying. And started screaming:

OOOOHHHHH! How fun! How fun for us that there are parents who will RIP APART children’s drawings! And envelopes! Thank GOD for parents like this, that will grab their children’s creations from their hands and tear them up! How lucky we all are! WHAT FUN!

She’s 5. The future terrifies me.