This last week, our dinners have been along the lines of grilled cheese toast (until we ran out of bread), oatmeal, and cereal. Seriously. I've tried to throw in some apple or carrot sticks or something, but it's been very far from cooking proper food. Tonight I was still tired, but thought I could step my mom-game up at least a notch or two. Our new house has a rice cooker, so I put rice and lentils in that, and then actually went to all the trouble of making a vegetable sauce. The gate-keeper at these apartments seems to grow a giant garden of mostly Swiss chard, and he generously gave us a large serving. Hibiscus loves "greens," so I set about making a pot of greens in tomato sauce to serve with our rice. I know that Emerson won't eat it, but both the girls are very excited about a proper dinner of "food and soup" and looked eagerly into the cooking pot.
While the kids were playing outside after school, Emerson and Hibiscus came running up to me with a branch of something that looked kind of like rosemary, but wasn't, and said that Hibiscus liked to eat it and would I cook it, and you're supposed to take the leaves off it and cook it. I kind of brushed them off, and reminded them not to pick the plants. It got dropped on the floor and abandoned for more interesting pursuits.
Then it was time to clean up before dinner. Oh, what a long and painful process! As you probably know by now, I do a lot of parenting-by-routine. Waldorfians call it "rhythm instead of discipline," but I think of discipline as disciple-ship and not necessarily negative. But I try to set up a strong and absolutely consistent routine, and it helps a lot to contain the internal chaos of my kids. Any child benefits from consistent expectations, but Emerson and Hibiscus have very little internal regulation, so the external part makes a big difference, and it will eventual teach them self-regulation as well.
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| Dinnertime chores in a basket. They took turns drawing them, to make it exactly clear who is supposed to do what, and even in what order. |
And do you know what that means? The last week has been chaos. The new house does not yet have a routine, and the kids can't figure out how to find themselves in it. Normally they are like pinballs shooting off the walls by dinnertime, but at least pinballs with an occasional purpose, and they really actually manage to get the table cleared and set almost every night. But now? Hibiscus has a vague memory of "clear Mama's stuff," so she picks up my computer keyboard and wanders around the house with it, opening and closing it, for minutes. I tell her where to put it down, but it's in the kitchen instead of the bedroom like the last house, which she can't articulate to herself but she refuses to put it there and dissolves into wailing when I try and take it from her before she breaks it. Emerson brings a piece of trash to the bin, but he has to spend time remembering where the trash is, so then on his way back he starts doing a balancing beam act on the broom instead. And this table looks somehow much more messy than the last table, so both of them feel like the job of clearing it is impossible.
Somewhere in the middle of all the human pinballing, someone found the random herb on the floor and asked me to put it in the food. I said we weren't going to put it in the food, and reminded them of the correct job. I'd finished the sauce, which was just simmering, so I stepped into the bedroom to take care of something. Emerson came running in eagerly, telling me that Hibiscus fixed the plant and now we get to eat it for dinner! I went back to the stove, with Buttercup peering out of the wrap over my shoulder, and found little rosemary-like leaves all over the top of my simmering sauce. I did not really feeling like adding a strange bitter herb to my sauce, and picked as many of them out as I could, while trying to direct the wild table-clearing-not-really, but many of the leaves were stuck in the other stuff in the pot.
This is a mess. Don't step on that. Don't drop that on the floor. Please get the spoons. And then I had a sudden suspicion.
I went over and asked Hibiscus if she actually knew what the plant was, and had eaten it before. She wouldn't look at me. I asked her again. I took her hands. I made her look at me. Finally she shook her head; she had no idea what it was. We had mixed a mysterious ornamental plant into our dinner.
I told her to come over to the stove with me, and she wouldn't. I reminded her that I had never hurt her, and I wasn't going to now, and I took her hand and led her over. I picked up the pot with one hand and held her fast with the other, and took her with me while I went outside and dumped the whole soup in the garbage. I told her we couldn't eat plants when we didn't know what they were, because they could make us very sick, and I thanked her for admitting she didn't know what it was, so now we wouldn't be sick. But we didn't have sauce. She was devastated, and crumpled in a corner of the kitchen and wouldn't get up.
I served the rice and lentils. Plain. I put a little tomato paste in our bowls, hoping it would add at least a few vitamins or something. I wasn't going to put any in Emerson's, but he insisted that he wanted some -- until he tried it, and then he told me that I had ruined his entire dinner and he was mad at me. I added some nutritional yeast, but not on Hibiscus's. I told her that since she had ruined the sauce, she didn't get any new sauce. Then Buttercup tried hers and asked for cheese, which I didn't think was a bad idea because it was pretty miserably boring. I didn't give cheese to either Emerson or Hibiscus, because they were both involved in the sauce-ruining, although I'm pretty sure Hibiscus was the ring-leader. It seemed pretty reasonable to me: you disobey direct instructions to not put something in the sauce, thus ruining the sauce: you don't eat sauce. Or sauce substitute.
Speaking of which, Hibiscus defended that she'd put the plant in the food because "Emerson told me to." Emerson has also tried to get out of things because "Hibiscus told me to." This appears to be a Möbius strip of excuses for doing things that they know are stupid! And when I told them that it was stupid, they said that they would report me to their teacher for calling them stupid. I said that I didn't call them stupid, and they were smart children, but sometimes smart people do stupid things. And this was one of them. In fact, I think a good criteria for deciding whether or not something is a stupid thing to do, is if you plan on telling your mother that your sibling told you to do it!
Hibiscus sulked in her corner while we all sat down to eat, but she has enough experience with me to know that sulking wasn't going to get her tummy full, so she came over and cleared the things left at her place and sat down with us. We all sang the blessing, and she refused to sing with us, and said "now I do it myself" and sang quietly by herself after we all were done. The strange ways that children decide to punish their parents!
By bedtime, and two helping of boring rice-and-lentils later, Hibiscus was in a much better mood, and got herself ready quite well. She asked to pick out a book. Normally each child picks a book and we read three (Buttercup's book, then Hibiscus's, then Emerson's), but if it is after 8 o'clock we only have time for one book and I pick it. I told her she could pick something, and she picked the Madeline compilation. Emerson had stayed in the kitchen to clear and wipe off the table, which was also admirable, so he was the last one ready. I noted that it was after 8, and said since they both had been good we could compromise, and Hibiscus had picked the book and Emerson could pick the story.
Oh my goodness, this was so not acceptable! Total hissy fit that Emerson had any say in what was going on. Hibiscus refused to even get into bed with us and listen to the book, and then she wouldn't even get into bed for blessings. She finally crawled into her place as I was leaving the room, I think because she knew that otherwise I was going to plop her there myself (and I would have). The things kids think of! As though refusing to listen to the book was going to break my heart and leave her victorious!
At least she didn't scream! I can see in so many ways that she has come a long way in the last couple of months. She got herself out of her sulking fit twice, she knew when I said that I was going to do something that I was really going to do it and reacted accordingly, and she didn't scream at the top of her lungs or break things deliberately. But we have a long way still to go. First of all, in being able to plan her actions and think before she does something, whether it's putting random stuff in the pot or trying to balance upsidedown on a barstool. But also because she feels like everything is a personal insult to her, even if it is natural consequences or an accident or just totally random. That makes little issues a lot more painful than they might otherwise be. She spent a lot of time punishing her own self tonight.
And I wish I weren't using my frustrated voice so much! Maybe next time I should just tell them to do the table, and go into my room and shut the door for ten minutes, and then just come out and eat. I'll let you know how that goes!
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