tormenting my children - or is it parenting?

ok, i parenting has its ups and downs and it is not the same with each child at one time. while it might be up with one kid, it is down with another. thus, bringing on more complications. let,s start with syd, who now is calling herself ally. ally had a busy weekend and refused to go to sleep on sun night. it is hard enough that our church doesn't have service until 6:00pm, so it is normally 7:30pm before we are home. then you start the supper and baths and all that good stuff. after falling asleep at 10:45pm, we knew mon would be a hard day for her. sure enough, from the time she got home from shcool, she was fussy, winey and flat out miserable to deal with. we made her go to bed at 7:45pm. she fussed even more. it was so hard to not read her a story, sing her a song, or do anything special to get her down. we hardened up and said, "don't worry, you will thank us for this tomorrow." and yet, at 6:10 this morning, she was bright and cheerful. i pray we have a better day when she gets home today. i do not want to go through that again.

now i will move on to alayna. she was fine. she is easy to deal with. her personality is a little more easy going and she is FUNNY! we had just finished supper and we were all going to go outside for a little bit. she ran into the bathroom and climbed into the bathtub. (she does this regularly to hide and play in the faucet.) thinking she was going to turn the water on like in the past, i hollered from the kitchen for her to get out of there. she stayed. i went to her and started pulling her out of the tub. she screamed the whole time. i spanked her for throwing a fit, she screamed more. then she said, "net, mommy." i finally figured out what she was talking about. i, get this, put her back in the tub and she gets her little fishing net (a bath toy that you can fish up fishies with) and she runs outside. not only do i feel horrible for all that just happened, but then i am extremely amazed at how she thought to use that fishing pole thing as a butterfly catcher. strike two for me....

then there is the little one growing inside me. as sweet and innocent as she is, i swear she is going to come out my throat and not the usual way. she is so high up in my chest it is killing me. i pray she drops and she drops tons.... i will love the relief of her off of my neck!

all in all, everyone was all smiles this morning. we'll see what happens this afternoon.