Dating with Children

Tonight began as the perfect evening. My 8 year old daughter had a baseball game, immediately followed by my 12 year old son’s game. All of my kids were there (the other two being a 10 year old daughter and a 5 year old son) as well as my “extra kid” who is my oldest son’s friend and who spends a lot of time with us. We spit sunflower seed shells, cheered like wild for our team and just had a wonderful evening in the warm mountain air. I live in such an ideal spot. It’s safe and I was able to let my nonplaying kids run around in the trees and on the playground by the ball field. I was thinking, “Life does not get any better than this!”

THEN we got home. The kids were running around outside and I decided to let our three month old puppy run with them. We live back from the road and all there is for him to do is frolic and sniff trees. Thus began my problem. My 10 year old daughter had a complete and utter MELTDOWN that I let the dog off his leash and she was positive that he was going to run away and and die. Mind you, this dog doesn’t wander more than 10 feet from us at any given time because he’s very sweet and loves to be near us. Daughter and I then got into an argument. I say the dog needs to run and have fun outside so he can get exercise and be healthy and happy. She says “WHYYYYYYY OH WHYYYYYYY do you have to do this to me Mommy?????”

I had had enough. She was screaming and pitching a fit so I had to send her into the house to go to bed. I could not deal with her another second or things were going to get even more ugly.

I guess that we can’t have the perfect evening where we come home from a wonderful night at the ballpark, eat dinner and go to bed. SOMETHING has to happen.

I got to thinking that I was very VERY glad I didn’t have a boyfriend with me that night. He’d have run scared after seeing her freak out like that! Maybe that’s the best part of long distance relationships. If your kids start to have a conniption, you can just hang up the phone and call back later when your world is serene!

On the other hand, he may perceive my world as serene because I mainly talk on the phone after the kids are in bed, and while that is for the most part how it is around here (my kids are generally well-behaved), from time to time we MELT WAY THE HELL DOWN!

I guess it just takes time to build a relationship based on the realities of our lifes…kids, dogs and all.

single parenting, baseball, meltdown, fighting with children, relationships, healthy parenting, dogs