Bit of a Failure

Bit of a failure

So today is a friends’ birthday party at an indoor playground an hour away. It was planned in advance so it was a glorious sunny day. My kid’s party on Saturday in the pouring rain needed to be there and this party need to be here, today! I digress.
My kids must get to sleep early. I try and be flexible. We read up to an hour, I lie with them and usually they fall asleep almost instantly. Unless they are excited. And my kids with no sleep equals endless meltdowns and pointless tears all day the next day.
The night before his birthday party I was peeling Holdy off the bedroom roof. It was the first time he really clued in it was HIS party tomorrow. He was sooooooooooooo excited he was jumping on his brothers and could not calm down. At 10:30 they were all still awake. And I paid. They all had ‘too much birthday’ meltdowns, which were expected and didn’t last too long. And really the party went well. I digress, again.
So they were excited about the trip to the playground place, and the fact that Daddy arrived home from his hunting trip. With antlers! Oh yah and hugs. So after kindness, firmness and understanding, I forgot all my parenting philosophy and fell back on fear and coercion. Amazing how it works. *bowing head in shame* It goes like this, “If you guys don’t calm down and go to sleep we’re NOT going, I am not dealing with tired sobbing children all day tomorrow!”
Sigh.
We get up and go early and they have a ball. We were basically the only group there and the kids ran for about 3 hours up down around. Happy red hot sweating kids.
Then Mommy does her old ‘lets go on a tour’ thing. We are currently reading “Owls in the Family” by Farley Mowat (Oh the book lists I have to get thru!) and there is a Great Horned Owl at the North Island Wildlife Recovery Association. There are bears, injured eagles, injured ravens (an albino raven!) and various birds and animals they try and either rehabilitate for release or they take care of and use for education. I think they’ll love it. They had other ideas. I heard the “We want to go to the Parrot Place” and the “We don’t want to go there” but I really thought they’d get over it. They didn’t. They hated it. They wanted to see the dang parrots. One sobbing big boy and two little brothers trying to pretend they were hating it too. (Ok the image of Sawyer in a monkey position on the fence outside the owl’s cage hooting is cute, especially when the owls started hooting back!) We had to leave because August absolutely refused to like it one little bit. Refused to participate, sobbed and basically made it impossible to enjoy. I guess I should have left it for another time and gone to see the dang parrots. (Parrots Schmarrots) So sometimes plans fall flat. My wonderful cool “look at this” visit was a total bummer. Bummer.
I tried really hard not to be angry. Really hard. Thank you Naomi.