Sometimes I Reach My Limit

I have heard it said often: raising girls or boys are two totally different experiences. Girls tend to need more emotional support, while boys tend to run roughshod on the home with their activity. Don't bother getting any new furniture until those boys are teenagers, it'll just get ruined. At least that's how the stereotypes go.

We thought my eldest was our emotional one, and used to jokingly call our youngest "our boy," because she was so emotionally resilient, not prone to burst into tears at the slightest provocation like our eldest.

And then our eldest continued to grow and mature, while our youngest reached the age when the eldest used to be incredibly sensitive, and the tables turned.

Take Sunday.

It began at the breakfast table, when Marissa asked me to put butter and syrup on her pancakes while she used the bathroom. So I did and I also cut her pancake up, like she usually asks me to do. She returns to the table, pushes her plate away and refuses to eat her pancake because I cut it up when she didn't ask me to. Fine. So I take the pieces of pancake and split them between Lindsey's and my plates, and give her another two pancakes, which I put butter and syrup on and give back to her.

She looks at me. "Cut my pancakes, please."

"But you wouldn't eat the other ones that I did cut up," I say.

"That's because I didn't ask you to do it. But I'm asking you now," she says.

I look at her. "Figure it out, kid, I'm not cutting your pancakes."

She ate her eggs, not the pancakes. Because I cut the ones she didn't ask me to, and wouldn't cut up the ones she wanted me to.

It continued throughout the day. She got mad because she wanted to play at the bottom of the stairs but Lindsey already was, even though Marissa had been playing happily somewhere else. She insisted in reading books loudly two feet away from where Lindsey was playing quietly, and got mad when Lindsey asked her to move (I managed to convince her to read with me in my bedroom). She resolutely refused my offer to help her get dressed, then cried when she wanted me to help her two minutes later and she couldn't find me because I'd gone downstairs.


Hard to believe this little girl can be so demanding.

The last one of the day came at bedtime, when she sat down and cried because I refused to change the clean sheets that had been put on the day before for her blue polka dot sheets because she "didn't want to have the same sheets over and over and over."

Wayne had to deal with that one, I was officially tapped out after a day of illogical demands and ridiculous outbursts.

I can't wait until this stage is over.