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Bless me, Grandma, for I have sinned

Ane took a ten-minute nap in the car yesterday.

That was IT.

We had been at the mall, trying to get some odds and ends Christmas shopping done – a gift card here, a small thing there, one last stocking stuffer – and by the end of it, Ane was dragging and she was in trouble. She had decided to duck into a computer games store without asking me to go check it out. Fortunately, I saw her do it. If I hadn’t… I would have been flipped out of my mind trying to find her.

So she had to hold on to Tad’s stroller all the way back through the mall – it was time to leave, anyway – and she was crying the whole way back: “I don’t want to run away from my Mommy, I want to behave, I want to be a big girl,” like a broken record. After that display, she went limp in the car and had her ten-minute power nap. I tried getting her back to sleep after we arrived home, but had no luck. I did make her rest in her room for a while, but it was a lost cause.

Problem: this is a Wednesday night, and we have Cubbies, and now she is sleep-deprived and in a bad mood.

She ended up on time-out during Cubbies (administered by Grandma) and pouted her way through singing time. She also had a hair-trigger temper that resulted in several crying fits because she wasn’t getting her way.

This all culminated once we got home, and Tad got into her room. She collapsed in the hallway and began to cry and kick her feet in a classic temper tantrum pose.

I watched in amusement. “Kick harder,” I told her.

She stopped. “What?” she asked.

Before I could repeat myself, she got up, went into her room, and in front of her father and me, kicked her brother in the shin.

She was in big trouble now. Tad didn’t cry – he just looked at her, confused, as if to say, “What was that for?” The Webmaster swept him up and carried him off to his room, and I calmly informed Ane that she had just forfeited her story for the night.

Of course, that set her off, and she begged to apologize to Tad. We let her, but told her that she wasn’t going to avoid punishment – no story time tonight.

As I was tucking her in, she was sobbing quietly. “I want Grandma,” she whimpered.

“Do you want to call Grandma?” I asked. She nodded, and so we went to the phone. I dialed the number and handed her the phone, knowing that my mother would be the one to pick up.

“Hi, Grandma,” said a tearful Ane. “I kicked my brother.”

“You kicked your brother?” I could hear my mother say.

“Yes, but I’m not in trouble,” Ane replied.

“Oh, yes, you are,” I interjected, loud enough for Grandma to hear. “Tell her what your punishment is.”

“I don’t get a story tonight,” Ane told Grandma. After she listened to my mother for a while, she asked, “Grandma, can you come over to my house?”

“Honey, I’m in bed already,” she told Ane. After another minute, Ane said good-bye and handed the phone to me. “She sounds so pathetic,” my mother laughed.

“She is. But she wanted to talk to you about it, and confess,” I laughed. We got off the phone a minute later, and I put Ane to bed with no story, but she was resigned to it at this point – she knew that this was her punishment, and her appeal to the Court of Grandma for mercy had been denied.

The Webmaster asked what we were doing, and I told him that she had wanted to call Grandma to tell her what she’d done. “Bless me, Grandma, for I have sinned?” he laughed.

“You know, that would be a great title for a blog post,” I said.

2 Responses to “Bless me, Grandma, for I have sinned”

  1. Cousins' Mommy
    December 13th, 2007 07:25
    1

    You know, you’re blog just wouldn’t be the same without Ane and her antics.

  2. Webmaster
    December 13th, 2007 11:09
    2

    Actually, it was, “forgive me, Grandma, for I have sinned,” but who’s counting?

    Yes, it’s just comedy gold 24/7 @ The Corner. And if Ane doesn’t come through, Tad will perform a prat-fall and break a limb… hilarity ensues.