Thanksgiving

So I couldn't come up with a way to get out of going with the Hedgehog to his mom's house today. Mostly it was because he was so damned supportive and told me to stop freaking out. See, one of the benefits of this blog is that, as a socially awkward person who's terrified of confrontation, I can put my thoughts up here that I could never say aloud, because writing on the internet doesn't scare me as much.

Because on the internet, I feel like a boss.

This means the Hedgehog saw my last post, laughed at the thought of me trying to sneak off, told me I was ridiculous, and we had a normal conversation about how I should handle Thanksgiving today.

I felt like someone going into battle...

So I spent the whole day laughing with his step-sisters, both of which are either just going into high school or already are, but both of them are hilarious and awesome so it doesn't matter, and I pretty much felt like I actually fit in for once, aside from some awkwardness. See, I met them before and they make me feel comfortable, so I'm just fine with them.

... Whaddaya know...? This isn't so bad...! Whooo!

When it came time to come home, however, both the Hedgehog's mom and the Terror's mom offered to drive us. At the same time. In the same car. I thought this would be the confrontation I'd been expecting...

Oh gods...

Except it never happened...



Surprisingly, this makes me feel worse.

But they're driving the Hedgehog to work, so I'm almost positive it's happening there... or worse, they'll drive back and talk to me... alone... without the Hedgehog... oh gods...
Edit: It's been 45 minutes, so they're not coming back.

Still terrified.

In fact, the only thing I do know at this point, is that there's a 99% chance I won't be watching the Terror ever again...


... She's my Chick Pea...

Edit: Okay, so they didn't talk to the Hedgehog either... but even he agreed it was suspicious and he'd been a little weirded out when they didn't talk to us on the way home.

This Child is Planning on Killing Me

 ... I have a sneaking suspicion that the Terror is planning on killing me... After all, I spent most of the day yelling at her thanks to a new annoying habit she has of eating two bites, throwing the food away, saying she's finished, and then telling me she's hungry...

I'm full, I'm done eating... Can I have a snack, I'm hungry...

Not to mention she's continuing her trend of asking me the same questions repeatedly in a row, ignoring me when I'm talking to her so I have to repeat myself until my throat is hoarse to elicit a response from her, and just plain ignoring what I'm telling her.

What time is it? Is it four yet? What time is it? Is it four yet?

This is her playing with glass cups I told her to not touch 5 mins before.

Get up. Get up. Stand up. Get up. Getupgetupgetup.

I have a sneaking suspicion she has no short term memory. Also, remember that picture at the top of this post? That's her reaction after I took those glass cups away.

Terror Hates Pants

I think I've mentioned in the past that getting the Terror to put on pants is hard. She says she doesn't have any, and while sometimes this it true, yesterday I had to help her find some, so I know she has a ton just lying around. Since I'm supposed to be preparing her for school, this morning I told her she couldn't have breakfast until she put on pants...

Picture inspired by something Lulu said

And then I spent the next 30 minutes listening to her scream and cry and whine as she sat in her doorway, letting me know how horrible a person I was, occasionally stopping to yell, "But I don't have pants!"

Eventually she got hungry enough to put them on and come back, staring pathetically up at me: "I'm hungry..." She said, to which I replied, "Told you you had pants."

Don't You Make Me Come Get You!

How could you be so stupid, me?

... I can't believe this child made me chase her down... again. I can't believe I made the mistake of letting her play outside again... again. Honestly, when am I ever gonna learn? Do I have some kind of chronic brain problem that makes learning from past mistakes impossible?

 It's just the Terror's been so... terrible today. All day long she's stared at me in that strangely blank but vaguely sad and confused way she has, making me repeat everything innumerable times.

"Stop. Stop it. I said stop. Stop right now!"

 "Let the dog go. Let Noodles go. Stop it, let him go, he wants down."

 "Close the fridge, you just ate and you didn't even finish your food. Close it. No, you just ate."

 "Pick that up. Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick up your mess."

"Let him go. Leave him alone."

"Get up. Get up and let Noodles out. Get up. Up. Up. Up!"

That last one was followed by, "Don't make me come get you..." She stood up and started inching away, and when I stood, she bolted. I chased her down the stairs and around the back of the house before I could snatch her up without hurting her...

Update: Ugh, she just made me have to get up and turn her back around in the timeout chair after she tried to play with Noodles and watch cartoons... Which is impossible because the kitchen is blocked off from the television...

Update: ... And after explaining again how timeout starts when she's quiet, she tried to get Noodles to come over to her... again...

Edit: This is my 45th post...

I Need A Job

Forewarning: I am angry. That is all.

I had been planning on writing this post out when I could think clearly about the events of the 11th when I had to watch both the Spawn and the Terror, and in fact was going to put it up today. After all, I had calmed down significantly since then and could think objectively about the whole day... Last Friday I was supposed to be paid. Now, if you read this blog, you might think I've been paid a couple of times since the first post on this blog... Well, I haven't. Today was only the second time I've ever been paid since I started watching the Terror.


The first time I got paid $85. Today? I got $80. I did the math on that... I'm still pretty much getting paid $8.50 a day to watch her kid.

Alright, deep breath Kit, don't get mad... just tell everyone what you planned...

On the 11th I had to watch both of the kids at the same time, and as you may know, the Spawn seems to think it's his job to terrorize the Terror and get her behavior going a thousand times worse. He was okay first thing in the morning because he was focused on his game, but... he beat it, and not 30 minutes after my post, he came out of his room and helped to cause near non-stop chaos for the rest of the day.

On top of their usual behavior of dashing up and down the hall and jumping on the couch, the talk of buttholes continued... non-stop... through every conversation... no matter what they were playing. Sometimes they changed it up and talked about dooky. I got them to stop for all of 15 minutes when I made up a game where they could only use five words to talk, all really weird words, like "ceiling fan"... That occupied them until the Terror kept on talking about poop and butts... I couldn't make it stop.

Before I move on, I will tell you the good things that happened: we all had a good laugh over the questions for the FAQ and my answers, and I had a couple of nice game conversations with the Spawn... There was even a kind of touching moment when I explained that when I was yelling at them to stop, I was yelling at both of them, not just him. They were both doing things that were wrong, and he should tell me when she was bothering him, so I could take care of it...

... You know, as opposed to getting a hard pillow and slamming it across her face while screaming at her.

That was pretty much the only good things that happened. The rest of the day was spent trying to make them play nice with each other, trying to get the Terror to stop trying to shove her finger up his butt, to leave him alone when he wanted to go back to play his game, to get him to share with her...

They had pillow fights and wrestled and stacked pillows on each other and jumped off of the couches onto each other, and for the most part... I let them. So long as they weren't screaming or arguing, I let them be and play with each other.

I could remember being six and playing with my older brother. My older brother terrorized me. We were both in Judo, so he called it "practice" and my aunt let him pound my head repeatedly into the floor or ground while they watched. Also, he was in football, and would use me as a target to practice tackling.

While the Terror and the Spawn pretty much screamed and hollered non-stop and made me wanna strangle something, they pretty much were having fun. Aside from taking an iPhone or iPod (don't own one and can't tell the difference nowadays...) and recording him talking and not sharing, and above incident where she was bothering him and he wailed on her, and all the times she tried to shove her finger up his butt, they played pretty well with each other.

Of course, that doesn't mean they didn't drive me nuts with the constant chaos, and the Spawn played his usual game of ignoring my authority and laughing at me when I tried to get them to stop, or getting way too offended and storming off... But talking with the Hedgehog cleared all that up later. You have to feel sorry for a kid who thinks everything's his fault.

So looking back on it, it wasn't as bad as it could've been... even though they made fun of me and hit me in the head with a pillow when my back was turned, said I had a "monster face" and that I was fat.

But my point is... would you deal with all of this for $8.50 a day?

And would you really pay the person who watches your precious child from 8am to 8pm some nights for 3 or 4 days a week so little...?

Looking to be in for a Rough One

It returns!

Today's a day off from school for the Spawn, so he's home, and unlike yesterday when he came home early, I don't have the Hedgehog and his little sister helping me keep an eye on the Terror and the Spawn...

Seriously, this kid is part monkey.

 Surprisingly it's been okay, though. See, the Spawn just got Call of Duty, so he's been in his room hole'd up with his PS3 and big flat screen tv... Me and the Hedgehog don't even have a tv half that nice... Gods I wish I could be a kid again when I see stuff like this.

Anyway, he's actually been a pretty good kid. We had a whole little conversation about his game while he was heating up pizza, and he never mentioned butts. I was really amused by his monkey-like abilities to jump onto the counter to get a plate out of the cabinet, too. All in all it was kind of weird and fun to see that he wasn't trying to out terrorize the Terror.

After he left, though, the Terror thought it would be fun to try and gnaw Noodles's ear off, despite the fact the dog was sitting on her lap screaming. After yelling at her to quit, stop, and let the dog go, I came over and had to forcibly pry her arms off from around the dog... Screaming at the top of her lungs, I put her in timeout.

She sat there doing that awful thing she does where she just screams short little "ah" sounds while staring at me as if trying to force me to go insane. When she finally began to quiet five minutes later, I informed her that she would stay in the chair until she stopped screaming, and then, and only then, would I start counting her five minutes of timeout... That shut her up instantly.

I had thought yesterday's lesson from her aunt that you could walk out of timeout had been forgotten, but...

The time had just gone to the end of her five minutes when there was movement out of the corner of my vision... the Terror was attempting to sneak down the hallway while I wasn't looking. So I grabbed her real quick and set her back in the corner, pointing at the clock on the stove. "See this? Your five minutes were up, I was just about to let you out, but because you went to sneak out, you have to go back for five more minutes."

So she sat in the chair and alternated between her forceful "ah"s and sobbing and whining to herself...

It's not even lunchtime yet.

I Am Sooooooooooo Screwed

So last night after sitting around for a few hours plotting all sorts of post ideas with some key words so I remember what I need to write about, almost all of them about funny incidents or memories, I pulled my blog up to look and see how my posts look to you guys.

Me and the Hedgehog don’t really have internet at home right now, its been turned off until we can buy it again for a month, but Firefox remembers what things look like the last time you looked at them if you type in the address, go to another page, and click the back button, so I was reading through.

My ego got a tiny boost at seeing I apparently had a comment that I’d forgotten to read earlier, one from Jess, mind you, and that my pictures were kind of funny (though I really have to stop talking about my random depressed moments and hinting at my sad childhood… I’m supposed to be inspiring laughter, not pity... though the Cat Incident should inspire sadness and rage...).

Then I got to the Awesome post where I was talking about a FB convo I had with Lulu. While looking at the post I remember my pictures link to the blog, sorta, and I wondered where those pictures linked… Imagine my horror when I saw they linked straight to our FB profiles.

 For a moment I sat on the bed, panicking as I’m wont to do so easily, thinking about scary blog stalkers who secretly love me but are too creepy and stalker like to subscribe to my blog where I can see them because that would ruin their lurking abilities while they’re trying to friend me on FB; and then I would feel awkward and like I needed to accept because I’m nice like that… but then they would talk about the blog on there and the Hedgehog’s family would ask and the stalker would stupidly link it and then the Hedgehog’s mom would know I talk bad about her precious grandbabies and his sisters would know they annoy/intimidate me beyond all belief because I don’t feel like a proper adult like they are; and then they would legitimately hate me and the Hedgehog would leave me because he realized they were right and I would be all alone and paranoid in a world that’s cruel and harsh and no one would ever love me because I would have to become homeless again and no one would want to love a person who’s been homeless multiple times before the age of twenty-one.

 But then I let out a sigh of relief because all I’d have to do is simply not friend the people and pretend like I have no idea what was going on, besides, I would fix the pictures somehow in the morning before the Terror woke up. It’s not like just because my FB was linked on the blog meant the blog was linked to the FB. It would be fixed quickly before there was any damage done…

Anyway… So the Hedgehog had to ruin this momentary lapse in my panic by reminding me if I didn’t fix it and somehow his mom got linked to the blog she’d see that and know that it was me, because hey! There’s my FB!

 I panicked again…

She would see me talking bad about her precious grandchildren…

She would see me calling her daughter a hypocrite…

She would see me getting all annoyed and venty all over her family…

So I reminded him about how he’d accepted it pretty okay. I mean, you’d have to have absolutely no humor whatsoever to think I hate the little Terror, and I do mention that I’m actually only really scared of making his mom hate me… I mean, I’m just not a very well adjusted member of society. If I don’t know you, and I’m aware I don’t know you (which I’m sometimes not because I’m horrible with names and faces and sometimes if people both have the same eyes I’ll think they’re the same person despite drastic differences in everything else… It takes me at least a week of constant exposure to really learn a person.) I’m a really shy person. I’m terrified of making people hate me and saying the wrong thing…

The blog is here because on the internet I can be me without fear, but on FB I couldn’t be me without fear because this is the Hedgehog’s family and I love him and if they hate me the only logical thing he could do would be to leave me from sheer shame of being with a girl his family hates…

That doesn’t mean I didn’t fix those pictures, though. If you really wanna friend me that bad, stalker guy, I’ll make a new FB just for this blog.

... Longest Day Ever...

... About the fifteenth time you have to explain to a small child that it's lunch time and the supper her mom is having you make won't be ready to eat until supper time, which is after you leave to go home because she won't stop asking when she's supposed to have dinner... You realize there's little else that could be done to you...

... And yet still you wonder why you did to deserve this... and how you wound up with the job of explaining every ten minutes what dinnertime is and why she can't have it for lunch...

Mind you this is after a day of her saying she's hungry, complaining she wants dinner instead, not settling for lunch, picking up the noodles and dropping them on the floor for Noodles, complaining she wants more drink when you just filled it, saying she's not hungry anymore... waiting ten minutes and saying she's hungry again...

Inability to Learn + Complacency = Repeat Incident

 Something strange has been happening for the past week...

The Terror has been good...

... Not just good, either... but amazing...

She's started to learn her numbers to the point where I don't have to talk down to her in that annoying  voice I hate using when she asks me a billion questions about the time. In fact, she's gotten so good that all I have to do is point at the clock and she can tell me what the time is. Of course, she still doesn't  have the finer points of time down yet, but she knows that four comes after 1 and that she has to wait... She still doesn't understand what an hour is, but things have been better...

The Terror has finally begun to understand letters, too. She can finally sing her ABC's without getting really confused, and just yesterday she managed to read off the name of a popular kids show about two inventing cartoon brothers while I was flipping through the guide trying to find her the cartoons she was demanding. It amazed me so much I almost danced.

In fact, the Terror has been learning a lot of things lately, and has been amazingly adorable and not very Terror-like... It took an hour of struggling, but I taught her how to draw a triangle... Yes,  it was one of those things that broke my heart a little and made me wanna kill something, because spending an hour going, "Nooooo. Straaaaight lines, not cuurrrved..." just does that to you.

We even learned how to play pretend last week! She was so good, staying in the yard and playing with her dragons and unicorns as she played princess. She didn't chase after Noodles when he ran out of the yard, she was real good and stayed in the yard, running in every so often to announce, "I found another dragon!"

She was so cute I started calling her my little Chick Pea.

As the Hedgehog has blatantly told me, however, the Terror often has these moments... and they are short, as she quickly relapses into usual Terror behavior. I learned this the hard way, because yesterday I let her play in the yard again. I opened the door and the blinds and watched her playing, but right away I began to notice there was something a little different. She was running in and out constantly complaining about Noodles, and the more I told her to leave him alone and play, the more she complained.

Finally I went outside to tell her when he went to run off with a neighborhood dog to just let them play, it was alright.

The moment I came back inside, I looked out the window and saw an all too familiar scene...

So I ran back out and yelled without thinking, managing to get the Terror back into the yard... but then she started to do that thing that the Terror does that drives me nuts. She froze, didn't move... just stood there with her head bowed, face like that of someone who only speaks English now in a country where no one did. She looked confused, worried... so I told her to come inside...

 The Terror just stood there, blank stare on her face, looking at the ground without moving... I tried a few more times, and the finally, frustrated, yelled that either she came in or I went to get her, and she wasn't going to like it if I did. Another moment of standing there, staring with this confused face at nothing, and I finally went to go get her...

And that's when she took off running like a bat out of hell.

Oh yeah, I caught the Terror and I gave her ten minutes of timeout, but still... Why don't I learn?