Nearly bedtime

It's getting that way.

It's around 2309, the BG has phoned. Or rather, the She-Ex phoned and asked if BG could speak to her Daddy, so I said of course she could! And BG was cross with Daddy for not phoning the night before last. So Daddy explained to BG that he had, he just hadn't been able to get through. And BG said "Oh, that'll be my silly dumb mommy" so she got told not to be rude about her mother from her father for that, because regardless of what we think about adults, children do not get to be rude about or to adults. That's the way we're raising the AC, that's the way that we'd be raising the BG if we could. But we can do our bit by telling her not to be rude to her mother. Funnily enough, BG didn't want to talk to Daddy very much after he told her she had to be polite about her mother, children are like that lol!

I suppose this links into the giving up theme. If we had wanted, we could have had a longer conversation with BG by just ignoring what she said. In the long term though, that might have made a difference to her attitude towards her mother, towards adults in general - if her Daddy doesn't tell her off it could mean to her that he thinks it's ok for it to happen, and it's not! So he gave up a longer conversation, for the sake of her having some respect for adults and her mother in general.

That's what parents do. Make short term sacrifices of children's smiles for long term achievement of children's ability to function in society as responsible adults who know how to behave, and hopefully cutting out the ASBO and tantrums and hormones on the way. Well, not the hormones, we're stuck with those, but the rest of it is easily managed at this age.

And it looks like bed has been delayed as R has cracked open a packet of jaffa cakes and we're eating. He has jaffa cakes, I have cheese and baby tomatoes that he bought me the other day to make me smile. They do :-)