Parenting Problems

Sunday night Steve woke me up after I fell asleep to tell me that Gunther had disappeared. We spent ten minutes calling for him in the dark of our backyard, until finally Steve put on his boots and went out to find him. I was picturing his flattened body in the street, and wondering if I should start working on posters when Gunther ran up the back porch steps. Yesterday morning, instead of sitting right outside the door staring at us as we ate breakfast, he was nowhere to be found. Until I took a peek out and saw him lounging in the neighbor's yard.

See, we have this electric fence, which beeps when Gunther gets too close to the property line. And it works very, very well for him. The thing is, you have to remember to replace the batteries.

Yesterday the Oil Man came to deliver the eleven gallons of oil (which will cost us a thousand dollars) and Gunther started barking at him. I was working out, and after a halfhearted attempt to get him to stop, I just let him keep barking and going crazy, thinking "he's inside - what's the worst thing that can happen?" Well, one of the worst things is that Gunther would throw his body into the window and BREAK IT. Which, of course happened.

Add to this the fact that Nicholas gave himself a fat lip doing a flying leap to get his pillow into his school cubby (think lots of blood, lots of tears). Add to all this the fact that I made Nicholas cry this morning because I refused to give him the last two, stale, cold toaster waffles because he had already had three french toasts and the waffles were supposed to be MINE. And Nate is crying and choking next to me at this very moment shouting "Gimme MILK Gimme MILK" but I have developed a deafness to anything that does not contain the word "PLEASE"

And I just pulled the syrup bottle from out of Nick's mouth, and I'm this far from putting the baby's swing outside because kids are always sitting in it and playing the stupid tinny music, and it's not Andrew!...

I have to go yell some more, now.