I Spent My WA Day. . .

. . . Washing three sets of wet blankets and sheets.

This last weekend was a long weekend in WA. The kids wanted to get to the park, make chocolate chip cookies and do lots of fun things together.

Instead we spent the weekend washing load after load of blankets and weed on pajamas, wearing out our time out corner and moving a certain 4 yr old out of the bedroom he was sharing with his sister.

The final straw. Sunday night. I put the kids to bed. They were talking and giggling and I could tell there was mischief happening. 3 minutes after bed time out comes Mr4 "mum I wet the bed" he smiled at me.

The thing that annoys me the MOST about all this. Mr4 can't be bothered plotting evil plans, instead he does what his big sister tells him to do. And while they were in there she had again convinced him to wet his bed BEFORE they were asleep.

After that it was a night of game playing-getting out of bed 1000 times, talking, singing loudly. Anything to attract attention and for Miss5 to prove that not only does she have control over wetting her own bed but she was starting to gain control over her brother too.

Now to some people this might all seem a bit silly. You might think I'm over-exaggerating by saying my daughter has these control issues. That's she's "too young" to know what she's doing.
Well for those people out there let me just say this-HAVE YOU MET MY DAUGHTER???? As much as I love her and she IS a beautiful, helpful, caring person she is also super intelligent (in the bad kinda way), stubborn, manipulative and controlling. And her brother-well he's too easy going for his own good and does whatever his big sister tells him to do.

Earlier in the day on Sunday mum had called me outside to look at something and I had asked the kids to sit nicely while I did something important. We were set up to make cookies and I asked them to stay where they were.
They didn't-Miss5 stood at the front door and shouted and screamed and did everything to get my attention. And Mr4-he used that time to bang the spoon he was holding so hard into the table he has made lots of dents all over mums dining room table.
I came back inside, smacked the pair of them on the bum and sent them to timeout. Needless to say we didn't make cookies, Mr4 had to own up to Grandma what he had done to her table and he copped a second telling off from her.

So after a slightly disasterous Sunday we actually had a lovely evening. I was planning a pizza and movie night but after the days behaviour I decided not to. Instead we sat down and read books and Miss5 wanted to practice her sight words and we enjoyed ourselves.

Then the bedtime disaster happened and, once again, I went to bed grumpy.

Just after midnight Miss5's bed wetting alarm went off. The bloody thing is so loud it woke me and mum up and I actually nearly fell out of bed it scared me that much!! Clearly Miss5 was in a really deep sleep,as she got out of bed to turn the alarm off she was still peeing-yippee now I had a pee soaked carpet to clean up the next morning too! She changed her bed and went back to sleep. Now even though she weed on the floor I HONESTLY believe this was the first REAL accident she had throughout the entire continence program (roughly 7 weeks) she was in a very deep sleep and she dealt with it very quickly without waking anyone else up (even though mum and I nearly died of fright from the alarm)

By morning Mr4 had wet his bed for the second time and was happily laying in the freezing cold wet blankets-he hasn't learnt his lesson from nearly getting hypothermia the other day. He now has quite a bad cold and cough and is off school today to try and recover a bit.

I'll just quickly add here that Saturday night had been bad too. Miss5 wet her bed at 5am setting off the alarm (which clearly doesn't scare her anymore) and while changing her sheets and stuffing around she poked and prodded her brother until he too was awake and then they started being silly until I got up yelled at them both and threatened them both that if they didn't stay in bed I was gonna lock them up all day! It lasted till 7am when they started fighting.

Sunday morning I had had enough. At breakfast I talked to both the kids about the behaviour from the night before and the excessively loud singing and fighting going on early on Monday morning.

I was that fed up by this stage I walked out of breakfast and sat in bed and cried-for about 20 minutes.   Mum and I then made the decision that if we wanted to keep the kids alive, and to keep us out of padded cells, we needed to split the kids up. This room sharing wasn't working. Miss5 was starting to get too much control over her brother and it needed to be stopped.

So Mr4 moved into the spare room and mum moved in with Miss5. Poor mum!
Mr4 went to bed last night feeling pretty miserable, coughing and blocked up with plenty of snot. Miss5 went to bed terrified of sharing her room with Grandma.

After Miss5 tried her usual getting up to the toilet 7 times in 45 minutes she settled in for the long haul-there was no one in the room to talk to or be silly with. She had a dry night and woke up nice and warm. She was still drowsy and half asleep when I went in to get her up for school. From such a good sleeper to this she was suffering from exhaustion.

Mr4 didn't have a dry night but it was an accident-not a stupid excuse for attention. He did however sleep well past the 7am wake up call and I had to poke and prod and tickle him and finally pull all his blankets off before he would wake up-clearly he's been missing his sleep too.

Hopefully over the next couple of weeks as they get used to being away from each other and enjoy being dry and having a good night sleep they will become much nicer to live with.

And when we get to Tom Price we may have to kick baby out of her room for a few months while the kids get resettled and then attempt a room share a little later in the year.

It was so nice last night for them to be in bed and for the house to be silent. No talking, no giggling, no crying from being pinched, no jumping from bed to bed. And this morning to have no loud singing and running around before wake up time made waking up that much more enjoyable.


Now I'm off  to figure out how to do some washing minus the washing powder I forgot to buy this morning, and have a cup of raspberry leaf tea to try to encourage this little princess to make her arrival.