Oh, No He Di'int!!!!!!

You all may remember my Black Cloud post from yesterday. Suffice it to say, after that, all hell broke loose.

Patrick's friend, Ryan, stopped by to play with Patrick, and the two of them trooped upstairs, with Baci in hot pursuit. I went out to the back porch with the DS to try and relax and improve my oh-so-stellar mood. Cue DH's call that he had to stay late at work.

Of course he did. It was practically a given, considering my day. In fact, I would go so far as to hazard a guess that it was actually the gigantic cloud of my karma for the day that had extended so far as to blanket his office in Black!

OK, whatever, I was half-expecting something like that. Back to the DS.

After a minute, I became aware that Baci was barking. Really, really barking. And crying. So I called upstairs to find out what was going on. I called Baci. Several times. More crying. No coming. FINE. I went upstairs.

Baci was locked, alone, in my bedroom. The boys were nowhere to be found.

By that, I mean NOWHERE. Not in the attic, the basement, any of the bedrooms, nothing. I searched the house for ten minutes. Nothing.

I ran downstairs to ask Josie, who was sitting on the couch near the front door, if the boys had gone by her. 'No, I didn't see them.' Remembering that her powers of observation are akin to USELESS, I went out the door.

They weren't in the yard.

I stomped up the street to Ryan's house. Sure enough, there they were, in Ryan's living room.

If, by some chance, you heard what sounded like an exploding pterydactyl yesterday afternoon around 4pm, IT WAS ME. I freely admit, I totally lost it. I let that boy have it (verbally) right there in that living room, with Ryan's dad informing Ryan that, 'See? That's what happens when you do something like this,' which was nice to hear. I dragged that boy home, screaming and crying, and told him that he'd better get up in his room, and I didn't want to see him or hear from him until I told him otherwise.

Cue the stomping and screaming, and eventual yelling 'I HATE you!'

Oh, no, he di'int. He DID NOT sneak out of the house at AGE SIX, and then yell that he HATED ME after I made him come home!!!!

I went up the stairs and opened his door, and asked him what he'd said. He actually REPEATED IT, to MY FACE, but in a much smaller, maybe-this-isn't-such-a-good-idea voice. Can you believe he actually SAID IT AGAIN?! (What an idiot. Rule one of hating your parents is NOT YELLING IT AT THEM AGAIN when they quietly ask you to REPEAT IT!) So, I picked up his skinny ass, told him that I didn't want people who hated me because I was upset that they had scared the living crap out of me to live in the house, and deposited him on the front porch. I told him to go and live with people he didn't hate. I closed the screen door, and stood just inside it while he FREAKED OUT (he could see me the entire time). I didn't let him back in until he said that he was sorry, which only took a minute, but I'm sure seemed like forever to him. And I don't feel one bit bad, either. It's not the first time he's said he hated one of us, and also not the first time he's left the house (although he hasn't done it in awhile, so he obviously forgot his last lesson about that), so I figured he needed a Memorable Reminder.

This morning at 8:50 I got a call from the mom who runs Josie's book group; she wanted to bawl me out because I hadn't brought Josie to the 8:30am book reading she was doing with the group of one of the 'harder' books. We had originally said that we would be there, but really, Josie's already halfway done the book, and didn't need to be gotten up at the crack of Saturday to go out and listen to someone read to her for four hours. Also, I had a headache from yesterday still, and didn't want to go. Man, was Ms. K pissed! She tried to lay it on really thick, like I was one of her 7th grade math students, saying that they had held up the whole group waiting, and Josie had the copy of the book they were going to use so they'd had to find another one, so we really needed to call, etc. Waah. I think what really happened was that probably several parents had felt the same way, and she was mad about *that*. I told her that I wasn't feeling well, and Josie didn't need or want to be read to, and we didn't know it was mandatory or that they had wanted her copy of the book, but that if it was such a problem I could make her get dressed and tell DH how to get her there. She backed off, and then she let it slip that she was actually on her way out to pick up another kid and could come here to get Josie if we wanted. So they weren't really waiting on us. HA! She knew she'd slipped, too, because she started trying to talk really fast to cover it up, but I interrupted her quietly and said, 'OK, Wednesday evening, then?', and she agreed, and I hung up. Some people internalise kids' activities waaayyy too much. Josie's already read almost all the books, and is way ahead of all the other kids in the club, so... seriously, it's not that big of a deal.