Corrective Action

I'm assuming you want to know how it went?!

Saturday in therapy we told Bear that he was on probation, about Soup Kitchen, and about his new job description. He took it OK. When we got home we decided to do a quick retraining on how to clean correctly. As usual I talked too much and Hubby got in his face too much (by the way, ANY constructive criticism is too much when dealing with Bear, but we really should have stopped a lot sooner). Bear shut down, which ticked Hubby off. Bear was rude to me, and Hubby didn't really get on his case about it, which ticked me off. All in all it was frustrating, but at least he can't say he doesn't know how to do his chores.

Sunday evening, we told the kids about the new chores and Soup Kitchen. Bear already knew so he didn't participate in the conversation. Kitty wanted to watch a show, and the family meeting ran over the start time so she was antcy and trying to get the meeting over with so she could watch. Ponito was upset because his chores didn't really change. Bob was the most upset, because... she hates soup! All soup! She'd "rather die" than eat soup.

I hate confrontation, was still a little ticked about Bear's attitude the day before, and felt attacked by everyone so my PTSD was showing. When the meeting was finally over, and Bob was refusing to eat dinner and went to cry in her room about what mean parents we were for torturing her this way, Hubby was trying to force her to eat, then listened to her complain for an hour, then came to me to defend her.

Bob has tons of homework, so hasn't done her chores the last couple of weeks. Hubby was suggesting that based on her homework, we cut her some slack. At the beginning of his and my conversation I thought he was changing his mind about the whole program and fussing at me for sticking to my guns and putting them all on Soup Kitchen, turns out he just wanted to talk about Bob specifically, but the damage was already done. I was defensive and short with him. By the time I figured out what he was talking about, and adjusted to discussing Bob, he was frustrated with my attitude and stormed out. I was already upset, so his walking out really triggered me (I've got attachment issues of my own).

Finally after 1am he sent me an e-mail saying he wanted to finish the conversation. We stayed up until 2:30am talking (usual for me, late for him).

I explained that yes, Bob has homework, but we'd already accomodated this last year, and hadn't really increased her chores over the Summer either, and she still chose not to do her chores all Summer and copped a major attitude to boot. I didn't realize she'd rather die than eat soup, but she wasn't going to starve to death either. She had ended up eating one bowl of the chicken noodle soup I'd made for dinner. Quite frankly she wasn't going to get a lot of sympathy from me. Hubby thought about it and was a little more in agreement. We didn't go to bed angry.