Stalling and other such Musings

As I've mentioned before, Jadzia's one "chore" is to clean up the play room every night. Inara attempts to help and I attempt to get her to help but she's not really all that good at it. Previously the problem with project clean up seemed to be distraction by the toys and such. It took forever, I'd get frustrated and so on and so forth. Well now Jadzia has discovered the fine are of stalling. She knows that clean up time means bedtime so maybe that's the catch? Anyway part of the evening routine is to go upstairs (after the grand clean up) and she's goes to the bathroom one last time, baths, teeth brushing, etc. But for the last few nights, within a few minutes of me saying it's time to clean up the play room Jadzia says she has to go potty. Okay - she's four, I'm not going to make her wait if she really needs to go. So she goes to the bathroom, shuts the door and five minutes later I go check to make sure she didn't fall in and she's sitting in there doing nothing. Sometimes she says she's going other times I can see her start to scramble off the toilet like she's be caught. While she may go to the bathroom a little, I'm 90% she doesn't REALLY have to go, she's just delaying the whole bedtime routine. Even when she gets upstairs she still goes again.

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Yesterday at some point Bluto got locked in the bathroom. I assume Inara shut him in there as she is apt to do. So I when Jadzia alerted me to this fact, she was the one who let him out of the bathroom. I specifically asked her then if Bluto had made a mess or gotten into the trash. She said no. I asked again just to double check because she'll often say no without really thinking about the question. She actually went to the bathroom to check it seemed. She came back and still said no. So I was happy and went about the day. A couple hours later when I went back there, I opened the door (we usually keep it closed to keep Inara from flushing the toilet over and over and over and over) and stepped into a mess of torn up trash from the bathroom trashcan! So I called Jadzia over and asked her as calmly as I could why she'd told me there was no mess. I didn't even get a chance to raise my voice before she burst into tears. I guess she knew she was in trouble? While I was annoyed with Inara for closing the dog in there in the first place and annoyed at the dog for tearing up the trash, I was most annoyed at Jadzia for lying to me. After she cleaned it up as punishment and she calmed down (and I was calm), I explained to her that she had lied and tried to express the idea of truths and lies. Not sure if she got it exactly but we'll see.

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Today we went to the Commissary for just about everything. When we got there, all the kids were perfectly happy and I managed to get through all the shopping with no major meltdowns (although I had to grab a random package of Beef Jerky sticks for Anya to chew on before she turned a box into a great big slobbery goo). Robby had asked for just a couple of little things to be sent to him, specifically the singles packets that can be added to a bottle of water (like Kool aid, crystal light, etc). We had some still around the house but I wanted to grab some more. Then I start snack shopping for him. I had intended to fill one large flat rate priority box with goodies to mail out tomorrow. But somehow the whole "this looks good" *toss in cart* mentality took over and soon half the cart was filled with stuff potentially for Robby. When I got home and unpacked everything, I got a box ready to fill and filled it with A LOT left over. So I got the second box and filled it too. Sooooo tomorrow I get to take two boxes of goodies to the Post Office to mail off for Robby.

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I finished my Grey's Anatomy marathon. Four seasons of Grey's Anatomy over the course of a week or so - awesome! When it was all said and done, part of me wanted to start right back at the beginning. I love that show.