Day 17: What to do when covered in shampoo?

Can I just say – it’s damn hard not to yell at your kids when this happens:

I was in the shower mid-shampoo and I heard the 3yo and 4yo come into the bedroom. 5 minutes before they’d been yahooing out the back in the black dirt that is currently our backyard. I know what they do when they come in. They jump on the bed. The nice, big, king-size bed sporting a $500 white linen doona cover (I got it on special ok). Cue inner rage. There’s me, shampoo all over my hair, eyes closed, desperately trying to calmly have the kids extract themselves from my bedroom without touching the white doona cover with their black feet. Omg. Nobody listens to me the first time. Or the second time. I’m trying to fling open the shower door to assert myself calmly, authoritatively when I all wanted to do was yell:

“GET OUT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

There was no magic I-did-not-yell-therefore-they-listened-to-me moment. No. I had no tricks up my sleeve where I could get down to their level, reason with them and deliver consequence for poor behaviour choices. I was in the shower. I was soapy. I was blind. I was about to lose my $500 white linen doona cover (purchased on special) to the grubby feet of two giggling children having the time of their lives on the king-size bed. All I could do was firmly repeat “Out. Now. Please” (in my head “or so help me god”). Followed by “If you don’t get away from the bed right now there’s no tv today” – eventually the kids decided they’d leave, and the white linen doona cover remained untouched. For now.

Man, could I have classed yelling at that time as an emergency yell? Possibly. I think I was just lucky (or more like they were lucky) that they stayed away from the bed.

Today the Orange Rhino blogged this:

“Yes, when I stopped yelling at my boys, I became alive again.

Parts of me that had been stuffed away for years came out. I started laughing more. I started smiling more. I started walking with a greater pep. I started sleeping better. I started finding joy in the small things, in the normal moments with my boys like bath time, dinnertime, playtime, chat time.”

This is me. I have noticed that instead of yelling, I get down closer to the kids to talk to them, to touch them, I engage more (er, unless I’ve got shampoo in my hair). And doing that means I get to squeeze little bodies until they giggle, I see my big boys smile because I’ve ruffled their hair instead of yelling at them, I feel closer to my babies. All of them. I am still tired. I do snap and say mean things when I shouldn’t and I am improving that every day. But life’s that little bit sweeter each day because I’m not pouring my energy into my lungs, I’m pouring it into my heart instead.