Xbox in One Hand, Blow Torch in the Other

Someone once said, "if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan."  Done and done.  It's not like I try to have disastrous plans as much as my plans become disastrous.  My husband involuntarily cringes whenever I start a conversation with, "I had a thought..." or "I was thinking about something I wanted to try..."  Most of my grand plans involve my children and the vision I have of them getting along.  And by getting along I mean not actively trying to kill each other.  It is exhausting listening to kids fight and argue over the absolute dumbest, inconsequential things.  Just yesterday I hear Noah and Reagan yelling back and forth:

Reagan: YES, IT IS!

Noah: NO, IT ISN'T!

Reagan: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!

Noah: YES, I DO!! STOP BEING A BRAT!

Reagan: I'M NOT A BRAT!  YOU'RE A BRAT!

--time for me to intervene--

Me: My dearest, adorable, sweet, sweet children, what seems to be the problem?  Is there anything I can do to help?

Fine, that's not what I said.

Me: ENOUGH!!!!!  (both kids stop yelling as they stare at my overly irritated presence in the doorway)  WHAT is so important that I can hear you two yelling about it all the way upstairs?

Noah: Reagan said it's supposed to rain tomorrow and I told her it wasn't and she keeps saying it will.

Reagan: I looked it up - IT IS going to rain tomorrow.  It is!!

Amazingly, they forget a very irritated mother is standing10 feet away and they start arguing about it...again.

Like a mature parent, I help them see that fighting and yelling is not the way to handle disagreements.  And by mature, I mean I walked out of the room, came back with a water bottle, and started spraying them down.  I figured if they were so concerned about getting rained on the next day, they might as well get a head start.  They were not amused.

Back to grand plans.  When I look at my family, I see two adults and three kids that are just trying to survive.  The parents are still trying to figure out how to balance their time between jobs, each other, the kids, personal time, and whatever life throws their way.  The kids are all over the place.  I think the older two stay up at night and plot which one gets to have a surge of hormones that week and should it be tears and falling apart or yelling and stomping around if anyone looks at them wrong. When they want a week off, they have trained their minion, aka "the 4-year-old," to wreak havoc in their stead.  He makes them proud.

It's not like I haven't tried 10,000 ways to bring us closer together...to be that loving, unified family. I've tried Family Home Evening, no tech Tuesday, reward jars, consequence jars, "calm and consistent in all we do" month (I use the words calm, consistent, and month loosely).  I tried "angry with zero tolerance" month.  Shockingly, my yelling did not produce happy obedient children.  Maybe if I yelled with an accent of some sort: "Zat is enough!!  No more of ze fighting!  You vill obey me!"  

I have read books, spent countless hours philosophizing with friends on how to bring the family closer and how to raise responsible, polite, respectful children, and on and on and on.  But nothing really works...and the children can smell my defeat.

Fine.  Eat dinner in front of the TV.

Fine.  Play with your friends before you finish your homework.

Fine.  Don't clean your room before you play on electronics.

They have worn me down and I begin to wonder if a happy, loving, supportive family was just some marketing scheme to make me buy a softer laundry detergent.  Silver lining: when my kids fight, at least they'll be in softer clothes.

This is my life in a nutshell.  I have to believe that it's possible to have a family where the children get along because they want to, not because I'm standing in the doorway with their Xbox in one hand and a blow torch in the other.  Like I said, I've tried a lot of different tactics.  In fact, I was pretty sure there wasn't anything really different I could try...until now.  Until Carmine's.