Children from Hell

What a day! Early this morning Josh went on a ski outing with a friend of his to Ovindoli in Abruzzo. Rome is incredibly well-located: in the summertime, you can be on the Med. in 30 minutes (without traffic, if that's ever possible), and in the winter, you can ski by driving less than two hours in the other direction. Josh left the villa by 7am and was back by 3pm and skied for four hours in-between. Putting his plug in for living in Rome longer, Josh pointed out that this is how life should be: coastline, mountains, and great food! I get it.

That meant that I was on my own with the kids in the morning (which had nothing to do with subsequent events, it was just unfortunate) and, collectively, their behavior was terrible. But in particular, Charlotte's antics with her sister at the breakfast table and subsequent criticism of everyone who wasn't Charlotte, was appalling. Not a great start to the day.

As punishment, Josh and I agreed that after school all the kids would have to go directly to their rooms until dinnertime. On the surface, this doesn't seem like such a draconian sentence, does it? Well, when Josh brought the kids home, having given them the news in the car that they are to go straight to their rooms, it was as if we were in the midst of a prison revolt! Led by, guess who? Charlotte. She refused to go to her room without food. She made it seem as though we were depriving her of life, by disallowing her to eat! Of course, Olivia was starving too. But not just starving, I mean STARVING! And Avery, who had to get involved in the fray, just simply was not going to his room. Can you believe it? What's next?

Now, Avery is still small enough that he can be physically moved; but Charlotte, is not! What have we done wrong as parents that our children can't just accept their punishment and move on? What did we do to create such defiance in our children? And Charlotte is only 12! Not surprisingly, the hystrionics carried on for quite some time. The only problem was, that we'd invited friends for dinner. In fact, we invited a classmate of Charlotte's and her mom.

Come dinnertime, despite my massive headache, we put on our white gloves and enjoyed Morris's chicken curry along with appetizers of fried zucchini flowers and pokra (his Pakistani specialty which is like a potato pancake but made with mixed vegetables and chick pea flour). We carried on as if the events of the day had never occurred. Charlotte even asked to use my computer after dinner so she and her friend could play with the video (I declined but Josh said yes). We had a lovely time with our guests, and then we all fell right to sleep as soon as they departed. We'd have to follow up on our children's behavioral issues in the morning. It had been quite a day!