Seeing Red

Yesterday I was busy cooking dinner with Mr. Wright while the kids played outside. They play outside ALL THE TIME with no incident, but this time the 10 year old neighbor girl was playing with them.

I would normally assume that having a 10 year old with them was a good thing, but this time it turned out to be not so good. I don't want to blame anything on her since my kids were also covered in red spray paint, but some of the "art" was a bit too accurate for my 6 year old to have created. I checked on them periodically while I was making dinner and they were happily playing in the water table.

Little did I know that they were so enthused with the water table because they were trying to get the fire engine red paint off their hands. They had gotten the spray paint from our paint shelf in the garage (that's been there since they were babies and they have NEVER even given it a second look) and decided to decorate my house, their playhouse, their water table and a folding chair that was outside. WITH RED FREAKING SPRAY PAINT!

Luckily there was only one small spot on my green house, and I faded it a lot with a Magic Eraser, but they still used spray paint at 5 & 6 years old. I flew outside like the house was on fire and immediately sent them to their rooms. I glared at the neighbor girl for not mentioning this little activity to me and stormed into my house.

The kids ate dinner and had to sit on their beds until bedtime, which of course is the worst thing that I could possibly EVER do to them. I lectured them on making good choices, knowing right from wrong, yada, yada, yada. Then today happened...

I'll skip the details so this isn't a 12 page novel, but I found out that they stole 3 Hershey's bars from my in-laws motor home and hid them in Sweetie Pie's sweatshirt until they could get home and eat them in secrecy. It's SO stupid because if they had asked they would have gotten 12 candy bars, I'm sure, but since they had to take them they got in tons of trouble.

I'm SICK of punishing, and I'm sick of my kids being the hellions that I dreaded having before I had kids.

They don't make enough Butterfingers to get me through this week...