Sunday, May 18, 2008

Just Can't Win

I tried hard to keep the kids all happy today. I just wanted to have a nice day. But there were two very puzzling situations that made me realize that you can’t possibly make people happy when they go back and forth about what they want.

When things don’t go just so for Dominyk, he doesn’t do well. And Salinda got the front seat (whoever gets there first gets it, is my motto). So the beginning of the trip was not destined to go well. Sadie had brought three movies with her. And Dominyk declared, for the first ten minutes of the trip to the game, that nobody was going to watch the Fighting Temptations. It was the stupidest movie ever and no matter what they weren’t going to watch it. I decided to take a vote, and fortunately, everyone else in the van is pretty easy going, so they said they didn’t care and they watched “Over the Hedge” which is what Dominyk wanted to watch in the first place.

However, on the way home, he did get there first and got the front seat. Since the front seat is the one seat where you can’t see the DVD player, the other kids figured it wouldn’t matter what they watched. And for the first ten minutes of the way home from the game Dominyk cried about how bad he wanted to be sitting in the back because he really wanted to see the Fighting Temptations. Sigh.

When we got to the game Sadie had a little meltdown over the fact that there were not going to be enough chairs for everyone and how she couldn’t possibly sit on the GROUND. So she and Salinda stayed in the van. After the first half, I walked back from the field and brought Dominyk wth me, to let the girls go sit on the chairs. Sadie declared that she did not WANT to sit in the chair, that she wanted to watch from the van. Sigh. I returned to my seat.

Ten minutes later they came from the van and Dominyk, being nice, offered them a seat. They both declined and sat on the ground. Sigh.

Next time I’ll not even try to make them happy.

1 comment:

Shari said...

I'm slowly learning the same lesson. Things go so much better when I have no expectations as to how they should go.