sweet-and-sour new year

the theme of the past two days has been strongly aligned with the past two weeks; lots of fighting with mr smear because he doesn't appreciate the relationship between cause and effect. specifically, his bad behavior causing negative consequences.

 yesterday:

yesterday was mostly a combination of pre-chag shopping runs. a mall mission to find a backpack for mr smear to replace the one he left in the street, a grocery shop, a neighborhood store fruit and veg run, and gift shopping. then we stopped for lunch (gd and i for a vegan sandwich and fake-greek salad, mr smear wolfed down an entire laffa), and then we returned home in time to get started on preparing the choc-chip challah and other dinner contributions (mushroom pie).

in the evening, i learned just how much damage the mongoose's physio had done to gd, not only hurting and bruising her, but also scratching the shit out of her with her fingernails.

everything was ready in time for dinner at our friends. the evening was generally lovely, though all four of the kids (ours included) took turns being offensive and upsetting their parents; mr smear's most offensive moments included running down his old class as "garbage" when his friend's still struggling with being in it.

and shit vibes from mr smear as we arrived home, super late.

today:

today started with me helping out a contractor, then playing games and reading while mr smear was very bored and quite unappreciative of the fact that it's his own behavior that got him into this mess (not just being rude, but he made a new hole in his leg). it also included gd's arm going out of joint again and me needing to cancel our participation in our cousin's dinner tonight :(

this morning included a lot more shit from him, culminating in a pillow fight with me smashing him over the head repeatedly trying to get him to understand cause and effect. this had the strange effect of calming him down, and afterwards we went out on a flour mission that turned into a very pleasant, long walk culminating in a really nice lunch.

mr smear was being playful on the way home, and we were almost all the way home when his mood suddenly turned sour but he continued to provoke responses even after i warned him to stop. this led to some very serious, horrible moments, and when we got back it took a lot of fighting (on both my and gd's parts) to bring him down to earth and get him to see some kind of reason.

it was literal insanity.

and then, just as everything seemed to be resolved and becoming peaceful, gd came in and "misread the room", effectively undoing all of the progress. i'm still in shock, but mr smear seems to be more aligned in spite of that so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the rest of the evening so far has been good. now it's dinnertime. hopefully tonight will set a better tone for the new year.