Yesterday I made a conscious decision that I was going to go home with a clean slate. My wife and I have been irritated, frustrated and tired for weeks, and I figured I would go home after work and we could all start off fresh. In addition to ss11's attitude, constant arguing, moping, and laziness our 3mo old daughter has not been sleeping well at all... but I was determined to start over for all of us.

At lunch I get a text from my wife "is there anything ss11 can do outside with the garden tractor?" I said no, he didn't know how to start it, much less operate it and I wanted to watch him with it for a while before I just trusted him to do things like that on his own. I told her when I got home, before dinner, I would take him out and go through all that with him...

Little did I know...

I get home and change my clothes. Ask ss if he wants to go learn. "Right now?" Well, yeah, we gotta eat and you have football practice later. So we go outside. I grab the extendable limb primer from the garage and when he asks what its for I tell him I have some pruning to do, and once he knows how to operate the tractor he can haul the limbs out to the neighbors brushpile with it.

Now he doesn't want to it. He already knows. Alright, tell me how to start it. "Put this in reverse, push this (the throttle) all the way up, pull this (choke) out and turn the key." No, that's not right. "Yes it is." No, its not. I ask him why he would put the direction selector in reverse. "I don't know." Well, I thought you knew how to do this. You realize it won't start unless its in neutral? "So." Did you forget any steps? "No." What about the clutch? "What about it?" It won't even turn over if you don't push in the clutch. "So." What's your problem lately? ...stone faced look... do you want to learn or not, because I'm tired of your attitude and arguing, and if that's all you're going to do then this tractor can rot into the ground for all I care. "What! I wasn't arguing! God! You guys always say I'm arguing, and I never am! I just already know and you won't listen! Ugh!" Really? You didn't know what you were doing with this and wanted to argue and give you attitude. (In a mocking tone) "you didn't know what you were doing with this and..."

I cut him off and told him to go clean the guinea pig cage, it had been 2 weeks, I was tired of waiting and done being nice. He stormed off and was muttering the whole time.

So I tell my wife what happened and she's PISSED. He's dragging his feet cleaning the guinea pig cage because he thinks if he takes long enough he won't have to do it because of dinner and football practice. So she tells him, he's not going to practice until the cage is cleaned. He throws a FIT. She tells him he's not going to practice the next day until the basement game room is clean and the firewood (all of maybe 40 pieces) is stacked. "Well I might as well quit then, I'll never get that done." OK. That's fine. Because you will do as you're asked and you will pick up after yourself, help clean and do chores.

Yay!!! Wife!!!

We'll see how today went when I get home, but I'm done. I swear, this kid needs to learn there are consequences to his actions, he doesn't know everything, he's not always going to get what he wants, and that the world has expectations; otherwise he's going to end up in jail.

I've already decided that should he clean up his act... IF that happens... the garden tractor will be locked out above second gear. He thinks he's gonna go racing around on it, we have some nasty hills and swoops in our yard, but he told me he knows how to drive. So I'm locking it out. I'll weld a darn patch over the console if I have to. I don't trust him.

I want to. But I can't right now.