psycho parents ?

I was having dinner with a girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, and she told me a story of how a friend of hers made her children ride in the car with thier hands in the air (stick em up style) for over 20 minutes because they wouldn’t quit playing with thier gum.

Now, I’m thinking, the logical way to deal with this would be just to not….give….them….gum…..but maybe that’s just me. She thought it was a hilarious idea, and I said ‘that’s how they torture people….don’t you think that’s a little–psycho?’ The look on her face, poor thing, made me feel like I hurt her feelings, so I had to tell her about my own psycho-parent story.

One year during the school hols, I was having an extremely hard time getting my kids out of bed in the morning.
After being late to work enough times, and going through all of my ideas (grounding, taking away electronics, earlier bedtimes) I had had enough. I warned them if I didn’t get a little cooperation I would be waking them up in a very surprising way, and that didn’t help.

So one morning, I tried the nice mom approach, (hey sweeties, time to get up!….come on babies….time to get out of bed!) and that wasn’t working. So I grabbed my cowbell that my ex used to take to football games and clanged it wildly, and hollered WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UUUUUUU-UPPPPP! On the verge of laughing/crying. It was quite effective, however.

Anyone else have stories from the edge of sanity?

hugsssssssssss xxxxxx