I’m finding Beth especially challenging at the moment. She is 15 now and almost demands to be able to do things that other girls her age do but she just isn’t mature enough. She doesn’t agree with me though and keeps insisting that she can babysit the other kids for me and other big girl stuff. I’d love to give her a bit more independance but she never seems to grow out of being a naughty little girl when left alone. I’ll give you some examples. Some a little hilarious, some real Beth funnies, others not so funny if she had the opportunity to follow through.
We got Foxtel a few weeks ago. Beth still has in her head that she can’t be out in the loungeroom with Paul home but one night she had been watching a movie when he came home so she stayed out here. Paul went and watched tely in bed so she was happy enough. I was lying in another room and I heard Paul come out telling her to leave the cat be. Dwight, who is her cat, was cleaning Harmony who is Bridie’s cat. And Beth was licking Dwight clean. “Stop licking the cat” isn’t a phrase you would expect to hear when talking to a 15 year old! Beth’s response “Dwight dared me to do it.” She told me the same thing later that night. The not so funny thing was after Beth was told off and we thought she’d be ok, Paul caught her with the windex bottle. When he asked what she was doing with it she said she was going to clean Dwight’s eyes. Luckily she hadn’t done so. Now she knows not to do things like that. We haven’t had to put things away from her in years. When she was younger she was a bloody nightmare, tipping things down the sink, dropping eggs and glasses when she saw us coming (she’d stand still for ages, waiting until we came before she’d drop them), drawing beautful pictures all over the walls. She was a shit of a kid. It was like as soon as she had the opportunity she had to look for mischief. That night she reminded me of Minka the Wonderdog when I get up in the night. I hear Minka trying to silently get off the couch. When Beth hears us coming she starts to say things like “I didn’t mean it” or “Whoops, it was an accident” so I know she knows it’s wrong. When the hell is she going to grow out of it though?! You can’t pre-empt every single thing so a social story wouldn’t work, she’d just do something not on the list.
She’s also being slack with her shower. She’s pretending to have the runs so she doesn’t have to go to school. I thought she was out of the shower the other morning and went to check on her, we had to leave in a couple of minutes. She was sitting on the toilet, waiting for me to tell her to hurry up and get in the shower. She had been there for about 10 minutes. I knew she didn’t have the runs because when she got off the toilet and in the shower, there was nothing there. She lost ipad privelledges for that one! The next day, when she knew I meant business, I went in to check on her and there she was scrubbing the shower screen with her toothbrush. Lucky I find her bloody hilarious!
