Fun With Play-Dough

I love that my six-year-old daughter Isabella is in school. School is great; they should have school all the time. Unfortunately, they don’t. They have vacations; I’m not always sure why. This week, we have one of those happy occasions where two days off fall at the beginning of the week. Other people call this a long weekend; I call it sheer torture. For her, as well as for me. We like our usual routine: I take her to school at 8:15, and I don’t have to worry about her until 3:30, at which point she comes home tired and –usually- happy. I’ve gotten most of my work done, she’s full of stories, and the time between coming home and bed is not too long. We both know what to do: homework, cook dinner, talk about her day; eat, take a bath, read stories, go to sleep. It’s the same five days a week; we’re like a well-oiled machine. We want to keep it that way; both of us are very neurotic about making a plan and sticking to it. We’re not so lucky when there’s no school; no matter how many play dates and fun things I come up with, the day stretches out before us like the Sahara before a sand flea.

Still, we manage to not get on each other’s nerves until about four PM, when she’s colored, read, played with her brother and gone swimming. Now, she thinks, it’s time to veg out in front of the television for a while.  She complains that she has “no good movies to watch”.  The issue: she’s seen them all before. Well, yes, that tends to happen. I tell her to stop whining and read another book; it doesn’t go over well. She runs to her room to cry a bit, and when that doesn’t work, she kicks the wall a few times. Three-year-old Mendel runs after her to tell her to stop crying. He sounds like me; it’s very uncanny to hear your own voice come out of such a small little body. I manage to calm her down, and convince her a nap is a great idea; surprisingly, she agrees. She wakes up after half an hour, refreshed and in a better mood. An hour later, her rude-level reaches an all time high. This is when she starts making comments, like “You should do the dishes,” and “it’s time you vacuum.” Never mind that I just washed, dried, and folded six loads of laundry; she still makes me feel bad. She’s too young for the “If you think it needs to be done that bad, do it yourself” response, so I hold my tongue. The problem with that is, she doesn’t stop: “When I’m naughty, daddy is much nicer to me than you are.”

Okay, that’s it; I’ve had enough. “How about you point out something I did right?” I say, and before she can retort “Like what,” I give her some pointers. Then I make a mistake: I tell her the comments she has been making are mean. She takes serious offense at that, and for the second time that day, she stomps off to her room. I check the clock, is this day over yet? But it’s 5:12 PM. Plenty of time for another standoff.

I am left to wonder why we have such a hard time when we’re together all day. Are we just too similar, two ticking time-bombs, so set in our ways that a change of schedule causes complete meltdown, or is my own anxiety the culprit here? Is it her age? Is it my age? Does she notice me rolling my eyes a little too often when I discover a hole on the calendar? Or does absence really make the heart grow fonder?

            We make it through the rest of this long, long weekend without tearing our hair out, and the next day she’s back in school. I would do a little dance, if it wouldn’t make me feel like such an evil mother. Then it dawns on me: in two weeks it’s Passover; she’ll be home for a week and a half. And by the end of May, she’ll have summer vacation, which lasts three months. Oh my.