Choosing Appropriate Punishments

My kids are pretty darn good and I rarely have to get them into trouble but sometimes...I think they do things just to test me. My oldest did just that last night. I allowed her to go do something that would put her final arrival time back home one hour later than usual. I thought that was being pretty nice, don't you? Apparently, she didn't think so because at three and a half hours past her normal curfew, she still had not returned. The kid is going to give me a heart attack, I swear.

We have a rule at my house that even if I'm sound asleep, when my kidlet gets home, she's supposed to talk to me and let me know she's there as opposed to being sprawled out dead in the road somewhere. You can imagine my worry when my internal clock woke me up at 3:30 am and I noticed that she was not home. The first thing I did was to text her about 17,000 times in a row asking where the he#$@ she was. Then I called and left a voicemail threatening to murder her in cold blood if she didn't contact me right away. Minutes later she did phone me to let me know she was alive. I employed a tactic that my mom taught me (and that scares me still to this day). I put on my iciest, deadliest calm voice and told her to get her hiney home immediately.She knew she was majorly busted.

Once I knew she was OK, I could begin the process of deciding an appropriate punishment. Here are a few of the things I thought of:

Jail? In house maybe.

Beheading? Nah, too messy.

Electrocution? Nah, burning hair stinks.

Hanging? I'm not strong enough to hoist her up into a tree.

Spanking? Quite possibly.

Beating with a stick? Sounding better.

Shackles and public stoning? It's the city people, there just aren't enough stones lying about.

Chinese torture rack? Sorry, I'm not Chinese. I don't have a torture rack (unless you count my sit-up chair thingy).



So what's a Mom to do? I wore a groove 6" deep in my living room from pacing so much. 326 gray hairs popped out on my head. My stomach churned for a good hour after she got home. And do you want to hear the icing on the cake? The following morning she missed her first period class because she "just couldn't wake up." Can you believe the gall that kid has? If I had done the same thing to my Mom, she'd be grabbing me by my ear, yanking my kiester out of bed and dragged me naked to school.

I have to choose her punishment wisely because for however long she's grounded, so am I. I'm going to have to check my empty extremely busy social calendar and see how many fun things I'm going to have to cancel or move around. And that just sucks! She screwed up, she will get in trouble and yet I'm being punished, too.

I have joked to her her whole life that I can't wait till she turns 18 so if she's bad, I can kick her out of the house. Well..........she's 18 now. Does that mean I can toss all of her stuff out into the front yard and change the locks on the house? If it weren't so hard to do, I'd do it just to freak her out when she gets home from school. She'd mess her drawers to think the I kicked her out! Ooh, that's a good one. Maybe I'll drag out all of the suitcases and put them in the front yard along with her stuffed animals and hamster cage and tell her to take a hike. I've got a telephoto lens on my camera so I could hide inside and take a picture to capture the look on her face when she pulls up. I might just have to do this.

I'm still undecided as to what to do. It's been hours since she got home and I've pondered about it till my head hurts. I hope her head hurts from worrying about what I'm going to do to her. She needs to worry. I hope I keep to my guns and not let her off the hook - that's what I do sometimes. But NO...I will prevail! I will ground my girl and make her life miserable for a little while. And I'll probably use her for slave labor so I can get my house clean since she's not going anywhere. I might just try to get a yard mowing out of her. Hmmm the possibilities are endless.....