Again!?!

It's 11:00. Today has been pretty busy and we finally just sat down to read our scriptures. I usually write in my journal before reading. Tonight I don't have my watch on, so I look at yesterday's entry to see what the date was. I am suddenly very confused. I look at Adrianne and say, "Uh...what is today?" Now, before I tell you the rest of the story, let me tell you a little about the past few days and in particular, today.

Isaac has not been feeling well. He had a fever a few days ago and has been complaining about a sore throat. We feel very sorry for him, but Isaac isn't a sad, mopey sick kid. He expresses his discomfort by acting rotten towards other people. Thus, for the past few days we have been getting a lot of, "I'm never going to like you!" and "No, you go put your plate away," and "You're stupid," and "I'm sick and tired of you today, Mom." Today was particularly bad. Isaac's envelope is stuffed full of frowny faces and his mother repeatedly threatened to take away his birthday celebration tomorrow.

When I got home this afternoon, I reinforced those threats as I observed his behavior myself. When he threw a handful of rocks at our van I converted the threat to a promise and cancelled his birthday (well, at least the party). Isaac responded by throwing another rock out into the street. Luckily, there were no cars there.

This whole evening, since putting the kids to bed, our conversation has been about nothing other than how can we be good parents and cancel our sons birthday? We'd already arranged to go visit my adviser's farm and ride his horses. Adrianne was going to make a batman cake tonight, and Grandma presents are already here. We also have some presents for him. We were going to get doughnuts for breakfast tomorrow, too. I was in favor of cancelling it all and telling him that when he shows us how 4 year-olds should behave, we'd let him turn 4. Adrianne said I was too harsh and that we couldn't still be good parents and cancel his birthday. After a long discussion, we finally agreed to sit him down and explain that he had lost a number of the things we had planned on doing for his birthday because of his bad behavior. We would tell him that he could get those things back, but they wouldn't be on his birthday and he'd have to show us that he deserved them. We decided he could start the day with 3 of his 5 presents, no cake and no doughnuts. If he behaved well tomorrow, he could earn back 1 of his presents. If he disobeyed, he could loose those three, as well.

So, back to our conversation. "Today is the 29th," comes Adrianne's certain reply. But, alas, she iswrong, and all our debate about how to follow through with our threats and still remain good parents goes out the window. We have, in fact, completely failed to celebrate Isaac's birthday, as it is today. He's asleep, and I'm not going to wake him up to tell him we forgot.

P.S. Adrianne has been balling the whole time I've been writing. Apparently, we are bad parents. Three of his four birthday's have been celebrated on the wrong day. Well, there's always next year.