Bad Mommy Weekly, No More Toys

I know what you're thinking. This mommy hasn't shared any Bad Mommy Weekly posts in quite a while. She must have discovered the holy grail of mommy-dom. She's become the perfect mommy and no longer has any Bad Mommy stories to tell.

You're absolutely right. Just stop reading now and go find some unfit parent's blog to read. There's nothing to see here.

For those you living in reality, welcome and congratulations! You may continue skimming this post and likely feel better about yourself in the end.

Monsoon is a reallyreallyreallyreally rough kind of kid. He doesn't do anything half way. He likes to pretend, usually that he's a hero out to save the day. Lucky toy who doesn't get chosen to be his nemesis, though. The way he breaks things, you'd think we only let him play with glass toys. Most of the time, it's an accident - he just gets carried away beating the transformer into the ground or drowning the evil electronic microphone in the toilet.

It's because of this toy-torture that he doesn't have as many toys as most kids do. He has plenty - a surplus still, if you ask me - but we weed through and sell or give away toys that he doesn't play with often because if they're here, they'll surely turn into the enemy and once their beheaded, no one will want them.

He still breaks the ones he has, though, so I told him last week that if he broke another one of his toys, we would take away ALL his toys and give some of them to kids who would appreciate them and take care of them. I reminded him all week, when I saw him getting rough with them, of the consequence of breaking another toy.

After only a few days, he came to me, pieces of his bumble bee helmet in his arms, and asked me politely if I would fix it.

Well crap.

I took every toy in the house, made him help me box them up so that he could experience the full effect of what was happening, and put them all out in the garage. He cried. He tried not to cry, which is awful because then I know he isn't doing it just to get his stuff back. He was devastated. So I told him he could keep ONE toy and one toy only. He could keep the helmet he had just broken. It wasn't much of a comfort to him, but I thought it fit well with the lesson I was trying to convey.

So today I'm dusting his room, including the helmet, and I'm thinking, "Well how odd. Two of the four pieces are broken in the exact same spot. Hmmm."

You can guess where this is going, right? It took about ten minutes, but I finally figured out how to put the pieces back together. Apparently, it was made to come apart.

I have to tell him. Don't I?