Today I’m helping out a friend who can’t post this on her blog and I would love for all of you to help!
I’m posting over at Jackie’s place today because I have a gripe about a friend that I can’t post on my own blog, Single Mom on a Budget, and I need advice!
I have a friend that I’ve known for about 14 years. She and her husband have a son that is seven, so he is a year younger than my youngest, Jonesie.
My gripe: THIS KID IS A BRAT, the stick-out-your-tongue at strangers type of brat and his mom doesn’t do anything.
This issue is really affecting our friendship because I don’t know how to handle it anymore. Frankly, I don’t want too.
I used to babysit the kid when she and her husband would go out to dinner or a movie or something, but I won’t watch him at my house anymore because the little shit is hugely destructive. And I’m sorry, but I don’t allow that in my house. I have three boys so it’s not like things in my house don’t get destroyed, but I don’t let them slam Hot Wheels into the feet of my cherry wood couches. And he doesn’t listen he will look at me and do it over and over.
He also steals Jonesie’s toys. And here’s the thing that gets me… when he leaves I go through his bag and when I find Hot Wheels (which is ALWAYS what he takes) his mom just says “it’s not like you don’t have 100.” This attitude that she has probably irritates me the most. So what if we have 100 Hot Wheels, just because you want 5 of them doesn’t mean you can just take them.
She and I have always had a tradition of making and decorating Christmas cookies at my house. Well, after last year I am not doing it anymore. He tosses flour all over the place like it’s funny. And I’m not talking about “oops, I made a mess”. He stuck his gum under my table when he wanted to eat a cookie. He wiped blue frosting under my table as though he just needed a place to clean his hand. At the end of the night he took his water bottle and dumped water on my floor. I watched him pick up the water bottle and turn it upside down. If that wasn’t bad enough when I yelled at him for dumping his water he looked at me and stuck his foot in the water and walked away – on my wood floor. At that point his mom was irritated with me and they left. I was SO relieved!!!!!!!!!!!
She has started asking my older boys to babysit, which is fine by me. Until last week. Joe went over to their house to babysit at 7:00pm. The kid had been playing football on PlayStation since 5:00pm. Ok, we’re talking two hours already. At around 8:15 I texted Joe to see how it was going and he said “Bad, I was playing him on football and he started crying because I was winning.” So Joe stopped playing. I told Joe to just turn off the PS because that was kind of crazy. About 15 minutes later Joe texted me again saying he didn’t know what to do because the kid was now screaming and crying because he was losing in football against the computer itself. (Joe videotaped this little fit and showed it to me later. WOW!)
I texted my friend and asked her to call Joe because he didn’t know what to do. Her response to me… “Boys.”
I have had it. I don’t know what to do, and how not to let this affect our friendship. To me, it feels like he is just acting out for attention. But he gets NO discipline at home and I am a firm believer in discipline and respecting other people’s things and space. I think I could handle him, I just can’t handle her lackadaisical-ness anymore.
Help! How do I handle this without looking like the bad guy and ruining our friendship?
