Yogurt

Wow, my first post. Exciting. I'll get right to it. My 10 year old daughter Nomi, threw a yogurt container at me today. A big, 750 ml container of 3.5% fat, organic yogurt. It was half full. The lid was luckily on, and did not open upon contact with my face. I just started laughing. There was something so surprisingly outrageous about her act that made it very funny to me, at least for a moment. I quickly forced the smile off my face and took on a much more appropriate, angry expression. The moment was full of drama and I was the queen. I looked at her intently for a long while, then, without a word, turned  sharply to my five year old son Lior, and quietly asked him to go to shower. I was hoping that the moment's gravity wouldn't be lost on him and for once he would comply. He didn't. It took several more request and finally a threat to get him in there (my big threat these days is that if he chooses not to shower I will choose not to read to him - for now it works). Nomi, in the meantime, vanished somewhere in our huge, 800 sq ft mansion.
Why did she throw the yogurt? well, we were going through our usual night-time ritual - I ask the kids to go to shower and they come up with other must-do activities instead. It works something like this -
me: "Nomi go to the shower please"
her: "I'm just finishing my bracelet on the Rainbow Loom dad".
5 minutes go by.
me: "Nomi go to the shower please"
her: "I just have one page to finish in the chapter"
me: "I thought you were doing the loom thing, go to the shower NOW!"
her: "but I'm hungry"
me: "Nomi, it's too late for that now, please go to the shower"
her, in her super-winey, annoying voice: "but I'm soooo hungry"
At this stage I can't help myself and do my best impersonation of her voice  - "I'm sooooooo hungry"
and before I know what's happening a container full of yogurt is flying through the air and hits me in the face.  

And so, here is a dilemma, what do I focus on? On the one hand, throwing yogurt containers is  a bad idea, on the other hand mimicking people to their face isn't nice either. The key word here is people. What I did in the situation was to treat her as something less than an equal person, which is easy to do -  she isn't entirely equal, is she? For one she is smaller. She also depends on me in a way that I don't depend on her, so, to speak of equality is perhaps irrelevant. But our need for respect is obviously equal. Perhaps the right reaction would be to reprimand her for her act of violence and then to acknowledge my own transgression? Or perhaps the other way around, to apologize for the mimicking and at the same time explain that throwing yogurt containers at people is disrespectful? maybe, but I think that the best reaction is to apologize for mimicking her. That's all.

I hope to post to this blog weekly, and share small scenes from our home. My moto for now is - more intimacy, less opinion, and almost no information.