How old is the kid? I highly suggest getting yourself out of the situation. Take a walk. Go for a bike ride. Whatever. Yelling and violence don’t solve anything. He’s part of your family and will be for the rest of your life. Treat him that way. If he can’t use the PlayStation properly, then take it away. Yelling at him until he’s afraid you’re going to hurt him is terrible parenting. If my wife did that to my kids for anything short of a dangerous situation I’d file for divorce. Also, kids wake parents up. It’s what they do. Earlier you said your kids from your first marriage don’t want to be with you. Does your temper have anything to do with it? You are better than this.
He's testing you. He probably doesn't even realize it, but he knows you're not his father and in his undeveloped little mind that means you're an outsider...so "Fuck you, I do what I want." I've been through it, luckily outsmarting a kid isn't hard, though it can be tiring and difficult. His father may be a complete piece of shit, but never let your feelings about the dead beat dad be known to him, that will just reinforce the kid's impression that you're an outside invader into what should be his perfect little world. Pick and choose your battles, let the little shit go. But when he fucks up and pushes too hard... BLOW. THE. FUCK. UP. Scream at him loudly. Make yourself big as possible like you were trying to scare a bear....if it works on bears, it definitely works on kids. Later talk with him like an adult and explain that you don't like yelling at him like that and that he pushed you too far...so he probably shouldn't do that again. Even more important then trying to scare the shit out of the kid though is find something you can do together. Teach him to fish. Go play catch in the backyard. Build models together. Whatever. Find something you can do together and amazing things will happen. He will start to look at you as a wealth of knowledge instead of of someone intruding on what he thinks is his family. It's a hard road my friend and I wish you the best of luck. You are helping a young child to become a man under less then ideal conditions and if your wife doesn't back you 100%, you're probably fighting a losing battle. Every time she overrides one of your ideas or punishments she is just reinforcing his idea that you're an outsider and he doesn't have to listen to you. That leaves you pretty much fucked. I would strongly suggest talking with your wife and come together with a plan on how to address issues and present a united front that doesn't waiver. Best of luck. It's not easy.
Oh yeah....I forgot I'm supposed to tell a dad joke.... I saw a dude with two wooden legs the other day. He caught on fire and burned to the ground. Also, last Sunday I started shitting like a fucking goose. This is not a dad joke. I was actually shitting like a fucking goose. Every 45 minutes or so on average....time to shit! On Sunday I attributed it to the fact that I drank 10 beers the night before on a less than full stomach, it happens every now and then, so no big deal. By this morning, 5 days later, I was still shitting every 45 minutes to at most 1 1/2 hours. That's kind of a problem. I was getting dehydrated, not to mention that my hour long commute each way to work and back home filled me with fear that I'd shit myself in my car. Anyways, this morning I decided since I had some antibiotics left over from having my teeth extracted a few weeks ago I'd take them and see if they could stem the issue. I took one pill this morning. Problem solved. I haven't shit since I took a pill at 6AM. Apparently there was some little bugger sitting in my stomach who didn't survive the antibiotic. Burn in hell bitch.
Well ironically enough, the reason they say they don’t want to stay over is because my stepson wakes them up throughout the night nearly every night.
No it sure isn’t. You have a child that knows he can get away with pretty much anything because he’ll make eye contact with us and do exactly what we told him not to, etc. I was always told my dad was too hard on me but it gave me the self discipline to strive. Here I’m having to bite my tongue daily. The incident with the PlayStation was a culmination of me biting my tongue for weeks. It was an overreaction but it’s been a long, long time coming. It’s all about respect and in my book he has none. My wife refuses to admit any of it so we are going to counseling. At this point if she doesn’t see it’s wrong to spoon feed a 6 year old, there’s nothing I can say to change her mind.
In the vast majority of instances, medication is a substitute for shitty parenting and/or impatient parents who don't understand or aren't willing to accept that active children are hyper. It's also what happens when parents go to a psychiatrist and ask what they can do to help. Well what did you expect? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That being said, there are some children who genuinely need and will benefit from medication. Those instances are very specific and require the right circumstances. And everyone who reaches for the pill bottle as the first tool in their toolbox puts a bad stereotype on those who actually benefit. (Sorry for the soapbox; I've worked with young children for over a decade and this is my wheelhouse.)
I actually think he may be ADD. It may not be disrespect as much as it is him not being able to focus. My wife is staunchly against any meds so that’s off the table anyways but I have never encountered kids aloof to their environment.
I agree... I just think meds are too much of a go-to "solution". "Little Jimmie isn't paying attention to his 7th grade home room teacher... he's bored and wants to go outside and play... better hit him up with some meds to keep him focused."
Not to be argumentative, but how late in the morning are we talking about here? My ex expects our six-year-old to play on her own and not wake her unless it's an emergency every morning... because she likes to sleep into 10:00 AM. Which, personally I find rather ridiculous, figuring that if you have kids you ought to expect to have to get up in the morning and be on point for them. They're six. I have no idea what time she actually gets out of bed and for how long she's on her own over there, but with me, she rises at about 7:30 am on her own through the summer. I'm assuming that since you said you left for work that it wasn't anything crazy like that but I still tend to lean towards having the responsibility of being up before one that young.
I largely agree, with the caveat that every situation can vary widely depending on a number of individual circumstances. My 2 year old wakes up around 7:00 and my 5 year old wakes up around 7:45-8:30 if I let him sleep in. Youngest goes to sleep at 7:30, oldest is in bed at 8:30 on the week days and by 9:30 on the weekends. They have nap time at school but on the weekends we do "quiet time" where my youngest takes a nap and either my wife or I can close or eyes for a bit while my oldest does something quiet. My wife is more of a morning person and I'm better at night, so she wakes up earlier with the youngest and I take most of the responsibility at night. Those are the times and schedule that we use and what works for us. Not saying it's by any means ideal for everyone though.
This is when you start to realize what “the good old days” actually means. Back in the good old days, when you could pick a mouthy little shit up by his face and slam him through the sheetrock so hard and deep you look like you’re artificially inseminating a stegosaurus. But you can’t do that. You CAN, however, fantasize about doing that and various other now-frowned-upon things to him. And if you truly think you’re going to snap and snatch his eyes out, just gently whisper in his ear how often you get to fuck his mom. ....up the ass.
So hey, let me geek out a bit here... Today was the first day in about 6 weeks that I could just sit back and do something that I wanted to without having some sort of schedule or "have to get X done before Y date" thing... actual free, "what am I going to do with myself" time. So I decided to do some programming. My job is very much a technical one, where I design and build very complex systems (infrastructure and apps), but it's also one of very technical project management where I oversee a bunch of resources on a bunch of different projects. The problem comes down to the fact that there really is no good software to help with doing this. I use OmniPlan for high-level project management (the simplified, but still good enough, Mac version of Microsoft Project), and all of our PM's and developers and I use JIRA for the actual day-to-day issue tracking and development. Basically, an issue is assigned to a dev, they do it, and they modify that issue in JIRA to help keep track of their work and the status of the project overall. The really shitty thing is that OmniPlan does high-level stuff really well (Gantt charts, resource leveling, monte carlo simulations, etc), but you can't really use it for low level issue tracking for a whole team or project, and JIRA does a reasonable job at issue tracking, but sucks ass at high-level project management. This has been bugging me for a few years now, and I finally did something about it. Last night I started to write some automation that would basically aggregate and sync issue data from JIRA and dump it into Omniplan, and holy fucking shit, it works... and I'm really, really impressed with how it does work. Now, as the devs update their shit many times a day, I can run the "refresh data" app I wrote, and it will automatically update my Omniplan project with live data. So yeah, I know this probably doesn't sound like that big of a deal to a lot of you, but I showed it to one of my PM's today and she lost her mind. "HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!?!". This is a game changer for how I do my job... and I'm kind of amazed at just how powerful it really is. Now time to go drink and grill that big-ass hunk of beef that's in the sous vide. Hope y'all are enjoying your weekend so far.
Word. If it works for you and yours, then it works and you should go for it regardless of what anyone else thinks is ideal, obvious exclusions aside. I'm probably overly sensitive to the being awake before the kiddo thing because I once had to have a conversation with my five-year-old about what she should do if she wakes up hungry and it's before she's allowed to wake her stay at home mother.
Have you ever had one of those days when everyone gets on your fucking nerves? It started with my friend who was kind enough to let me park my truck in her driveway....I told her I'd just sign the truck over to her and she could sell it for whatever she could get because I don't want to deal with selling it. It should bring an easy $1k....it's a fully loaded 4WD, that was driven everyday up until I got my Camaro. It needs a battery and brakes. That's it. She texted me Tuesday and said she had someone coming over today to look at it and could I come over in the morning and get my stuff out Saturday morning. No problem. I texted her at 7 AM telling her to let me know when she's up. I called and left a voice mail at 8:30 saying the same thing. She calls me at 9:30 and informs me she just woke up and has to leave, so I can't unload my stuff out of the truck into the garage but I could come over and wash it. Wash it? Bitch I'm handing you the easiest $1K you've ever got and you want me to wash the fucking truck too? I'm not burning up a bunch of fuel to drive over there and not get what I need to get done. So then she starts bitching at me about procrastinating. God damn it...I was ready to go bright and early just like you asked me to. You're the one who slept in, not me. Then, about an hour ago I walked out the front door and Crazy tells me "I'm working out here" and I kept heading out the door. He then angrily says "Did you hear me?" Yes, I heard you fuck wad. I'm walking out the front door of the place I pay rent on at 5 in the afternoon, don't you even think of trying to tell me I can't do that. Go fuck yourself you insane cock sucker. Fucking people. Small wonder I want to live as far from humanity as I can.
...and right on cue the two Crazies just got into a screaming match downstairs threatening to kill each other. Fuck me running, is peace and quiet to much to ask for anymore?
Shoot both of them and put a gun and each idiot’s hand. If the neighbours have ever heard anything then you’re already skating from it. Peace and quiet.
The saddest thing is I'll end up with more stories from my time here then I have from my time in the band. Think about that for a moment...an early twenties young man playing in a touring bar band getting fucked up on booze and coke every night, plenty of willing young women, and young me's penchant for creating chaos...I was a master of chaos. Something was going to catch fire, get blown up, or go over a cliff if I got bored. I honestly think my band mates created bored times just to sit back and watch me make sure I wasn't bored. The fact that I may possibly have more stories about my time living here then back in the those days should speak volumes about the insanity level.
Having just explored the Martimes for over two weeks, and having already been out west a couple times, I now fully realize that I live in a really, REALLY boring and shitty part of this fine land. After seeing southern New Brunswick and Cape Breton I may as well move to fucking Detroit. Yecccch. Ontario is flyover country compared to the east and west. I’m sure Nett can concur here, being we’re from the same dull city. At least he can escape when he feels like it.