Cry wolf

This parenting thing can be pretty stressful. Yesterday we went and got our daughter her first bike: a little 12" which my clever hubby assembled for her. She has ridden trikes but they were all too short for her (she's quite tall for her age) so we went with a proper bike (with trainer wheels, although I have some philosophical issues with trainer wheels, never having had them myself). The problem came when she actually got on the thing: after being wildly excited about it, she completely lost the plot.... but to be fair, she has got a fairly big scrape on the inside of her thigh from going on a slide when it was wet (her clothes rucked up and rubbed). She refused to tell us why she didn't want to ride the bike, even though hubby asked her over and over again....

And then there was the meal wars. We'd cooked homemade hamburgers - homemade buns, homemade patties, and salad - and she stalled and stalled and stalled. After an hour and a half, we got sick of it and put her to bed, amid much shrieking and bemoaning her fate. We have previously told her that spitting food is nasty (she had a bad habit of doing this) - so what she didn't tell us until this morning was that there was gristle in her patty and she didn't spit it out and she didn't swallow it either.... and the gristle was still there this morning. We felt mortified: not only had she done exactly what we've asked her previously to do, but she put herself in danger to do so. She must have been so confused last night. But she was also being obstreperous and obstructionist... and she's been stalling over food and her dinner for several nights and we are getting very grumpy about it so were less likely to listen to her.