Nagging!

Do you ever get sick of the sound of your own voice? I certainly do.  I'm sure that my children get sick of it too and probably think that I get some sort of pleasure from nagging.  I don't.  They go to school cross, I leave them at school cross, so it really isn't good for anyone is it?

One of the dad's at school last year overheard me saying that I was fed up of nagging and he turned to me and said that women were nags and that was the way it was.  After I had mowed him down with my car, I wondered if that was a general perception.  Are we?  Is that really true?  I'm not so sure, I often see some of the mums floating to school with their lovely smiling, well-behaved children, they are all chatting to each other and there is an air of loveliness around them. 

We arrive in a haze of shouting and nagging and usually at least one of my children goes charging off in a strop over some insignificant thing.  Mornings do seem to be the time when I nag the most, sometimes it is the sheer effort of getting everyone up, dressed and out of the house, that stresses me to the point where I want to scream (and have been known to on very rare occasions).

So in a view to try and nag less, the first thing to do is pinpoint the situations that cause me to nag the most.

1.  Getting dressed in the morning.  The two year old daughter is a complete diva at the moment and will not simply put on the clothes that I want her to wear.  She likes to 'choose', which means a procession of inappropriate or mismatched clothes and she usually ends up screaming at me and spending at least half an hour in her vest and nappy.  The six year old would simple spend his whole life butt naked.  He loves being naked. If he became a naturist in later life, it would not surprise me at all.  He hates clothes and often takes items of clothing off in public places.  So I manage to get him out of his pyjamas and then have to nag him into submission before he will get dressed.  The eight year old is pretty good, but gets out of bed in the morning and then disappears under an old duvet that we keep downstairs for chilly mornings.  He's like a hamster and you literally have to yank the duvet away to get him dressed.  The teenage one is quite self-sufficient, however, he spends at least half an hour in the shower, uses every last drop of hot water and then moans that we have made him late!

2.  Breakfast.  I let the children watch a bit of television in the morning and refuse to let them have breakfast in front of it.  So once we have had the twenty minute discussion about what they are going to have, the nagging restarts getting them to come downstairs to actually eat it.  I now turn off the television as I have discovered that this is the only way to ensure that they all come down.

3.  Brushing teeth and washing faces.  Why do children hate brushing their teeth so much?  Or is that just mine.  My six year old acts as though I am trying to brush his teeth with a chainsaw and he has an aversion to toothpaste and so gags every few seconds which is lovely.  Added to that, whilst I am wrestling with the middle two about their teeth, the two year old is usually emptying the contents of my make-up bag or putting random objects down the toilet, which does little to help the situation.

4.  Getting out of the house.  Michael McKintyre recently talked about his experience of trying to get his two children out of the house in the mornings on his Christmas Roadshow and it really made me laugh as it reminded me so much of me.  Why is it so difficult to get three children into three pairs of shoes and three coats in a morning.  It would be easier to wrestle a crocodile.  By the time that we are out and A has finally decided which coat and pair of shoes she's wearing, my stress levels are through the roof and then we have the 'who is going to sit in the front' debate, followed by the 'which song are we going to listen to on the CD' debacle.  The neighbours must think that I am some sort of screaming banshee, they smile and say 'hello',but really I bet that they are thinking; 'Those poor kids!  All she does is shout at them!'

5.  Vegetables.  I do try and give my children a balanced diet and they are pretty good on the whole and do eat a lot of fruit.  Vegetable, however, are really not their thing and I do keep putting different  things on their plates to try and encourage them.  You would think that I was trying to poison them, judging by their reaction.

6.  Sharing.  My two year old can't share, that is a fact, however, I do expect that of a two year old, but the two older boys are old enough to know better and they always seem to want the same thing at the same time and then end up squabbling or fighting over it.  It drives me nuts.

7.  Balls in the house.  What I mean by this is ball games.  Having three boys means a love of sport, which is a good thing when they are at school, in the garden or generally in a large open space, but my living room/bedroom/hallway cannot be described as a 'large open space'.  I will only allow certain balls to be used inside as anything to big and too hard would wreck the house.  As it is, they constantly boot balls against the front door, door frames and I have had to rethink where I put precious things several times, to avoid them being smashed to pieces by a well-aimed football.

8.  Homework and reading.  This is a big cause of nagging at the moment particularly with the six year old, who is a fantastic reader for his age, but who finds all school reading books boring and therefore cannot see why he has to read them.  I try coaxing, blackmailing, asking nicely and then I resort to nagging.  It never works.  Once I am in nagging mode, he digs his obstinate little heels in and before you know it there is a full scale war raging. 

9.  Dirty pants and plates.  The teenager is a devil for leaving 'dirty things' lying around the house.  It is as though it is an affirmation of his adolescence.  Pants and socks lurk in his bedroom which is a stone's throw away from the washing machine.  Every few days I ask him if he knows where the washing machine is and he always responds with a grunt and then off I go again.  It is the same with dirty plates, dishes and cups.  He has never once in his sixteen years of life, ever opened the dishwasher.  Why is that?  Is there something about being a teenager that makes them physically incapable of picking up dirty things?

10. Manners.  Or rather lack of them.  I do sometimes wonder if I am from a dying breed, but manners are really important to me and I try so hard to instill manners in my little darlings and then they seem to disappear into thin air! Do they reach a certain age where it becomes physically impossible to say 'please' and 'thank you' and have any regard for anyone but themselves? I do certainly wonder and then there's eating with your mouthful, talking over each other, not washing hands after going to the toilet ...I could go on but I think you probably get the picture.

So, there you go my ten things that induce bouts of nagging. There are more, but we would be here all day. Now I just need to work on nagging less.  How about you? What makes you nag?    I will leave you with the clip from Michael McKintyre's Christmas Roadshow about leaving the house with children.