Saturday, November 4, 2017

Friday Night Fights

Friday night is where the distance between reality and expectation is a long and insurmountable void in our house these days. We crave an evening to kick back and relax, give in to the building fatigue of the week and just relax and have fun for a few hours. I've tried to create some kind of ritual, pizza & board games is the latest. But yet...

We are all tired. And kids don't just chill out and go to bed early the way sensible adults do when they are tired. They get a bit wild. They act out. Defiance, moodiness, tears. And the adults, who just want one evening that is EASY for the love, are not in the best state to deal with these emotions.

Anyways, Friday night usually ends in someone yelling at someone, consequences of some sort, and an overall feeling of disappointment. If, by some chance, we get the kids to bed without incident, Friday night is also when the majority of our special couple bickering and arguments crop up.

As much as I want us to connect and enjoy our time together without activities or homework in the way, I'm thinking Friday night is not the best time for meaningful interaction.  I think our new Friday night tradition is going to involve screens for all.

Do you have a Friday night ritual I can steal? Or is pizza and movie the secret that I have somehow failed to pick up on all these years?

4 comments:

  1. Our time for bickering is Saturday morning. Sigh. Friday nights we treat like any other night except maybe I let Dyl stay up til 9. I'm not very much fun anymore, sadly.

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  2. Yeah....the more concerted my effort to have 'fun nights' and such the more the kids rebel and act out.

    For a little while we went out to eat and swimming on Friday nights. Mostly I've given up.

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  3. Friday night is when we have our adult dinner, so the kids eat first, I put them to bed while Q cooks and then we have a couple of glasses of wine and a conversation that doesn't revolve around E's latest obsession or is punctuated by P's shrieking.

    I really want a pizza and board games night each week but know we're not there yet. I don't know that I'd do Fridays. They always seem fraught- I think because everyone is so tired.

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  4. On Friday nights, DC1 and DC2 have swimming lessons. Then usually they pick up pizza because our preferred pizza place is across the street from the pool. Then piano and violin practicing, and it's time for bed. Prior to Friday swimming lessons, Friday was a "if you do your chores you can play computer games" night, but swimming cuts into that.

    Our bickering day is Sunday morning while DH does his weekly computer gaming and DC1 finishes homework and DC2 does chores. Though today it isn't bad because DC2 reaaaaally wanted to play computer games (teach your monster to read and dragonbox big numbers) so she raced through her chores with only a small amount of complaining (which stopped when we reminded her that it was her computer time she was eating up). That's why I'm able to be on the computer right now!

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