Spoke too Soon

Oh.my.goodness. We are back to ignoring directions. Asking the same question over and over and over and letting the siblings play Mom and overrule what THIS Mom says.

Por exemplo:

Me: Jelly Bean please get up and get dressed. You have your visit today.
25 minutes later-
Jelly Bean why are are still in your pajamas? What are you doing in the basement? The driver will be here in 5 minutes?
JB: LM told me to go get this for her.
Me: Excuse me?
JB: LM told me to go get this.
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Me: Jelly Bean, leave those boxes alone.
Jelly Bean, I said leave those alone.
JB: Mom can I open this?
Me: Not yet. You can put it to the side and when all the other presents are in the car you may play with that one.
JB: mom, I want to open this.
Me: JB I already told you my answer. Ask me again and it goes in the car too.
(A few minutes later as I'm trying to consolidate the gifts my mother loving picked out for all of us I hear a package opening)
JB What are you doing?
JB: Opening the box.
Me: The one I just told you to wait to open?
JB: I just asked you and you said yes.
Me: No I did not. You asked me twice I told you to wait. Now the box is going in the car.
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When we'd both calmed down I went over that this Mom does not say things she does not mean. This Mom will follow through each and every single time. ALWAYS. That she could go ahead and test me by asking me the same question over and over but that was going to have the opposite effect of what she wants to have happen.

I'm exhausted by this testing behavior. And knowing that she's doing it because of the increase in visits with her Mom doesn't help with the frustration that I feel because we've been here before and overcome it. I know that Mom threatened to take away the cable from the bedroom JB goes into to watch TV all day while she is at the visits but Mom didn't do it and still let her continue to watch TV after she threw a fit, made a mess and called her a B*tch.

I feel bad for Mom. She's going to get eaten alive by her children. They are going to walk all over her.

And because Mom didn't follow trough, LM did. She walked into the room and turned the TV off on her sister. Which caused Gabby to call me out that night on not spending enough time with her. (Stay with me in the logic here. JB got the attention both at the visit and her behavior at home. Gabby got mad at JB for not listening to her Mom because Gabby's biggest fear is that Mom can't handle JB and that they will do all this work, get home and get taken back into the system. I'm the easy target to be mad at because I can handle her telling me she's angry. And really she knew if she confronted me I would sit and listen and talk with her. For an hour. At bedtime.)

I know I could probably call the caseworker tell her it's too much and cut back a visit this week but I'm not going to. Mom needs to understand what it feels like to have her kids every day. Today's visit is 9 hours. 9 hours is a long time to watch TV. And they were already having issues this morning. She has to see the behaviors they are capable of in order for them to be addressed. It will be very hard to shove behavior under the rug or blame it on being tired, the foster parents, the therapists, or school after 5 days of visits.

And while this is going to make home life suck, I'm hoping this at least gives us some momentum towards and end.