a good bad afternoon

Yesterday afternoon...was not so pretty.  Tim had a lab to teach until up in the afternoon, so I had both kids to myself for a couple of hours after Daniel came home from school.  During this time, I had to put Daniel's eyedrops in.  He hates Esther watching him do something that he doesn't want to do.  Esther hates not being involved in what we are doing when there is no-one else in the house to interact with.  So, 30 seconds into the first drop out of three, I was trying to count out the one minute Daniel was supposed to keep his eyes closed; Esther, disobeying my express orders to entertain herself elsewhere, was staring around the door; and Daniel was opening his eyes and repeatedly and stridently telling me, "Esther's here!  Esther's here!" (like I couldn't see for myself?).  I had already had it with the two of them disrupting the eyedrop routine, and had no interest in spending the next five minutes scolding them and being ignored.  So I told them both to go to their rooms for one minute, hoping that when they came out they would take my instructions more seriously.  Esther went, with much unhappiness.  Daniel looked me in the eye and said, "No."  I repeated the order.  He said no again.  So I told him no more computer for the afternoon.  He smiled and said, "That's great!"  Ignoring the bravado, I asked if he was ready to cooperate with the rest of his eyedrops.  He told me that I had already taken away his computer, so he was not going to listen to me any more.  At this point Esther decided to come out of her room and refuse to go back in.  So I told her she could not watch her Curious George movie that afternoon.  Then I had a brief discussion with Daniel about how I was doing the eyedrops for him, to help him, and it didn't make sense for him to be fighting me doing something that was for his good.  Apparently some of that sank in, because I found out later that he did the rest of his eyedrops himself when I wasn't looking.  But he was mad, and determined to show me that I couldn't be his boss.  So he set about proving that he could do things I didn't want him to do, and I couldn't stop him.  I will spare the details, but I have to say that some things he didn't do were to hurt anybody, damage anything, or use harsh words.  So I was rather proud of him for that.  The two most egregious things he did were to sneak a phone outside to make a call after I had told him not to use it (he only wanted to call Tim, which would have been fine if he had just told me what he was doing, but I was not happy about the sneaking), and to turn on Esther's forbidden movie very loudly and refuse to turn it off, thus making her much more miserable than I had foreseen or intended.  So it was not a fun afternoon, for anybody.  The good part of the bad afternoon?  When Tim came home, Daniel met him at the door and told him (accurately, and in surprisingly understandable English!) what had been going on, and later, when he talked himself down from being so angry and began to feel sad instead, he turned to Tim for comfort.  We have never seen him do that before.  Between the language barrier and a wariness of men, Daniel normally turns to me rather than to Tim to meet his emotional needs.  But this time, he wanted his daddy.  So, as unpleasant as Daniel's defiance was, in another way we feel like we reached a milestone.

After Daniel's meltdown was over he told me he was sorry and we found some pleasant, non-computer activities to do together for the rest of the evening.  We did have a bit (or maybe a lot?) more drama this morning over the consequences for yesterday's behavior, but we seem to have worked through it successfully.  And I'm hoping we don't have another incident for a while!