“Are you eating candy up there?” Silence.

“ARE YOU EATING CANDY UP THERE????”

Suddenly I realize they can’t answer me because their mouths are too full of candy. But all too soon they swallow and the silence is broken:

“I’m not but they are!” “You were too!” “You said you wouldn’t tell!” “You promised!” “Stop yelling at me!” Crying and screaming over each other. At this point I’m wishing I had just let them have the damn candy.

Friend goes home. Kaylee and Colleen sulkily eat dinner. TV and magazine go unwatched and unread. But I think I’ll have that glass of wine now.

This was a first. She has only ever had one yellow.

For the uninitiated, some schools have a system whereby kids pull colored cards when they behave badly. Yellow means you lose five minutes from recess. Red means you lose all of recess. Two reds earns the holder a trip to the principal’s office.

Cat pulled her card for cutting up during a fire drill. Apparently Kyle’s booger joke merited a guffaw, and there is no guffawing during a fire drill and so she pulled a card.

Cat was quite nervous to tell me about it and was dreading my reaction. I am, after all, Bad Cop.

“So, I guess I am now grounded for a million jillion years,” she said with tears in her eyes.

“Well, I don’t know about THAT,” I said. “Maybe this offense just warrants us having a conversation about the right thing to do, the potential consequences of your actions and a discussion of what a better choice would be. I think you may just get off here with a nice long discussion with Mommy.”

“Can’t I just be grounded?”

Today’s the second day the system was in effect and Mack’s not getting a car.

He was talking when he should have been listening.

I spoke to Mack about it and told him that it wasn’t fair to be loud in class. I said that all the other students were being quiet and trying to learn, and if he was loud that was disturbing to them.

His reply was, “No. The other kids see that I am talking and then they all do it, too.”

Mack told me he won’t get any reds but we should expect a few yellows.

He says it’s not that he might purposefully break a rule, it’s that you don’t always know the rules.

Byron told Mack that if he gets all the way through kindergarten with no yellows, he’ll get him a car.

Mack was going through a swearing phase and it got pretty bad. So I decided to go Old School with the discipline. We told him that from now on, he got one warning a day, and on his second swear word he would have his mouth washed out. He asked what that entailed, and I explained that we would put soap in his mouth.

This is a child who cannot have even no-tears baby shampoo go near his head before he is equipped with a bath visor and a washcloth handy for any accidental drips on his face. The idea of having to EAT soap was horrifying to him.

The threat actually worked. Yes! Discipline that worked on Mack!

Until Sunday, when he said “ass” for the second time that day. I said, “Now, you have to have your mouth washed out.” Byron brought Mack into the bathroom and squirted some hand soap on his tongue.

My “warm vanilla sugar” hand soap from Bath & Body Works.

Mack asked for seconds.