DH's parents are driving from PA for Christmas. We live in the Midwest so it's about an 18 hour drive. We would like the house clean for them when they get here. Skids' cousins (maternal) were over yesterday while their mom was at work. SD5 was told that SHE was responsible for whatever messes were made in her room.

Cut to cousins leaving and DH heading for work around 3. Time to clean up after the hurricane in her room. 20 minutes of tantrum later, she falls asleep. Fine, whatever, I can work on cleaning the rest of the house in peace. Bedtime for skids (here, anyway) is 9-9:15. So I go in to wake her up around 4:30 so she can go to sleep at bedtime. She's peed her bed. She starts throwing a fit about waking up, I leave her to it- her whining makes me want to smack her, so I remove myself from it. Go in 10 minutes later, instead of getting up, changing clothes, etc, she's grabbed her brother's pillowpet (she's peed on all "her" pillows and they haven't been washed yet), put it over the wet spot and gone back to sleep. Wake her up again. More tantruming. I leave. Another 10 minutes, she's picked ALL her CLEAN sheets off the floor where she & cousins threw them, put THEM on the wet spot, gone back to sleep.
I was done being nice at this point. I already had to wash DH's and my sheets because she had gotten into OUR bed the night before and peed in it. She'd just given me an extra hour of laundry to do because she wouldn't get up. So I pick her up of the bed and stand her on her feet. Begin epic tantrum time.

"I don't want to clean my room, it's too hard," "Everyone's mean to me, they all make me WORK." Personally, I don't attend her fits. I shut her door and let her have them. Saves my sanity, and keeps it from pissing off SS7 and DD8mo. I clean until she calms down, calmly tell her that gma and gpa are coming, and that Santa doesn't like this kind of behavior, and she needs to get her room clean. MORE SCREAMING. "I have to clean EVERYTHING" DH and I have washed all the dishes (no dishwasher) done nearly all the laundry (hers alone is more than mine, DH's, SS7's, and DD's COMBINED because she throws clean clothes out of her drawers onto the floor, then takes them to the laundry room when she has to clean, plus she wets her bed nearly everynight), cleaned both bathrooms, cleaned DH's and my room... I told her that she could do all that and I would clean her room. MORE SCREAMING.

"Everybody's so mean to me" "it's too hard" "I have to clean ALL this"-granted, her room did look like a disaster at the time, but we have a fairly simple system for the kids to clean, so if she skipped the whining, it probably would've taken ~20 min. Told her this, and that I didn't care if she whined, she was going to do it, and her door would stay shut until she could stop acting like a baby. The last bit was probably unneeded, but it was 6:00 by this time, and she had done absolutely nothing but scream and whine.

She wanted to continue throwing a fit. Door shut. She started screaming about how her head hurt. My reply- Well if you weren't screaming for the last 90 minutes, your head wouldn't hurt. More screaming, this time, "I WANT MOMMY" "MMOOOOOMMMMMMMMYYYYY". So I thought, ok. You want Mommy, you can talk to Mommy. I call BM at work, leave her a message to call me back when she gets a chance. BM calls, I tell her what's going on, give the phone to SD. Now, we have our problems with BM, but she's usually pretty good about backing up DH or I when SD starts this crap.

BM tells SD, "I can't hear you when you whine. You need to clean your room or Santa won't come. You need to listen to funmommy. Stop being a baby and clean your room." YAY BM, thank you. The petty part of my did a little dance at the look on SD's face. It's 7:45. She's been screaming, throwing a fit, pounding on her bedroom walls, throwing things for over THREE STRAIGHT HOURS. FINALLY gets her room cleanISH by bedtime. She is sent to bed, teeth brushed, lights out, having done nothing all night but throw fits.

What a night. Pretty sure if I did this as a kid I would've been spanked. Hopefully she'll learn eventually that tantrums get her nowhere, and I DON'T CARE HOW LONG SHE SCREAMS, she's not going to get out of whatever she's been told to do.