As I'm sure many of you already know SD(7) has some serious behavorial issues. She is very disrespectful to any all adults for the most part. She's mean, a bully, and a liar. I won't go into any details about the specifics of her behavior but if you would like to know you can read through some of my previous blogs.

She was so great the whole week. In fact DH was planning on taking her out for ice cream at her favorite place as an reward for doing so well. Neither of us told her about this because we wanted her to have great behavior because she wanted to and not because she was going to get something out of it.

Let's just say that she didn't go out to get ice cream. Saturday she was fine for most of the day. I was busy cleaning and other than her coming into the house with her shoes on after I had swept and mopped the floor I really didn't have any problems. Fast forward to that evening and everything changes. I was busy cleaning the garage when I went walking down the hallway and past the kids bathroom. The door is wide open and SD is stitting on the toilet. I turned around and went to close the door but when I got back to the bathroom she was already in the process of closing the door. I reminded her of the fact that we are practicing privacy and she needs to close the door. Her response, I forgot. So I'm standing their confused as to how you can forget that and I say really and turned around and got about a step away from the bathroom door when I hear, "Oh really" come from behind it. I turned around and asked her if she just said that to which her response was no. I told that I heard her say it and her response was I didn't. This went on for a couple of minutes before I finally just walked away. I explained to DH what had happened and both he and I confronted her about the disrespect and the lying. She would deny it, then admit up to it, and then deny admitting up to it. So her punishment for being disrespectful was that she was grounded the next day.

Fast forward to later on in the evening. In fact it was two hours after she was supposed to be in bed and I catch her walking down the hallway. I told her that she knew she wasn't supposed to be out of bed and her response was, "can't I just go to the bathroom" with plenty of attitude. I said that was fine but she needed to get back in bed after she was done. I knew she was up to something, I could tell by the look of shock in her eyes after I caught her. I went back out into the garage to finish cleaning it. I came back into the house a couple of minutes later and caught SD trying to climb into the same chair that DH was in. (He had a horrible migraine and was trying to sleep it off.) I asked her what she was doing and she said that her daddy said that she could sleep with him. I jumped in and told her no. (When DH has a migarine he will say yes to anything like me maxing out his credit card just to get me to be quiet and the kids know this.) She immediately beings screaming daddy and clutching at this hand as she walks off. On a side note she had already gotten in trouble twice this past week for getting up when she is not supposed to so she knew damn well not to mention that I caught her in the hallway about five minutes before this incident.

So now I'm pissed. I'm sick of the lying, being a disrespectful little brat, and not listening and following the rules. So I went over and asked the neighbor if she had any work that SD could do. The neighbor was diagnosed with skin cancer and can't be outside in the sun so of course she had some stuff that needed to be done. One was moving some rocks that were in front of her fence closer to the sidewalk so that she could get the weedguard out from underneath it. So that's what SD did. She worked for four hours putting rocks into a bucket and making a pile next to the sidewalk. Let's just say she wasn't happy with it and cried pretty much the entire time.

Do you think that she would learn from that. Nope. She flat out told me no again after that. Caused a scene at the neighbors and didn't listen to me or the neighbor when we told her to go home repeatedly. Then proceeded to scream for her father. There's more to it than that but this post is already long enough.

I was actually going to be done with her punishment after the four hours of moving rocks and let her just hang out in her room and read books but after that little performance that wasn't going to happen anymore. I had spoken to my grandmother earlier that day and she told me that when she was little and did stuff she wasn't supposed to do she had to scrub all of the floors in the house with a toothbrush. So that's what she did. Only she didn't do all of the floors just the two bathroom floors and then she cleaned the kids bathroom plus she wrote sentences.

I feel horrible for dishing out punishments like that. I just don't know what to do anymore. Nothing works with this kid. She won't listen. Treats adults like crap. Bullies other kids. Normal little kid punishments don't work. I feel like I'm failing as a step parent. If I ever said or did the things that she did at her age my dad would have smacked in into next week. Plus we lived on a farm so there was always lots of manual labor that would follow that for an extended period of time. He would have been bound and determined to make that point stick the first time.

Do any of you feel this way? What other options are there for this type of behavior? You could strip everything out of her room and she still wouldn't care. Youcould take away every previlage that she has and she would either just not care or find a way to get it being sneaky. I just feel so lost with dealing with her.