No Good, Smelly, Stupid Mommy!

Wow! It has been a morning around the Miller household. Nora has been a bit trying for quite some time lately, and honestly, our life has been too full and busy, so I am thinking this may have a part in her innapropriate behaviors of not listening, being rude and just being downright defiant. Experiencing this with her has somewhat taken this Mama by surprise because prior to a few months ago, she was anything BUT that. Today, however, her behavior was like icing on the cake. We needed to get to a local restaurant to pick up a lunch and deliver it to her school for a teachers birthday and so I was trying to get her and her sister showered and ready to go. After getting me SOAKING wet while bathing her (on purpose my you) she refused to put her clothes on. Once overcoming that obstacle we made it downstairs to put on shoes where she decided to let me know that I was a no good stupid Mommy. I have no idea where she even heard the word stupid, or how she knows what it means... Sad thing is I had lost my cool, she knew it and quite frankly I may very well have been acting "stupid". After getting the shoes on and me doing everything in my power to keep cool we made it into the car. I decided that since we were in the car she would have no choice but to listen to me and so I started in on how I was very dissapointed in the way she was acting lately and that it made me sad that we weren't getting along. I told her that if she couldn't be a kind person that we would have to go and talk to our priest, Father Bill and let him know that she was not being kind to others. She looked at me seriously and said "no thank-you, I'll be good". Not five minutes later we were almost to the restaurant when she said, "something smells in this car" I said, "what do you think it is'' to which she replied "its you. you smell yucky and you are stupid". Lovely, just lovely! So apparently the fear of God or talking to the priest wasn't efficient and I have officially ran out of tricks from the bucket... Guess I will be spending rest time this afternoon refreshing my skills from love and logic and researching effective ways to handle a defiant, somewhat rude, way too honest, non-listening four-year-old!