Coping with emotional children and broken gadgets

I read a great article this morning which made a load of sense to me, as right now Jess is really pushing us both all the time, and Jude and I find it really hard to stay calm with her. She fights with Milly all the time, over anything at all, and unless one of us sits with them both to act as mediator and go-between, it can go on all day. So, if I'm cooking or trying to do anything else, all I hear is screaming from them - "Mine, mine!" "No, Mil, NOOOOO!!!! MINE!" etc, which just makes me roar at both of them, which then results in Jess bursting into tears. Clearly we can't go on like this, as it's not teaching them how to control their emotions if all they see is Mummy losing it whenever they're cross....

She also hits Jude a lot, and laughs at him if he reacts to it in any way, especially if he's really hurt. Even when I've tried to talk to her about her behaviour when she's calm, it doesn't change, and she is often quite hysterically abusive, hitting and laughing, then crying if she's stopped. It's really hard to understand her at the moment.

So, I'm glad to have found the article and I'm hoping to put it into practice so I can be calmer and help Jess, in particular, deal with her own feelings.

My camera is busted, I foolishly left it in the funbus and little fingers got into the lens yesterday and well, that's it for the Coolpix.... luckily I have a back-up which seems to be working OK. Phew. Unfortunately on the same day Jude sat on his phone and cracked the screen, so now we both have broken phones as well. Not a good day for gadgets.

The white project is proceeding in it's own fashion: I've now got going on the fourth section, which has a big satiny moon on it, and is slightly more landscape inspired. I'm starting to get more of a sense of how it will look as a whole, though I'm still not totally confident about stitching it all together.... I kind of like how it's all a little wonky, I'm glad straight lines defeat me so easily, it makes it look a little richer somehow.

Some wildflowers collected a couple of days ago from the fields around us: I picked them knowing that the farmer will be killing them all on the next rotation when he sows the next crop and adds weedkiller.

The ones I've identified so far are tufted vetch (you can see the pretty paired leaves in the bottom pic), along with two I didn't know before: charlock (the yellow flower above right) and common fumitory on the left. The seeds and young shoots of charlock are both edible, but it is detested by farmers as the seeds can survive for half a century.

:-)