Wrestlemania

My boys have been wrestling each other a lot lately and it is driving me crazy. I don't mind if they want to wrestle each other but someone is always getting hurt and crying or whining and I just cannot stand it! I keep telling them they are welcome to wrestle downstairs with the door shut or out in the garage but no one is allowed to complain about getting hurt. Of course they all agree until ... someone gets hurt. So tonight I said NO MORE WRESTLING and they stopped wrestling. Until bedtime.

Every Friday and Saturday night we let them have "Crazy Sleep Night" (CSN) which means they can sleep in any bed (except mine) or any of their bedrooms or on the floor in those bedrooms. When they were all smaller, the three of them could fit easily into a full sized bed and even into a twin bed and it was cute and cozy. Now that they are bigger, only two can fit in the full bed and just one to a twin bed so mostly they sleep on the floor in sleeping bags on CSN.

So, at bedtime tonight, they chose to sleep in Jax's bedroom on the floor for CSN. It was quiet for a few minutes then I heard Jax yell and Dex whine so I snuck upstairs and found them all wrestling on the floor. I put an end to CSN for tonight and maybe forever! I am just so sick of it! Stephen says I am a hard ass but really he is not home for a lot of the wrestling and whining (usually happens after school before dinner) and the thing is, Jax weighs almost twice what Cars weighs so while Cars can be the aggressor, one big push from Jax is enough to make Cars fly (and yes, usually he is the one who gets hurt the most while Jax is the whiniest about it).

I also hate it because the whining and crying when someone gets hurt brings me back to my childhood. My siblings and I used to fight. A lot. We'd punch and scratch and throw things at each other. More than one door in our house was broken when someone was being chased and tried to slam a door behind them while the chaser would shove a broom handle in the gap to stop the door from closing. We'd fight and bully and scream (while my mom and dad were at work mostly). It never stopped until we were all adults!

Getting back to my kids, for the most part they do not physically fight. I will not tolerate it. Cars is one who will hit when frustrated but Jax and Dex do not (so Cars is the one who spends the most time in his room). This wrestling is not fighting but just play and I know that but the outcome (whining and someone being hurt) totally brings back those feelings of being teased, bullied and hit in my home when I was a child and I do not want to feel that way. Ever.

Now, I must say that I have a great family and I love my brothers and sister. I do not love parts of my childhood and really, the fighting was not constant (I have some friends whose homes were battlegrounds!) and when we did have fights they would be over pretty quickly with no lasting hard feelings (mostly). I just do not want that for my children.

I hope that by taking away CSN tonight and maybe turning it into something they have to earn rather than something they expect, I can get them to curb the wrestling. Keeping my fingers crossed.