K's been over a few times this week, but I finally got tired today and told her she was not going to be allowed to snap at me. I sent her home. If you don't repeat stuff a jillion times she just hears what she wants, but if you dare repeat something she yells. Bye; off you go. One day she cried on my shoulder after her mom yelled at her for doing something her grandmother had said was okay. The next day she brought her little brother over, which made me blanch because the brother already thinks it's cute if he misbehaves. He gets into everything. I don't want to take care of him and K just brought him over. She's been taking the rules more and more for granted, and I've been very cross with her. Argh. I've been reminding her for quite some time not to ask for anything without the word 'please' but there's some other manners lessons that need to be enforced. I'm going to have to be more of a hard ass, because just because she thinks of this place as a refuge from her family does not mean it's a refuge from rules and good manners. She thinks she can come in here, take food without asking, look cute, and I won't mind. She's smart enough to know better but it just doesn't seem to register.

Dealing with the girls has made me realize just how different the thinking processes of a child are and how wrong it is to judge most of them as adults. I'm not sure how much of K's behavior is deliberate or indifferent, but it's definitely due to her age and her bringing up. C makes the case clearer. She's very much the product of her upbringing and it shows. I'm still trying to break her of the notion that saying 'sorry' makes her continued flouting of my rules somehow acceptable. No, it just gets you sent home.

Jezebel actually got the cupboard open the other day, which scares me because she doesn't differentiate between cat food and food stuffs. I stocked up on staples and they're in the same kind of containers as her cat food, and she's not shy about knocking them over to see what's in them. Then again, she must be hiding her thumbs from me or something because she can open screw top containers. That's enough to make you break out into a cold sweat.