Parenting FAIL - again

My children are impossible. Completely and utterly impossible. Please excuse me whilst I rant...

I spent two and a half hours cooking dinner this evening. We had the most beautiful piece of prime rib and I wanted to make the most of it. It was intended for Father's Day dinner, but we ran out of time, and so I promised to do it today. Having baked some madelines for afternoon tea, because I promised Miss 3.5 that I would, I got the prime rib into the oven, reduced some home made beef stock from the freezer for a red-wine gravy, chopped up the pumpkin, potatoes, sweet potato and parsnips, made cauliflower cheese and my piece-de-resistance... made teeny weeny yorkshire puddings in a mini-muffin tray. I knew the kids would just love them.

Now you see why it took so long! Also in the middle of all that I made some yoghurt, tidied up, ran the dishwasher twice and did the washing up as I went along.

It all came together perfectly at the end. Well apart from me being still dressed in sneakers, velour trackky pants, the t-shirt I slept in and my fleece jacket (inside out as it turns out, which must have amused all the neighbours who chatted to me this morning when I was in the front garden). I'd wanted to get all dressed up, because such a spectacular meal deserves dressing up, and I was going to get out some tea-light candles and have some wine and it was going to be lovely and civilised.

So, I called everyone in for dinner, and they charged in like a herd of elephants screeching and whining and running around, and for some reason best known to herself Miss 3.5 is under the table screaming about something. They're asking me what 's for dinner and telling me they don't like it and refusing to sit down and I was trying to serve so it was still warm and nobody had set the table. And they were fighting about who was going to sit where and hassling the dog.

And all of a sudden it was too much. I'd had completely enough of my screaming whining family for whom I work day and night, and - like any mother - make sacrifices on an hourly basis. I was feeling used and taken advantage off, and just like Cinderella only there was no Prince and there never ever would be. So I threw a tantrum of my own.

"Enough," I bellowed. Flinging my oven gloves across the kitchen. "I have had enough you ungrateful shits. Do you have ANY IDEA AT ALL how f*king hard it is to produce a meal like this." Then I stormed off and refused to come out of my office until hubby crept in waving a glass of merlot at me. The merlot had a bug in it, but I drank it anyway.

By this stage the kids had eaten and were playing happily - apparently going to the aquarium to meet Santa - as you do, and hubby was finishing off the last of the washing up. So I was left to watch Talking Heads on ABC1, sip my wine and contemplate the fact I'd called my children ungrateful little shits - which, I believe is the honest truth, but that phrase is going to come back at me, its only a matter of time, and said f*king (again).

Well, as cool calm parenting goes, I've failed once again. And I'm wondering if I'll ever get it right. Pre-schoolers are such hard work. Mine fight endlessly, neither is ever happy about anything, and its like the bad times go on for ever with so few good times in between.

They're both at school next year. I'm trying really hard to treasure this time we have left at home all together. But to tell the truth, I'm actually hoping-to-god that our best years are yet to come.