So the drama . . .

Things were getting better around here. Spousehole has been in a pretty good mood and treating everyone fairly nicely. He was understanding about housework not getting done when I was sick last weekend. He was content to play his new video game obsession (Half-Life 2; thanks, Mom) and pretty much let us be.

But not any more.

I was out Wednesday night and he was in charge of the kids. Apparently Boy had a "toileting accident." His autism has made it tough for him to totally "get" potty-training. He pees in the toilet just fine, but still has problems sometimes with bowel movements. Boy was not cooperative about going upstairs to get cleaned up. Spousehole told me Thursday morning that he had spanked Boy.

Now, I'm not a big fan of spanking. But I wasn't going to have a major fit about it.

Until now. When Boy got home from school on Thursday, I was helping him in the bathroom and saw his bottom. It's bruised. Purple bruises on the surface of his tiny little bum. Not deep, can't-sit-down-comfortably bruises, but bruises nonetheless.

There's spanking and there's beating; I would classify this as beating. I was spanked a lot as a kid and I NEVER had bruises.

I warned Spousehole that if he ever hurts my son again, I will have his ass thrown out of here and get a restraining order to keep him away from me and the kids. He took that pretty well, actually. He apologized to Boy, but still made it all Boy's fault.

I've told Spousehole that he has to get some help for his anger problems. I know he's not having an easy time at work right now, but he cannot take out his anger on the children or me. He needs to learn to vent it another way. He agrees, but we'll see what happens.

In other parenting news, did you read about the little girl who was left at Chuck E. Cheese's and her family only realized she was missing when they saw her picture in the paper two days later? I can see how different people each thought the other had taken the child home, but to not notice for TWO DAYS? At least these people realized the NEXT day that they had left their child at Chuck E. Cheese.

And for REALLY bad parenting, there's the guy who threw his kids off a bridge to spite their mother and the mom who killed her four daughters and kept their bodies in the apartment to the point that the neighbors could smell them and the authorities found the girls when they came to serve an eviction notice. And the one that upset me greatly when it happened, the mother who suffocated her autistic daughter because she just couldn't handle the autism anymore. Her trial started this week.