Mila spent a good portion of the afternoon mad at me. She was justified in her anger, but it was one of those things that can't be helped. I offered a few good things to try to offset her anger, but Mila was having none of it.
She decided to throw a tantrum.
The super fun part about the tantrum is that I was in a work meeting at the time. Fortunately, it was with only one other person and it happened to be a person who can see my dirty laundry, so to speak, because he's one of my favorites. He knows I am not in charge in my house.
As an added bonus, he and his wife are expecting their first child in a little over a month. So, he's genuinely in that weird bubble of time when you're absorbing all of the possibilities of having a child, from the joy you're about to experience to the "WTAF HAVE I DONE."
Mila decided to pile onto the WTAF category. She started by hissing at me, because seriously she does hiss like a cat when she's angry. That didn't even make me blink because she has overused that trick, so she escalated to stomping. Then she decided to try slamming the door, but again, I didn't even pay attention. I was schooling my co-worker in the fine art of not reacting to ridiculous behavior, but also I genuinely don't respond to tantrums. It requires too much energy.
Besides, there was a witness. I don't make small children cry with my evil mom glare when there are witnesses. Gotta save that.
To my co-worker's credit, he also didn't respond. He could see the whole show because we had our webcams on, but he mirrored my response and just kept on going over the thing we needed to go over. Except when he knew Mila's back was turned. Then he kept busting up laughing because have you seen how tiny Mila is? It's HILARIOUS when she's mad. So tiny! So angry!
Mila didn't think her first few door slams were loud enough, so she tried to make them louder. She slammed and she slammed and I ignored and ignored. When that got her nowhere, she escalated again. There were a pile of papers on the floor that I needed to grab on my way downstairs to throw away. Mila, not knowing they were trash, starting picking them up, tearing them in half, and crumpling the pieces into balls so she could throw them at my head.
It was exactly as hiliarous as it sounds, while also being absolutely infuriating. Mila does know it's all not allowed behavior, but she really seemed to think that having a witness was going to save her from her eventual fate. Spoiler alert: it didn't. She has since selected her own punishment for being a jerk.
But the co-worker. He sat there talking about important work things with a totally straight face all the while Mila kept throwing balls of paper at my head. I'm relatively certain that each little ball of paper was like a bomb dropping on his pile of "WTAF have we done?"
Good luck with that baby, E. I will do my best not to laugh when she destroys you during a conference call.