Eli having problems.

Now that Miranda's main behavioral issues are a thing of the past, it seems Elizabeth has stepped in to make our life miserable.

She has always been a "mean girl" (we remembered noticing it when she was just over a year old), but lately it's been really bad. She is exceptionally mean to me in particular, but also to MIchael and her siblings. In general she is sweet to her teachers and friends, but it has started to pop up with friends too now (she had someone over the other day and basically ignored them). She argues, talks back, complains about everything, never seems to enjoy anything, and is generally a real pill. This is all exacerbated by the fact that I get comments like these at school (I got two today)..."Elizabeth is so friendly!" and "She was the first one to hug me...you are so lucky to have such a nice kid!" At her parent teacher conference, they just went on and on about how wonderful she was. I just sat there and said, "I have no idea what child you are describing but she doesn't live at our house."

At home, she acts like a 15 year old girl pissed off at her parents. As if I told her she couldn't see her boyfriend anymore. I am literally dreading when she actually is 15 and I can't just pick her up and throw her in her room anymore.

In addition to the meanness, she has started (again) to have pee accidents. She has one basically every day, but yesterday she had three. THREE! The first was at home but the second two were at a park (where there were toilets!) during an otherwise lovely family picnic. After the first park accident, Michael cleaned her up and rinsed her undies and we stayed, but after the second, we just gave up and went home. It was so annoying.

We really have no idea what to do about either issue.

The other day after one in a long line of tantrums about nothing of consequence where Michael had to physically remove her, I had a calm talk with her about her behavior. I said that it seemed that she was really angry a lot. She said she was but couldn't tell me what about. I told her it had gotten so bad that we were going to move to a no tolerance rule and privileges would be taken away after any time she argued with me about something or was mean to me or someone else.

For the peeing, I told her that I would be picking out her clothes to wear each day until she got a hold of the peeing accidents. This is like torture for her. Picking out her clothes and changing clothes is something she looks forward to. Her outfit today was ok, but I plan to make it fairly unpleasant for her this week so she actively tries to figure out what is going on and puts a stop to it.

It's all really unfortunate and highly frustrating for her and us. But we really don't know what else to do.