After sorting out that Little Fayoumis actually does want to listen and obey, but that he doesn't always remember to, I hit on a bright idea. He's now to practice doing what marxdarx and Mommy say: that is, asking for them to tell him something to do, and then immediately and happily do it.

You see, he'd been doing a math sheet. And he hasn't done those for a while, so it was tough, and he wasn't used to doing it, and he was stalling, and being a real brat about it, but he finally had only one problem left, 14 - 9.

So I got him to go through the whole list of 14 - X, starting where X = 0. And at first he was grumpy about it, but I whammied him, because when he does these things it has to be his idea, and he's used to doing "the patterns" with me, so he got all cheerful. He's rusty, I know he's rusty, because he was making simple mistakes on it. Sounds like time for a refresher of all of them until he can recite the patterns without declaring that 14-5=8 or something.

And then the storm hit.

It seems that marxdarx and I can say the exact same words and the Little Fayoumis will obey me, but not him.

There was a good round of emotionally fraught "What the hell is going on?!" until I caught enough traces to grab the answer, or, at least, an answer.

The Little Fayoumis just isn't in the habit of listening to and obeying them, and he is with me. And he's going to consciously be practicing it with them now. I probably do have added advantages like my background in tutoring and the thing where I can feel what's going on with them.

At any rate, that solved that, and they practiced that for a while, and then we went out to see Shark Tale. It's hysterical if you're a pop-culture whore. *looks at trollprincess, norabombay* Don't expect it to be anything like Finding Nemo except for talking fish. Take "bottom feeder wants to make it big time" plot, add Mafia, oh, and put it all under the sea, so all the pop culture references can be twice as funny!

Dinner was decent, except for the little detail that they hadn't changed the oil in the fryers recently, and Sis wound up sick from the fried shrimp.

I discovered that the reason I was so short on laundry was that I'd left half a load of laundry in the washer in the laundry room on Wednesday. Fortunately, it hadn't been messed with, unfortunately, probably because it had gone all dry and crusty. I washed it again, needless to say...

So, that was Sunday.