How deep does the rabbit hole go?

As previously posted, Darby is grounded for the weekend (actually through Monday per her mother). So when we were at my dad's this evening, she was not permitted to go to the other room to watch cartoons with her sister. Her options were to read, study spelling words, or work on word puzzles.

Well, at some point during the evening, Darby spilled a full cup of juice on the kitchen floor. Not a terrible scenario typically, everybody huffs and puffs, cleans up the mess, and we go about our evening. But in this case, Darby decided not to tell anyone. We went about our evening sure enough, but none the wiser to the sizable mess in the kitchen under the table.

As we were gathering our belongs to go home, I checked the kitchen to see if the girls left anything there. I noticed a cup on the table was sitting in a small pool of liquid. Strange. With further inspection, I saw that there was a much more vast pool of liquid under the table. Well, that was just great, of course.

So I summoned Darby to the kitchen and asked, "what's this?" pointing to the cup on the table. She responded, apparently not thinking that I had already examined the floor, "oh, I spilled my drink a little."

Imagine a mass invocation of ire about that time.

So I pushed the table out of the way, led her by the hand to the puddle on the floor, and expressed my astonishment at her description of the incident. There were many questions. I raised my voice. "How is this a little?" "Why didn't you tell anyone?" "Were you even going to tell anyone?" "Ever?" "Did you think this would disappear and go unnoticed?" "Why didn't you at least try to clean it up?" "Were we going to get all the way home before I got a call from grandpa asking what the heck this mess on the floor is from?"

She shrugged her shoulders in that disrespectfully ignorant way. Upon further grilling I got the, "I didn't say anything because I knew you would act this way," in that 9-going-on-13-attitude tone.

In the span of the next 1.5 seconds, I had turned her around, swatted her butt, grabbed the paper towels, put them in her hand, and instructed her to clean up her mess immediately, and then to apologize to her grandfather.

You see, I happened to know that my father spent a half-hour that morning sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor. That she would nullify the effort in such a way, as though the world were unquestionably her trash can, got the best of me.

After closely supervising the cleanup, I sat her down for a talk. I explained what had already been explained several times in recent weeks. That honesty about the matter up front is always the right and less painful thing to do. I explained that had she told someone at the onset of the incident, we would have complained and fussed about it like anyone would, but she would not have been scolded, definitely not attitude adjusted (i.e. swatted), and her grounding wouldn't be getting an extension. I expressed my frustration with the silliness of it all. That it all happened over a cup of spilled juice.

But I also gave her a hug, told her I loved her, apologized for the harshness, and explained that the extension of her grounding would be short lived if she could show improvement at school in the next couple days.

I know I'm being a little ridiculous. But this is a compounded solution for a compounding problem. I need a life-Tivo. You know, that would record only good parts, and let me skip all the mess. And don't get me started on the pausing live TV features.