More sibling rivalry, as well as outright mean behavior

yeah, you drive me crazy too.

My children know that around five pm every night, they need to simmer down and stop yelling, because I want to watch the news: I need my daily CNN-fix. Unfortunately, the commercials around this time tend to be longer, and more annoying, something that doesn’t escape my daughter’s attention. When a particularly wordy Pro-Activ ad comes on, six year old Isabella looks up from her book, and says: “You should probably get some of that.”
What?

“Why would you even say that?” I answer.
“I don’t know,” she says.
Just like every other mom in her mid-to late thirties, I have plenty of hang-ups about the way I look: I perpetually need to lose weight, haven’t had a haircut or a facial in many months, and manicure? What’s a manicure? Fortunately, acne isn’t on the list. So I decide that she just made the comments because she saw pretty bottles with mysterious things on television. We’ll leave it at that; she’s not mean, she’s just clueless.

That same night at dinner she is confronted with a dish of creamed spinach; it doesn’t go over well.
“That’s disgusting. If I ever have to taste that again, I will run away,” she announces.
Oh, really.
“Where will you go?’ I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“How will you eat?”
“I don’t know.”
“How will you get to school? Who will dress you? Who will tuck you in at night? Oh wait; if you run away, you won’t have a bed. Pity. Won’t you be cold?”
She looks at me as if I’m green and slimy like the spinach and just crawled out from under a rock.
“Eat your food,” I say.
“No.”

My son Mendel leans over and yells:” Eat your food!”
This is a useless intervention, since he has not touched his own plate, except for a few bites he has thrown on the floor. She ignores him for the time being; she’ll file it away as motivation to pinch him at a later time. Mendel, who doesn’t like being ignored, stabs at her with his fork. She in turn grabs his arm and does not let go, even when told repeatedly. His hand starts to turn blue.

My children can get very aggressive with each other; I guess it’s part of having a sibling. You have to defend your territory. The other day, Isabella bit Mendel so hard his screaming could be heard three houses down. I tried reverse psychology, and brought him to her: “Go for it,” I said. “You want to hit him? Come on!”
She looked at me as if I’d gone crazy, so I continued: “What are you waiting for! You have my permission to bite, pinch, kick, whatever you want, come on, go for it!”
“I don’t want to. You’re mean,” she said.

That took care of it for that day, and I thought we were making some improvement. Apparently, I was wrong.
“Stop it, both of you,” my husband says. “Can we just have a nice dinner?”

She lets go, and my son responds by getting out of his seat and running at lightning speed into the other room.
“Can I leave the table too?” Isabella asks.
“That’s a great idea,” I say, “both of you in the other room, unmonitored, and trying to kill each other over god-knows-what while we enjoy our dinner. Go ahead.”
She looks confused: is that a yes, or a no?
“It’s a yes,” I say. I have by now finally taken a bite of my own spinach, and oh-my-god, that’s gross. She wasn’t being cruel; she was just being honest. I guess I should be grateful she didn’t bite me.