A Family of Yellers?

I'm really not proud to write about this. But it's bugging me and I want to get it off my chest.

I often feel like we are becoming a family of yellers.  I'm impatient.  Mike is even more impatient.  Our older girls are at each other's throats 85% of the time.  One is full of drama and attention-seeking, the other is ultra-sensitive and little things make her blood boil fast.

They really push our buttons.  The thing that pushes me the most to my limits is either being ignored or blatant disobedience.  Unfortunately, I see a lot of that these days.  Kind of always have.  I don't get it.  I promise I'm nice the first three times I ask or tell my kids to do something.  But my blood starts rising fast by the 4th, and by the 5th time it is often boiling.  That's when I often blow my top.  Because it's this very scenario over and over, all day long.  Or one of them often likes to do the opposite of what I say and that puts me at boiling almost immediately.

I realize yelling is not effective. I realize the damage it does. I realize they tune me out.  But nothing else seems to get their attention.

And sometimes there is just so much cotton-pickin noise in the house that no one even realizes that I'm speaking. I don't mean angry yelling, just loud kid noise and happy yelling.  So then I yell and then they all realize I'm talking.

Then there's their dad.  More of the same, only his blood boils faster and of course his voice is louder.

So what's the result?  The kids seem to yell a lot, and now it is spreading to the little girls.

I actually think I yell less and am a lot more patient than I used to be, and so is Mike. But it still seems to happen a lot. I'm not really sure how to fix it, and I'm not really sure what else to do when I find myself getting to that point.  Sure I can count to 10, but then what?  What do I say to them?

Other than my impatience, need to control, and somewhat irritable nature, most people who have all known me find me to be pretty laid-back and even-keel and never know such a side to me even exists.  It's like, back when I was a teen and a young adult those things surfaced only during PMS and then largely went away by the time I was married. But for some reason being a mom brings out those three of my otherwise subdued qualities.  It's kind of like having PMS all the time, only that's not what it is.

And you know what's funny?  The impression that Mike and I generally give off is that we're friendly but also pretty reserved.  In fact, in my family that I grew up in (not my grown-up married family), I was always the peacemaker out of a whole bunch of people that couldn't get along.  Now does that sound like angry, tempermental, yelling people?

Hopefully as my kids get older they will get to know the real me, and more importantly, hopefully there will be more peace and harmony in our home (as long as they don't become crazy, psycho teenagers!).  But I don't want them to yell and have short fuses so I have to learn to exemplify something else. But how?