Saturday: Up early, coffee, reading for a couple of hours, interrupted by Bram's complaints of boredom, which bore me to the point of anger. Breakfast of toast and egg yolk. Yeah, I know it's the unhealthy part, but it's the part of the egg I like. Plans for a trip to the street festival downtown, the library and to the Greenville Zoo ditched because of the weather forecast. I just have no energy for enduring even the possibility of driving in another nasty storm. So, we went to Wal Mart where I noticed that the mean SPF of sunscreen is now more than 50. There is also quite a lot of lotion with SPF 70. Jeez, have we screwed up the ozone so thoroughly that we really need SPF 70? When I was a kid, SPF 15 was marketed for former skin cancer victims and people with sun allergies. Now we don't spend time in the sun without at least 15, and usually it's higher than that. I skipped the sunscreen and got a tiny kite (10cm) and a floppy flying disk.
We went to Toys R Us and did that parent thing that kids never seem to catch onto where one parent "goes to the restroom" and in fact is buying what the kid picked out and putting it into the car, while the other parent stands around feigning interest in as many things as possible. Then to the bookstore to use gift cards from Christmas. Bram refused to hang out with me because, as he puts it, I "read only murder and death books" and am interested only in books with dead bodies in them, which is sheer rubbish . The fact that only one of the last eleven books I read was about death and dismemberment aside, at the time he said this to me, I was looking at blank books. Don't think it didn't cross my mind to write a story about a killing just then. I sent him back to his father and briefly considered spending his college savings on a new sports car. I hate his complaining. I have zero patience for it after all I do to be the kinder, gentler parent. There are times when I would dearly love to slap him, just once. Heck, maybe a bunch of times. I will start dinner soon, and if Bram is wise, he will have listened to his father's entreaties to not mess with the cook. They'll get nothing or English peas, beets and burnt toast if they tick me off. So you see I haven't the perfect child and I am far from being the perfect wife and mother. But as hard as I try, I figure at the least I am owed not having to listen to complaints about my reading tastes or my cooking.
We went to Toys R Us and did that parent thing that kids never seem to catch onto where one parent "goes to the restroom" and in fact is buying what the kid picked out and putting it into the car, while the other parent stands around feigning interest in as many things as possible. Then to the bookstore to use gift cards from Christmas. Bram refused to hang out with me because, as he puts it, I "read only murder and death books" and am interested only in books with dead bodies in them, which is sheer rubbish . The fact that only one of the last eleven books I read was about death and dismemberment aside, at the time he said this to me, I was looking at blank books. Don't think it didn't cross my mind to write a story about a killing just then. I sent him back to his father and briefly considered spending his college savings on a new sports car. I hate his complaining. I have zero patience for it after all I do to be the kinder, gentler parent. There are times when I would dearly love to slap him, just once. Heck, maybe a bunch of times. I will start dinner soon, and if Bram is wise, he will have listened to his father's entreaties to not mess with the cook. They'll get nothing or English peas, beets and burnt toast if they tick me off. So you see I haven't the perfect child and I am far from being the perfect wife and mother. But as hard as I try, I figure at the least I am owed not having to listen to complaints about my reading tastes or my cooking.
1 comment:
I feel your pain - see my most recent post about my little angel.
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