Monthly Archives: July 2017

People – A Manual

When I brought my oldest daughter home from the hospital, as a baby, I walked out of the doors and felt this huge weight settle on my shoulders. Here was this wonderful, new, red and wrinkly creature that I had to take home and keep alive. My only pet, a goldfish, had survived less than a month. I regularly kill plants and here they sent me home with no instructions other than checking to make sure that the car seat was properly installed. “That’s wonderful, she’ll be safe for the ride home. But then what?”

I wished for a manual.

So I think I’ll write one. It might take me a while. Maybe by the time the computers/robots have taken over I can get it published. It’ll be a bestseller and all the little robots can rush to the pet store and buy their own human and my manual.

Kid Wars

It’s the summertime and my children are staying up until midnight, skipping meals (if they sleep through it), and that equals arguing. And it’s the same argument every time: “She’s on the [insert TV/Computer/device] without doing her chores first!” And they wouldn’t care except they did their chores so to be fair they need to tattle on their sister.

Other than getting them back to normal sleep patterns and feeding them (I skip fixing breakfast, because they are plenty old enough to fend for themselves.) I’m not sure what else to do. The rule at our house in the summer is 1/2 hr of practicing and 1/2 hr of chores before screen time each day. Chores are free form, but maybe that should change because the house doesn’t seem to get any messier, but it really doesn’t get any cleaner either.

I couldĀ  farm the children out to the neighbors, then the tattling would go away because they can’t see each other. Or send the little ones to a labor camp in Siberia, then the 1/2 hr of chores would seem easy. “Thirty minutes of chores, I can do that before waking up!” But the real solution is shipping them off to Grandma’s, where they only have cable TV and a computer and chores are something their parents used to do back in the good ‘ole days.