What made it one of those days, you ask? Well, it started when I went to pick up a few things at the supermarket and was standing in line with my daughter. She was browsing the magazines and bloids - most of which had photos of stars that the headlines said were either too fat or too thin, when she said, "I'm fat." It wasn't a question. My little nine year old wasn't asking for my opinion or a refutation. She was just saying what she saw as the truth.
I asked her why she said that and she pointed at the magazines. "I'm a lot fatter than all of those people, except the ones they're calling fat. So that means I'm fat too."
In between "paper or plastic" and "thank you, have a great afternoon, I put your dog's ear mite medication in a separate bag", I tried to explain to her about Hollywood, the obsession with weight in this country, the sensational nature of bloids and women's mag's headlines, and, (without totally embarrassing her or getting us banned from the store) the effect of puberty on body shape.I hope I got the point across and that she isn't going to start worrying excessively about her body image, but who knows?
Next, we stopped to have lunch at a chain restaurant and were seated next to two parents-without-a-clue with three children. Two of the kids were bouncing around in the booth with them, but one little guy, who was probably all of a year, was in a high chair at the end of the table. He was not a happy camper, probably because it was past noon and he was hungry and the food was taking a long time. He was crying, so in an attempt to help, the, um, mother, for lack of a better term, gave him a spoon to play with.
Almost immediately, she grabbed it away, because he was banging it on the table. "Be quiet or you're not gonna get any lunch!" she said loudly. The baby started to cry even more and she rolled her eyes and looked around. "Oh, stop crying. This is a restaurant. You have to be patient."
I won't even go into the rest of the stupid things that poor baby had to put up with before he finally got some food in the form of a breadstick that I offered after bribing his maternal unit with a big smile and several comments on how cute her kids were and how beautiful her homemade t-shirt was. (It was emblazoned with a heart with her kids' initials on it. The older kids had made it for her for Mother's Day. Of course.) My son calls people like this "family planning propaganda" and says they should film them and show them in health class in high school.
We ate as quickly as we could and went home in a much darker mood than we had started out in. I was irritable and snapped at the dog when we got home to find that she'd been sleeping on my bed. I wouldn't mind, except that she's a little too fond of rolling around in deer poop. Then two of the three cats threw up - some sort of rodent residue is what it looked like. We cleaned that up and the other cat threw up the remains of a sparrow. We were running out of paper towels and patience and none of us was too keen on eating supper for some reason.
So we sat down with books and tried to read, except that, as soon as we did, a smoke detector began to chirp. I'm sure you've had this happen to you, but I don't know if you've had it happen to you in an eleven room house which was built by inebriated carpenters who attended the M.C. Escher School of Architecture. Our house is like a rabbit warren, albeit not as well-planned. Rooms go into other rooms and hallways go off on tangents. Stairs go up, down and around.
