Has $1 ever sent you over the edge?

My girls are funny, beautiful, smart, sassy, stubborn and their wills and imaginations are limitless. And, I love them both with all my being. That said, for the love of Pete(r), Paul and Mary they are materialistic and senseless. I know, they are 9 and 4 and they are products of ME. So, whose fault is it? Can I totally blame their father? I can, right? He definitely contributes to it. He loves them unconditionally and really does not have the power to match either one of them. I mean he holds them to safety and social standards that we have agreed on and makes them brush their teeth and go to bed timely and attend (mostly) to their school and other chores. His powerlessness does not mean that he is weak in any way. As I said, they are products of me. The three of us, but especially the girls, are made of whatever kryptonite equivalent it takes to render our superman powerless. When in such a state he will bend to the will and wishes of the power-zapping sweetness of the smaller creatures. I seem to have lost much of my kryptonite-ish makeup somewhere in the last decade ... my theory is it that portions of it came out with each fetus and the rest went with the placentas. Maybe that is why some people save theirs or eat it or make tea from it. [I was in an interesting prenatal class my first go around. Needless to say, we didn't follow all of the midwife suggestions, even though she gave us pages and pages of instructions and alternate ideas and was so keen on us doing any of these things she volunteered her help to dig the holes or preserve the placenta til I was ready to ingest it.]


Blame aside. Lia, the nine year old, asks for things. Some big, some small, some necessary, some some some some some... it never stops, is how it often seems to me. Gia, the four year old does too, but I haven't had her around as long and she isn't nine and a half (which is some magical grown-up age, in case you didn't know, that is somehow equivalent to being 21 or 50), so it isn't quite as agitating. Yesterday Lia wanted me to 'order' lunch for her at the snack bar in the building, because the teachers do and it is only $3.50. They are both in summer school in the building where my office is. I considered it for an entire minute, as I thought how lovely it would be not to have to pack lunch, which seems to always be more effort than one could imagine for some bizarre reason or another. After that little dream of not having to tote lunch boxes, I woke up and saw the pitfalls of the $3.50 lunch order. (always including white rice, some meat substance that might be tasty, but most likely would be something they wouldn't eat or I wouldn't want them to eat, the fact that we couldn't know what the lunch was until we got to the building and ordered it, so it could be something they didn't want, or I didn't want them to have, and I'd have to run back home or to a restaurant and buy them something, defeating the goal of me being able to actually work from 9-2, while they are in class and doing crafts and music and computer and reading and math; that they would each need a lunch, doubling the tempting $3.50 to $7.00 for some white rice and two hungry kids that have my phone number and would have no qualms about going to the school office to call me and tell me they were still hungry, and then all that food being picked on and thrown away and me having to bring them granola bars to satiate their hungry bodies and minds.) Ran it by my husband, just to be sure I wasn't warped and he simply said, no you are right. Lovely. So packed lunches. That was yesterday's topic.



This morning, while I was packing lunches, Lia came into the kitchen [to help] and said:



"The snack bar also has drinks for only a dollar, like lemonade and other stuff, not just sodas."



As I was pulling grapes off the stem and packing them in their containers, I turned and started:



"Only a dollar? Lia, if I bought you one drink a day every week day for a year that is $260. That is like a new bike for you and Gia. [Lia does not have a bike her size and we have been discussing resolving that 'need' soon]. Plus those drinks are all full of sugar that doesn't need to sit on your teeth all day before you come home and brush them."



Before I could continue my rant and talk about the value of the drinks and saving the planet by not buying all the pre-packaged stuff. Okay, I admitted it was a rant, didn't I?

Out of no where, in bounds Gia:

"I want a new bike! That pink princess one at the store!"



Gia just got a bike, last week. A new-to-her red radio flier bike with a bell, which she loves. But alas, it is not pink and does not have a princess anywhere on it. So I stood there, grape stems in hand, rant totally derailed and speechless. Arrrgh.



***In my defense, my conversations with Lia had already included full on sales pitches regarding two new videos that are now available on DVD Bluray, or perhaps we could just rent them; signing in on the computer to the contest on a package to add up points to "earn" a guitar; getting toothpaste that a friend has because it is better for whitening your permanent teeth than the new kind we just bought the last time, which Gia could finish using because she is little, wherein we heard from another room (yes exceptional hearing in that one) "I am NOT little I'm FIVE now!" [she is so not even close to five]; new shoes because feet are growing; particular styles of school clothes necessary for the fall; and yes, this was all well before 8 a.m. and the lunch packing drink discussion! Needless to say, as soon as the elevator door closed and I was safely on the other side of the big steel door after dropping them on their floor for class, I called our superman and blamed him. It is his fault, right?