Strawberry Shortcake Underwear
I�m right, aren�t I?
Well, here�s what she said during her bath last night:
�Pretend you�re the daddy and I�m the mommy.�
�Okay�
Dusty then sits on her Strawberry Shortcake washcloth and attempts to wrap it around her nether region.
�And pretend I have on Strawberry Shortcake underwear.�
Oooookay then.
I don�t know about you but lately I�m having a very hard time keeping �on task� as they say in the business world, of which I am not really a member. I am having difficulty concentrating on work and it�s not as if I�m missing deadlines or anything, I just can�t stay with any one thing for longer than...I dunno, twelve seconds. At the most.
Maybe it�s spring fever and the fact that all the things I want to do, I can�t just yet. It�s still too early to plant the garden, the beach is still more than a week away, the various onslaught of birthdays and holidays are weeks in the future�..there�s just a lot of hurry-up-and-wait which I�m not very good at dealing with.
I did, though, start a writers group to force myself to write again and I�m planning to attend a writers� conference in the fall. So that�s all good. But, again, it�s mostly in the future. I need something NOW. And guess what happens this weekend?
My in-laws are coming to town. Sigh.
They�re not bad people, really. They�re quite nice and inoffensive but, apart from Dusty and Red, there�s not much else to talk about. Not that I can�t talk ceaselessly about my kids, but after awhile, even I get bored with it.
Fortunately, the riding mower�s broken (it seems to have sprung an elusive spring) so that will keep my father-in-law busy for awhile. He�s a fixer and has built Model-A Fords from scrap metal so he�ll have a nice little project to keep him occupied.
So, that just leaves my mother-in-law who is too wrapped up in her various slight medical conditions to have any interest in going anywhere. She takes a million different medications but never takes enough to actual help. She�s the kind of person who cuts an aspirin in half, fearing that a whole one will cause some terrible side-effect. So, even though she�s obviously clinically depressed, she won�t take enough of the drug to make a difference. She has no hobbies. She�s never interested in shopping or going to the park or a museum or...really, anywhere. Which means I�ll be stuck listening to a litany of all that�s been wrong with her sickly cat (who is the meanest, most dreadful animal on the planet, and I�m a hard-core cat lover) who was on antibiotics for something like 8 weeks for an illness I never learned the name of. Or, we�ll talk about work. My work, which she doesn�t really understand. My FIL understands workplace politics and that kind of thing but my MIL has only ever worked part-time, for a couple of years in the 1980�s, until it cut into her housecleaning routine.
She quit a job so that she could go back to cleaning her house on a regular schedule. I ask you. Her house, a rancher built about 1967, is about as spotless as it was the day she moved in, apart from the normal wear and tear that houses have (like toilets that don�t work right and leaky showers).
My house never gets cleaned until it presents a clear danger to Red�s penchant for tasting every dust molecule. Then, one of us breaks out the Hoover. Or I swab down the kitchen floor. Only when the shower stall is completely coated in mildew, do I do battle. I am sure my MIL is appalled by the state of my house but is too polite to say anything more than, �Way-yull, Ah guess y�all are just so busy with the kids and work.� Yes, that would be the case.
�Ah don�t know how y�all do it.�
Easy: there is no choice. When there is no time to clean � and cleaning is not a priority � things stay dirty. Somehow, we all live.
But, Dusty is excited. She rarely gets to see these grandparents (our last two attempts to visit them were quashed because somebody was sick) and when they visit, they always bring presents. So, not bad people. Not at all. It�s more like having to entertain vague, uninteresting aliens.
Could be worse, I suppose. I�ll let you know how it goes � if I can sit down long enough to write about it.
