They are everywhere. The most infiltrating force known to mankind, at least in my life. They are dripping off the curtains, slithering among the couch cushions, wallowing in the mudhole they created under the tree swing, racing around on bigwheels, crashing into and breaking flowerpots, lower legs are not safe in this world of uncoordinated steering and undeveloped depth perception. Its like a life skills training camp for the very small. Aged from nine to two months. It's called family day, or in my opinion, hellhole-don't-plan-on doing-anything-that-you-planned-to-because-your-entire-day-will-be-revolved-around-trying-to-avoid-becoming-the-juice-box-and-cheese-stick-bitch. It really takes up allot of unnecessary energy. It's a horrible social stigma. If you don't get a kid something basic like something to eat or drink when they say they want it, you're a bad person. And on a small scale, I completely agree with this. But getting a drink for one, means getting a drink for all. There are 12 of them, just kids, not including their parents who, upon seeing that at long last, someone is getting drinks, suddenly realize that they are indeed parched as well. It balloons into a When You Give a Moose a Muffin situation and before you can say 'No Ive got other things to do than serve you and your children refreshments all day' you're making grilled cheese and lemonade for the masses.Sometimes it happens so fast that I am lead to wonder if the whole thing hadn't been planned all along.
Unfortunately this does not only happen on family day. I should probably mention that family day happens every other week on a Thursday, which happens to be the only day that I sometimes have a day off from my crazy work schedule. Yeah, it sucks in a major way. My family is very large, and a few years ago, before the numbers were getting out of control, when they came to visit it was no big deal. This is no longer the case. It seems like they are never not here anymore. And I'm inclined to believe that I may have been a very bad person in another life because of the sheer crap that keeps on piling up. It's all in the timing. The story always goes like this-It was a beautiful day because of the sheer fact that I had the day and the house to myself. I was planning on doing something that requires peace and quiet-painting, chicken nuggets, a really good movie, a bottle of wine etc. No one had mentioned anyone stopping in for a visit. I am in the either just in the middle of whatever I decided to do or about to start. And then I hear it. The crunch of gravel under tires. I hope in vain it's a wrong turn or a Jehovah's witness, someone I can tell how to get out of here, but no. It's not. I hear minivan doors sliding and the subsequent screaming of little girls who are deathly afraid of our huge and harmless dogs. While I do get some satisfaction out of not calling the harmless dogs away from them, the satisfaction is short lived as the reality of what must come next settle in.
For some reason, in these situations, where I could have a house potentially all to myself, my sister 'T' decides that she will, yes indeed, be setting up her wild savage camp for the evening into the next day. I am not sure why she sees this as an acceptable situation. I don't go by her house with wild beasts and say hey, Im going to stay the night, make a huge mess for you to clean up later, drink all of your coffee and then leave.It is inadvisable if you don't want to overstay your welcome as soon as you state that you are not immediatly leaving.
This has been going on for a few years now. I think it has more of a cumulative effect than is healthy. There's not enough time in between seiges to forget how awful it was last time. It would really help if her kids were not the worst out of the whole bunch. Each of them has a very distinct annoying trait. The oldest is constatly arguing that you didn't say he couldn't dig a 2 foot hole in this particular spot, you said he couldn't dig a 2 foot hole in that spot over there.It is beyond aggravating. The next one is a pathalogical liar. I am not sure why nobody has yet to see this as a serious problem. Seriously, the girl could give classes on how to stick to a story. Its amazing. She just needs to learn a little about stretching the laws of nature and life and not breaking them. She still maintains that her next door neigbors mom bought her daughter a snapping turtke as a pet, its green and it makes a snapping noise. Apparently the mother told her. (btw, snapping tutrtles are brown, you can't buy them as pets as they are incredibly dangerous and you would know if a small child had induced one to actually snap at them as they would be missing a finger or two). Her commitment to her lies is admirable, if misguided, but she lies about everything, things that don't matter, things that really do, and so she manipulates her world adn I find this very annoying as I just want a straight answer from her. She also has this annoying habit of narrating a movie as you're watching it, like you didn't just see it or something. I think she would do better to just stop talking. The next one is the least anoyying out of the bunch and I kind of feel bad for her. She kind of gets lost in the fray. Her anooying trait is that she has a smokers raspy voice. no her fault, but she uses this voice to whine. It's an attention getter, for sure, as you just want the noise to stop. Which leaves the youngest. As soon as she was born, the first thing anyone ever said (out of earshot of her mother) was how enormous her mouth was. This has been an affliction we all hoped would disperse as she grew older. It has not. The kid has the biggst mouth I've seen, and lungs to match it. She does not squeal, no, she screams, deafeningly. About everything. Being the youngest of four, she pulls all the stops. Attention is at a high premium, as her father is in ministry(for him this means never being with his wife and kids, and instead hanging out all day with college kids and pretending that it's work) and her mother puts house fixing projects, sewing, crafting and all manner of business into her schedule and this subsequently leaves very little time for actually paying attention to her children. She is a master at ignoring her childrens antics right next to her. While this is a common skill for many mothers, you do actually have to pay attention to them at some point in time. At least to spare the people around them. Please, SPARE ME!
So there you have it. An insight as to why I am slowly going insane.
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