Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Seeing Is Believing

I noticed I haven't posted anything in over a week so I guess the addition of all the getting ready for the holidays activities aren't very conducive to blogging. That and I'm lazy. Anyways, today's big philosophical question is would you rather have kids you behaved in public and saved their dickishness for home or vice versa? Obviously, the best case scenario would be kids who behave both at home and out in the world but that's about as likely as me being named prime minister. After all the crap that's gone on in the last few days I think if I just show up down at parliament hill at the right time of day I may get the job. Of course, I'm pretty sure I flunked political science so I might be wrong about that one.

Back to the point, the question of where's the better place for the kids to play the a-hole card occurred to me last week. We were out shopping and a lady complimented my wife on how well behaved the kids were and how nicely she spoke to them. Kind of a weird thing to come from a total stranger in my opinion but nice nonetheless. My first reaction though was to think "how about you drop by the house at bedtime before you start tossing out statements like those". Sure enough less than four hours later one is jumping on our bed and wiggling her butt in the window while I'm chasing the other one, who happens to be completely bare assed, down the hall. I don't recall exactly what I was saying as I tackled our little nude sprinter but I can guarantee it wouldn't be considered "nice" by too many people. Needless to say, I think that woman is an idiot.

As I type this I can hear my wife pleading with our youngest to lie down and go to sleep. She's not cooperating with either request. Apparently those would interfere with her plans of not listening and being a huge pain in the ass. Seriously, you'd normally need some sort of pharmaceutical ointment to deal with rectal discomfort of that degree. I wish I could say at least he big sister listens but there's been more freakouts, flipouts, and timeouts that I can count to disproof that theory. Then she comes home from nursery school where we hear about how well she behaved and how the other kids were "climbing on the climbers when they weren't supposed to but I didn't".

"That's super. Are you going to listen to rules like that around the house? Yeah, I didn't think so either."

And so we're left in a parental state equivalent to Big Bird. Their unruly behaviour is our Snuffleupagus. Nobody else really sees it, so nobody else really believes it. In the meantime I'm getting pretty good at chasing down and catching naked youngsters. Not exactly the sort of thing you want to brag about to too many people but what can you do.

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