What?!

Genevieve wanted more ketchup for her french fries. I squirted out a packet and said, "That's the last one."

"What?!" she said in an outraged tone.

"That's the last ketchup packet," I repeated.

"I didn't mean the kind of 'what' where you have to say it again..." she said.

"Oh," I said.

Frankenstein

Genevieve has decided to start the year off right. The time she slipped on the floor and landed on a small ice chest that was sitting on the floor by the door. I'm not too clear on what happened because Imogen was the only witness. But the end result is five stitches and a scar that will hopefully be hidden by her eyebrow.

You know, I grew up without needing stitches. I really consider this frequency of stitching to be unreasonable. I asked a doctor if something was wrong with her balance and/or equilibrium in some way but he seemed to think that if she is capable of walking normally without falling down most of the time then she's just a klutz. Of course, a few days ago, she tripped over her own feet when standing still. She landed on her side with such a shocked expression that even she started laughing.

Anyway, I'm sure she'll need stitches again soon, but I just wish she would stop catching her falls with her face.

Not Fair

Parents of only children don't have to hear this on a near daily basis. But if you have more than one child, no matter what the situation is, one thing that it isn't is fair.

By "fair", children do not mean the same thing that I think of as fair. To me, being fair is to give each child what she deserves (whether reward or punishment) and to be more or less equally generous with those things that they do not deserve.

My children do not see it this way. To them, "fair" means "same". So if you have one child who was a perfect angel and one child who was a perfect monster and the angelic one gets to stay up and watch a movie and the nasty one has to go to bed early, this is what I would consider fair. But nooo, this is not fair, because it is not the same. Naturally, the one being sent to bed early will be the one protesting, but the one getting to stay up still views the situation as unfair. Make no mistake, she's just sitting there feeling smug and failing to see her reward as a result of her behavior.

Yesterday I was at Hobby Lobby with Genevieve who was bored to tears as I spent too much time shopping for art supplies. But she was cooperative and kept the complaining to a minimum so on the way out I bought her a silly putty. When we picked Imogen up from school, we got to hear that this was not fair.

Today I bought a small battery operated pencil sharpener for a drawing class. But when I got home I realized that it was too small and weak for the amount of sharpening I needed to do, so I gave it to Imogen when she got home from school. It was very inexpensive, comparable to, say, a silly putty. But Genevieve positively wailed in the car about unfair it was.

Irritated, I launched into this whole shrieky lecture about how if they want me to be totally fair I will punish them both when one of them does something wrong and if I ever have one of something I will keep it for myself, which they largely ignored except for Imogen to make some haughty comment about how she doesn't keep track of these things anymore. She had reformed a minute and a half before my lecture and felt it was impolite of me to hold misdeeds against her which were so far in the past as to be ancient history (that is, yesterday).

I've told them before: It is not my job to be fair. I don't have to be fair. I do not see it as a goal for me to be fair. But of course, when I say this, I mean that I don't want to be their kind of fair. My kind of fair is much better.

Leaves

Today was a beautiful day, that felt more like it belonged in September or October instead of January. Since I find fall infinity preferable to winter, this isn't a complaint. The girls went outside to play in t-shirts and I made them take hoodies with them that they ended up taking off because they were too warm. They laid down in the ditch in our front yard and covered each other with leaves in an elaborate plan to frighten their friend's mom who was coming to pick them up. This did not go as planned, but I got some good pictures out of it.

When a man and a woman love each other...

I recently told Genevieve how she came to be in our lives.

I said, "Back when we were living in Houston, and Imogen was a baby, we left her at home with a babysitter... and we went to the pet store. And there you were sitting in a little cage with little silver bars. And there was a little sign that said 'Monkey'. And Daddy said you were so very cute that he just had to bring you home. So we bought you right then and there."

Genevieve is fairly good natured about this. She just said, "I'm not a monkey!"