Evil Children

Today was going to be such a good day. A house to myself, errands unencumbered by a little man who thinks that every stuffed animal and Beanie Baby in every store is meant to be his, some time on the laptop getting patient letters re: labs and x-ray results ready to send.

A triptych of annoyances over a relatively short time:


The children came home from school. Thea had to sit on my chair in the living room and then proceed to point out that someone used a ballpoint pen to draw a very large circle on the cushion. Lining up the usual suspects, Micah denied committing this heinous act, saying "only draw on PAY-per. . ." with fierce conviction. Since his artistic talent these days are circles of varying sizes, I remained totally unconvinced of this professed innocence. Fortunately after putting various ballpoint pens through the dryer in 2004, I had hairspray on hand managed to get quite a bit of the mark out.

Micah is now restricted to the kitchen as far as pens go. Which was where he was when Thea wanted to cut paper. So both had scissors (Micah still in the kitchen, if you are on pen restrictions, scissor privileges are even more limited.)

Thea came into the kitchen to ask if she could cut up a magazine "with people on it" from the coffee table. This could have meant my nursing magazines (automatic yes), catalogs (ditto) or a few other things that I would prefer not to have sliced up. This very polite question would have been the right thing to do, if she hadn't already cut half of the cover off of my barely-read April 2009 copy of Washingtonian magazine. And when I saw that she'd already cut it and was a little annoyed with her, she had the gall to tell me that she did it because I didn't tell her not to do it fast enough.

We'd made some popcorn after school for a snack, and Thea hadn't finished it and put the bowl on the counter. She wanted to dump it in the trash but I asked her to ask her father if he'd want it later. Then when I stuck my head out into the living room to see what the answer was I find both she and Steve munching away, as dinner sits ready to serve on the stove and me needing to get on the road to the PTA-ish meeting at Thea's school. I could have clubbed them both over their heads but took the less violent path of yelling my lungs out at them. They deserved it.

Bad day to forget to take the blood pressure medicine.