Thirtysomething

Baggage and Snot and all the Other Things Little Girls are Made Of

It's official. I don't think I'm programmed to have children.

We took Ron's niece to the Please Touch Museum and kept her overnight on Saturday. Kids come with a lot of baggage. And by baggage I mean no fewer than 6 bags for 1 overnight stay. There was her monogrammed overnight bag, her Tinkerbell sleeping bag and backback, her Tinkerbell pillow, two bags with games, one bag with an assortment of fruit drinks and snacks and another bag of DVDs. The kid travels with her own set of 5 DVDs. I don't even own 5 DVDs. Kids also come with their own language, and over the weekend I learned to become bilingual. I'll put those kid words and phrases in quotes for those of you who are as retarded with kids as I am.

The good news was that she was super well-behaved all day Saturday. She loved the Please Touch Museum and played well with the other kids. She had her "listening ears" on all day too. She honestly seemed to have a lot of fun and while the Please Touch Museum is sort of a low budget operation, it is quite educational and the Niece seemed to learn a lot. When she seemed to get tired, we took a break for snacks, which consisted of "bunny rabbit juice" (read: strawberry milk) and m&m's. Niece got a second wind and did every activity at the museum about 2 more times. We spent about 5 hours at the Please Touch and let me tell you, for the most part, I was bored to tears. Is that awful? It was fun doing some of the activities with Niece for alittle while, but I realized about halfway through the day that for the most part, Ron was playing with her and I was just watching them play.

And can I tell you about the abundance of boobs at this place? Women around every corner whipping their boobs out, just breastfeeding at will. The Please Touch Museum needs to apply for some sort of governmental grant to build a lactation room. Seriously.

Another thing kids come with? Snot, otherwise known as "boogies". Niece was getting over a cold and since all her congestion had reached the breaking up point, Niece had a nice build up of thick mucus that was never-ending each time she blew her nose. The poor thing had no idea what to do, it was like she had never seen so much stuff come out of her nose, so I would help her get rid of all the "boogies". That the mucus was rubberband-like proved to be a particular challenge, but in this regard, I won out over Ron--who basically gagged every time the tissues came out. Great. Ron's good at playing and I'm good at fetching boogies. We make a good team, I suppose.

At the end of the day, I was convinced that Niece was not going to want to stay over, as she usually gets whiny for her parents. But her mother had apparently pumped her up for a slumber party at Uncle Ronnie's, so when we got home, she popped in a DVD, spread out her sleeping blanket and settled in. She and I baked chocolate chip cookies before bed, an activity she thought was "neat".

She slept through the night and in the morning, we found her in the bathroom, brushing her teeth with her Spiderman electric toothbrush and Dora toothpaste. All by herself. She woke up in a strange house and the first thing she did was go brush her teeth. She's 4.

Anyway, I went to the gym and by the time I got back an hour later, Niece had hit the wall so the speak and wanted to. go. home. NOW. The rest of yesterday went downhill. There was lots of crying and whining and Lord only knows, there were a lot of boogies. I was plenty happy to drop her off at her parents' house and watch the meltdown occur with them there to deal with it.

A couple of things are clear from this weekend, namely that I'm going to be the disciplinarian if we ever have kids and Ron's going to be "fun dad". When kids throw a temper tantrum over NOTHING, I see no need to plead with them, I'm fine with locking them in a room and letting them scream. I also believe in giving kids choices, i.e., "You can either take your medicine and then play with your new Cinderella activity book, or you can refuse to take your medicine and go to time-out. Your choice."

One thing is for sure: overall the weekend was fun, but I am very, very happy it's over.

posted by DJ Heavy D @ 6:32 AM