Hissy Fits And Tantrums Always Get Me Down

This is the week of our NPR station's semi-annual pledge drive, which usually drives me up a wall. Sometimes I don't even listen the whole week. But this year, something is different. Listening to them beg for money over and over again, and describe the "thank you" mug in detail, and talk about how much it costs to buy body armor for their foreign correspondents - I don't know, it's sort of soothing. I like it. This worries me.

Anna regressed today. She'd been doing pretty well for a few weeks, doing her chores without throwing hissy fits and refraining from using the death glare on her hapless siblings. Today, it all came back. Wow. To top it off, she sat around complaining how cold it was and was not at all amenable to my suggestion that she put on more clothes, or at least some socks. In fact, the sock suggestion earned a double death glare. It was rather unreasonable of me. After all, if I would just hike that thermostat up to 75 degrees, she wouldn't even have this problem.

The little girls and I went to a local supermarket today to get away from their possessed teenage sister and to eat all the samples. One of the salespeople thought she was being helpful by giving each of my girls a balloon. Rachel's balloon popped shortly after we reached home, causing her to howl in rage for a full 15 minutes, while Susie, fearful that Rachel would confiscate her balloon, cried and screamed at me, "Go back to store!" In the meantime, Brian was crying that he hadn't gotten a balloon at all (he hadn't wanted to go to the store with us). Even by my warped standards, it was quite a scene. So, in order to take people's minds off the damn balloons, we played a game of Trouble which involved my pinning Susie in a sort of wrestling grip so that she couldn't grab everyone's pieces off the board. The game was fun, despite my having to yell repeatedly, "Hurry up! Go! I can't hold her much longer!"

I will look back fondly on all this, right?

Any childless person reading this blog is no doubt scheduling a permanent contraceptive procedure right now. So, to scare them even more, I will admit that, with the exception of "Sense and Sensibility" and "Groundhog's Day," I missed every single movie released in the 1990's. (I was busy having babies, all right?) Diesel recommended Office Space, which we recently viewed and enjoyed; were there any other good ones I missed? I'm trying to catch up.