La Bene Vita

Friday

The 10-year-old is turning into a total snob. I'm not sure what to do about it. Keith and I included her in our online vacation research, but she insisted she wanted bunk beds in whichever cabin we decided to rent. She was rude about it, interrupting with, "No." every time we read the part of the description that said, "queen beds," without allowing us to read the rest. We started to ignore her, which I could tell was upsetting her, because she was tearing up a little. Whether Keith failed to notice or chose not to notice, I'm not sure. Then when Keith and I had settled on two cabins, one with a stocked pond to fish in and one without, he tried to include her again by asking which one she liked better. She said, "Neither." Keith said, "Okay, I guess we'll decide without you." I should have left it along, but I always make these mistakes: I egg on the conflict. I said to her, "None of them have bunk beds. We've looked at twenty websites and not seen a single bunk bed." She replied, "You would if you weren't looking at ones that are like, fifteen dollars."

Strike one.

Here's how that started. When we did our initial cabin search, we sorted on two criteria: (1) the cabin must have a hot tub, and (2) price, lowest to highest. As we flipped through various websites, we would stop looking after a certain point in the sorted list, citing that the cabins were way too huge and expensive (why would we need an 8-12 capacity lodge for a 4-person family?) Well, apparently, the child was convinced that we would find bunk beds among the higher-priced lodges.

Keith put the kibosh on that conversation, explaining that, no, in fact, bunk beds are actually cheap. Moving back to the comparison between our favorite two, Keith pointed out that it would be pointless to invest in the cabin with the pond if she didn't care about the pond. I agreed with him, asking why we would spend more money on something we didn't need. The ten-year-old jumped in and said, "Oh my God, Michelle, you're so cheap."

Strike two. You're out. Don't correct me on the rules of baseball, or you'll be out on strike one.

So I exploded into a lecture about how good she has it, and that she should appreciate what she has, and don't ever let me hear you call somebody "cheap" again, and that some people don't even have enough food to eat let alone money to go on expensive vacations. I was on a bit of a soapbox. The poor girl didn't argue back, she just said, "Stop!" after a good minute or two of ranting. The thing is, I've been worried that snobbery has been creeping into her attitude. She is at the most expensive gymnastics place in town. Her friend's mom paid for the kids to get picked from their last day at school in a limo. Her own mother is paying grandma to clean the house. She gets on these "I want" kicks, thinking she can automatically have whatever she wants, like the thing with the bunk beds (don't even get me started on the generic cereal argument.) And she's been rude and disrespectful to others. Even Keith is getting tired of that one. Every night she demands, "Daddy, tuck me in." He has started to insist that she ask instead of tell and say "please." Last night, that turned ugly, because she said, "No! I don't have to ask. Just tuck me in!" Daddy didn't like that one bit, and the ten-year-old cried herself to sleep.

Forgive me if I have no urge to procreate.

Reach 300 students at MTMS   by 12/31/11.
176. Also, last night, I got an email from a lady who wants to know if she can still get into next week's summer camp, because her daughter is friends with another child who is already enrolled. We closed enrollment, but I responded that we would be delighted to fit her in. See? Delighted. Sadly, we may have to cancel one of the two camps scheduled the following week. We have exactly zero students enrolled so far.

Reading: One book per week.
Page 354 in Eragon, which is a little over halfway. It's interesting me, I swear. I'm not sure why it's going so slowly. Maybe because family drama is distracting me from my peaceful reading.

Writing:
(1) Blog at MT.com   by the end of Wednesday:
(2) 30 minutes of daily freestyle writing:

Count points:
Morning weigh-in: ?
Yesterday's points: ?