Even Brilliant Mamas Get The Blues

Someone called my parenting "brilliant" today.  In public!

I know!

We were at the Children's Museum, home of long, delicious ramps that just beg, "Oh please, children!  Run!  Run down me!!!"  And since, oh, forever, I've been playing red light/green light with my kids there.  Where they get about 20 feet in front of me, and I say, "Red light!" and they stop, and then when I get within a few feet I say, "Green light," and they take off like maniacs, and this is how we get through places without me putting anyone on a leash losing anyone.

Right.  It almost always works.

So we were doing the red light/green light thing on the way in, and the girls got going a little too fast down the ramp, and they couldn't stop (yeah, right, they saw something shiny and ignored me), so I said, "You'd better stop or you'll get a ticket!"

We've talked about tickets, when we have been pulled over seen someone get pulled over, so the girls know they're bad, and they cost money and they make Mommy use her special "car words."

When I threatened them with tickets, they both stopped until I caught up.  That was about it, and I didn't give it much thought until we left, when the woman at the information desk four hours later said I was "brilliant," and asked me for the specifics of the red light/green light ticket thing.

I didn't tell her, necessarily, that it's all bluster.  I did say that I've never actually taken money from them, but that I threaten it, and that's enough.

We chatted for a few more minutes while the girls went to the bathroom, I gave her my URL (hi Children's Museum Info Desk Lady!  You made my day!) and we went on our merry way.

Until Mommy got to Lafayette road, and decided that it had been long enough since I stopped at Garden Ridge.

I won't get into the gory details, but about halfway through I said "no" to a certain cheap plastic piece of crap wand from China, and all hell broke loose.  It was so bad that the cashier prescribed an early bedtime and a glass of wine for me.  Retail therapy became retail THERAPY.  Yikes.

So even brilliant mommies make bad choices and take tired children to boring stores, and have to threaten and speak in all consonants through our teeth just to get through 5 more minutes of it.

But the little turkeys did NOT run away from me at Garden Ridge, so I guess there's that.

(I randomly bought my sister's throw pillows.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?  I knew they were similar, I wasn't expecting them to be identical.  Whoops.)

(AND my husband just threw one at me, and when I threw it back he blocked - with the baby!  He is so wrong!)

(Don't worry, the baby laughed.)