It finally rained yesterday, a good thunderstorm moved through the area after about two months of nothing. I sat out on the back porch and watched it blow in. It felt great to be outside in the morning and not feel all muggy and gross. It was cool pretty much the whole day, which is a miracle here in August.
I was in such a good mood that I decided to take the kids to the bookstore after the usual Saturday trip out to the library, etc. I have some coupons for $40 worth of free books at Bookstop (that's from our credit card payback), so I told the kids I would let each of them get a chapter book at the bookstore. Before going in, I warned them that I would not pay for a game book or a comic book or book #24 that is 50 pages with color photo inserts from some TV series. It had to be a chapter book, something new they haven't read.
Well, Justin looked around for a long time and finally found some fantasy series with dragons and such that says it is good for ages 10 and up. I don't even remember the author's name, but I said sure. Sarah found a book fairly quickly, too. Cody comes over to me with a book about magic, one of those Klutz books with a lot of little magic gadgets that come with it sealed in a plastic bag, full of instructions on how to do magic tricks. I told him not only was it 15 bucks (I was trying to limit them to paperbacks) but it wasn't a chapter book.
Well, he was Mr. Mope after that. He was so mad he wouldn't even *look* at the chapter books. I got really mad at him, but I didn't say anything. I showed him "A Wrinkle in Time" because he likes time travel stories, but he just moped. I didn't want to ruin the book for him by forcing it upon the boy, so I put it back on the shelf. In the end, I just got him the first book in the Philip Pullman series, "The Golden Compass", which I know nothing about but hope it is good. I told him if he doesn't want it, he can give it to his brother.
I gave him a good lecture in the car about being ungrateful. I was probably too hard on the poor kid. He's only nine, after all. I was just frustrated, because before going into the bookstore, I had taken such great pains to avoid having any of them get their heart set on a book I wouldn't allow them to get. I think part of his moping was not just realizing that I wouldn't buy the book for him, but also that he can't even save up for it right now because it is only the 9th week of his 16 weeks of punishment for breaking all those windows.
Plus, he's got at least three weeks in the alternative school coming up, and I'm sure he's scared about that. So he's got a lot on his mind (which is fine with me, I want the window breaking to have very memorable consequences). Anyway, 15 minutes after we got home, he was already reading "The Golden Compass", and we dueled later as usual.
I'm now 21-0 against the kids in dueling. Sarah should've beaten me last night, had me down to 100 life points (out of 8000) for a long time, but she screwed up about four different chances to finish me off. That allowed me to finally draw a card from my deck that saved my bacon.
Posted by Observer at August 10, 2003 08:52 AMComments on entries can only be made in pop-up windows while those entries are still on the main index page. Sorry for the inconvenience this causes, but this blocks about 99.99% of the spam the blog receives.
You'd think after a MILLION lectures on being selfish and ungrateful for things, they'd get the picture and smarten up some. ha ha I know if mother had of taken me somewhere with the promise of "I'll buy you...", i would have been happy about that, then again, maybe I just remember my childhood through rose colored glasses.
Posted by: Felicity on August 10, 2003 06:44 PMGood storms here as well these last two days. Very unusual for August in Austin. But nobody is complaining, even though we have a HUGE branch on the lawn to deal with. (8 feet or so, a good 10" diameter at it's big end.)
Posted by: Perkusi on August 11, 2003 05:42 PM