Were you born as a box of hair?

One of my favorite things to bitch about is people who do what they are told. Just doing what they think they are supposed to be doing without ever so much as an independent thought wafting through all those unused brain cells.

Last week, we were at our little community pool. It is a great place for kids. Really, this is a great town for kids but that is another subject. The pool is intended for small children and at its deepest is probably less than 2 feet deep. Anyway, it is a pool. And when you are at a pool you put sunscreen on your children. When you go outside at all, you put sunscreen on your children. That's what you do. That's what Parent magazine says to do. Probably even Readers' Digest says, put sunscreen on your kids every time they leave the house. Obviously the label on the sunscreen bottle says, put this on whenever a ray of sun could reach you. If you don't, well, unspecified really horrible tragedies will befall your precious offspring. You know, we used all that hairspray in the 80's and killed the big ozone filter in the sky (although my hair looked really great, big hair suits me well) so now the sun will annihilate your children. Guilt and threat of death, a powerful combination.

(Does anyone know if those other chemicals in sunscreen are healthy? I don't).

So there we are at the pool. Myself, and my nakedly sunscreen free children risking unspecified horrible tragedies. We were going to stay for about an hour, so I did not break out the sunscreen. Teena tans, but Genea is more like me where we don't really tan and it takes a long time for us to burn. But here is the real deal. There was no sun that day, and none was coming. Just clouds out.

No sun, just clouds, and in fact rain was coming. Now of course I know that sun can get through the clouds anyway, but not very much. Along comes what appears to be a mom, a grandmother and 3 children ages about 3 to 8. Everyone is excited and ready to have fun! And they all had to stand and wait for 15 minutes to get sunscreen lathered all over themselves by their mother who was determined that not an inch of flesh could be exposed to a potential unspecified horrible tragedy.

Now, I am not anti- sunscreen. However, I reserve it for times outside when we are going to be out a long time and oh yeah, there is SUN somewhere. This particular day, not only was it rain cloudy, but the clouds were deep and heavy and dark. The kind of day when if you were inside you would need lights on, it was that dark out. The clouds were so thick it was the equivalent of being under a sleeping bag designed for sub zero temperatures. No sun is going to get in that sleeping bag either.

But what if the group was going to be out there a really long time? A ray of sun could squeak through the sleeping bag clouds. Then they might need all that sunscreen, and they will not have been ready! Well they weren't. I heard the mom saying that they were only going to be there for a half hour or so, (plus 15 minutes of sunscreen application time), so they had better go have their fun right away. Along with about 100 other constant warnings per minute to the 3 kids. Don't stick your toe in there. You could get hurt. Don't get so close to the wall. Don't get in the water. You could get hurt. Stop getting so wet in that pool. You could get hurt. Don't throw the ball at your brother (okay, I am embellishing). One of those where the stream of badgering is so incessant you know that every last ounce of fun has been sucked right out of the day. The kids meanwhile have moved as far away from their mother as they could get on the other side of the pool. No wonder. (I am a big believer in let them get hurt as long as there will be no lasting damage or stitches involved. Overprotecting and incessant badgering teaches dependency and they still don't learn until they experience it anyway).

So that is my bitch-fest for today. I can't stand it when people don't think for themselves! Hate it! Makes me nuts! Okay, was the sunscreen going to hurt them? No, probably not. Does it really matter? No. Was this in any way, shape or form affecting me? Er.... no.

Still!