kids with the manners of a construction cone

Oh no, not mine!

Well, okay. Mine.

*sigh*

We had a birthday party for Teena this weekend. We went to a local (indoor of course!) water park. It was a reasonable deal that included the water park for the day, a ton of arcade tokens, and a private room for pizza, soda and a birthday cake at the end. It was the sort of thing that makes you go ahhhhhhhhhh, it's so nice to let someone else do all the work......... except it turns out to be a ton of work anyway. But fun? Sweet mother of Ritalin, they had fun. FUN! It was the kind of thing where your kids are having so much fun it is a joy to just sit and watch them. It makes you happy to do nothing but see the pure delight they express. Genea and 2 of Teena's friends from school came and the four of them exploded into soggy, dripping, energy grenades and kept it going for 4 hours.

Yes, 4 hours. Yikes! Originally I had planned for 2 hours in the water park and 1 hour to eat, then leave. However, after I procrastinated for like, 15 minutes, the slot I wanted was gone and we had to take a later slot in the party room to eat. By then I had sent the invitations and it seemed awfully rude to tell everyone..... we will be eating later so good crap don't bring your kid until later. Besides I figured, why not. We would need extra time for changing in and out and that would probably take a half hour, so lets go for it.

When we arrived, we waited for a bit before the first girl came. Then we waited some more for the second girl. Not to feed mercilessly into a stereotype or anything, but the first girl was dropped off by her dad. No coat, no socks and she had her bathing suit on under her clothes. Which was fine except for when it was time to change back..... and she had no, *er*, foundation garment. So I convinced her to go c*mando in just her pants, rather than sit for the next hour in a cold wet suit that incidentally was like a Bermuda-short style. Yeesh. The other girl was dropped off by her mother. She was dressed for February in Green Bay with a coat and you know, socks etc. She had a backpack with her that had swim goggles, her swim suit, towel and a full extra set of clothes just in case and the backpack was a waterproof type that could contain a soaking wet suit without leaking everywhere. Really it wasn't a big deal, it just struck me as funny.


As we waited for the second girl, the first girl and my two blew up the lobby with frenzy. Racing, running, racing, checking stuff out and running some more. Exhausted after about 10 minutes of that ( my brain was already convulsing knowing I had 3 hours and 50 minutes to go) the girls flopped for a minute by me and chatted in that silly way little girls do. Teena starts by saying, "do you know, my eyes are blue- gray but they changed cuz when I was a baby they were blue but they changed to blue- gray cuz I'm a white girl".

ACK! It seems my educational discussion with my children about genetics, dna, and the development of eye color in infants sort of boiled down in Teena's mind where she summarized it all into one quick sentence. I know she didn't say anything inappropriate, it just came out sounding..... wrong. I had tried to explain blue eyes that stay blue, brown eyes that stay brown and blue eyes that change to brown or green or gray......

The little girl who arrived first appeared to have possibly had surgery on her upper lip. Maybe it is something she was born with, I really don't know. But she had significant scarring there for some reason. As the girls are resting for a minute with me I see Genea coming around and suddenly she has her finger within a centimeter of the girls face and she says...... "what's wrong with your lip here?".

ACK! Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeee-IT. I am trying to redirect the conversation (Look girls, there's Barney!), the girl is trying to answer, and here comes Teena saying importantly, "I asked her about that before!". Oh well. My brain was swirling trying to come up with a way to un-rude the question that was not available. We privately discussed good manners and polite behavior later.

Thankfully, and I mean THANKFULLY that sketchy start did not carry over. At least as far as I know. The kids all had SO much fun there was an actual danger of them shattering from exhilaration. They didn't walk, they didn't run, they ricocheted back and forth. My girls, when we were home later, Were Not Tired as their eyes glazed and they could not finish a sentence. After they went to sleep I found them both curled into tight little knots in their separate beds, twisted up in themselves exactly the same way. Both of them crooked and half off the  mattress with blankets everywhere but on them. Tired, yeah they were tired.