Lousy Mother's Day
So Mother's Day has come and gone, and Bonnie and I are both happy it passed -- this was one of the lousiest ones I can remember.
Mother's Day is sort of a wash for me. My tradition, having been raised by a single parent, is to celebrate Father's Day with my mother instead. She likes that better, I suspect, for reasons best left unstated here that have more to do with her background than mine. So for the past nine years (for as long as we've had kids), I've focused my attention on Bonnie for Mother's Day instead.
Anyway, there was a whole confluence of events that made this Mother's Day just rotten.
For one thing, we had a nor'easter this weekend. For those of you unfamiliar with the meteorological peculiarities of New England, a nor'easter is a storm that blows in from, as the name implies, the northeast. It usually dumps a horrific amount of precipitation and is accompanied by gale force winds. In the winter, nor'easters are often blizzards. They're almost like hurricanes, in a way, though not nearly as strong or as well defined as tropical storms can get.
Living on a peninsula as we do, the effects seem magnified. There wasn't a huge amount of rain for this one, but there was just enough, and the winds strong enough (gusting up to 40 or 50 miles an hour) that spending any time at all outside was just miserable.
For another, Bonnie is sick. She's been fighting off a spring cold she picked up from James for days now. So she was miserable, feeling run-down and cranky. That made going out for any extended period rather a waste of time, because she really just wanted to rest instead. Of course, Bonnie won't rest at home: She has an endless list of things to do, and won't sit still even if common sense (and her husband) suggest otherwise.
Last, the kids had one mandate for Mother's Day: Clean your rooms. They didn't. Emmeline pitched a fit until her grandmother volunteered to help her, and then she cooperated fairly well and quickly too.
But the boys just totally dropped the ball. At first they failed to clean their room at all, and once they did, they didn't do it *right.* So, at 8 PM last night, Bonnie was still in the room, helping the boys put their stuff away where it belongs.
Comments
I hear you, Peter. It rained the entire day here in the bay area. Bad, bad, bad.
Posted by: Jason | May 9, 2005 01:46 PM