Wisdom from the old Roseanne show?

Remember that show, Roseanne?  The average family being two working parents and three reasonably normal children.  The usual additions of less than ordinary friends and relatives.  Although I would generally never have gained any wisdom from this show, I did once. 

It was a usual episode of the ups and downs of daily life of a busy family trying to get 36 hours of work done in a 24 hour period.  Roseanne, the mom, is trying to get an answer from DJ, the youngest.  She has asked him a question and is now wanting an answer.  DJ finally says that why should he answer, he hasn't talked in three days and no one has noticed.

I have often wondered if this could happen in a busy household, and I think it could.  Just because he isn't talking doesn't mean that he isn't looking at you when you are talking, nor does it mean that he isn't doing what you just asked, like homework.   Maybe when he didn't say good night back, you either didn't notice, or maybe you thought he didn't hear you.   He's not talking to his older sisters, cause they don't really talk to him anyways.

Often my kids and I have great conversations in the car on the way to school.  But I've had jobs where I started before they got up and ended after they went to bed.  When I worked two full time jobs, I still saw the kids in the morning and drove them to school, but when I returned at 11 pm at night, they were in bed.  What if one of them had not talked to me for three days?  I'm sure I would have noticed, I'm always talking to them about something.  But what if my day job had started earlier?

Grocery shopping hell

I remember grocery shopping when the kids were little, and there are few things more stressful than that.  It is grocery shopping hell.  I went from single and grocery shopping with one of those little carry baskets, swinging it carefree down the aisles, filling it with gourmet cheeses and wines, to 6 1/2 years later having a newborn in a carry seat attached to the top of the large family sized shopping buggy, a one year old sitting in the kid seat and a 6 1/2 year old walking besides. 

Cheese Whiz is my gourmet cheese now and I really could use a couple bottles of wine!

Fast forward a couple of years and the kids are more mobile, they are about 4, 5 and 10 1/2.  Before we enter the vortex of "Can I have . . . ", "Can I get . . . ", and "I want this",  I am reading the Riot Act, yet again, about how we are going to behave in the store.  I have a red pepper in the buggy when one kid pushes the buggy (accidentally) into another kid.  We've been here two minutes, and I just can't put myself through this, I swear we will eat bread and water for dinner forever, I say we are leaving, we abandon the buggy and go home. 

These days, I will take the youngest, but not so young anymore, kid to the store with me.  Sometimes our conversations are like this:

"Can . . ."
"No."
"But . . ."
"No."
"Mom . . ."
"No."

Lately, I've been quicker on the draw, and now it goes like this:

"C . . . "
"No."
"B . . ."
"No."
"M . . ."
"No."

Now it's getting funner to grocery shop, try it yourself, see how fast you can say "no" when they start to ask for something.  (I'm serious, it's really funny, you've got to try it!)

Kids and taxes

When my kids were small and had little money, I decided that I would pay the taxes on all of their very own purchases. Which, at that time, wasn't very much money. But as time goes by and their purchases get bigger with the money they earn, my tax portion is also getting higher.

I mentioned earlier about my boys and their delivering of phone books to earn money. One of my boys, put his phone book money together with some xmas money, and had enough to purchase a brand new larger screen HDTV for his Xbox. This TV costs $495., so far so good. But when both mafia-like taxes and that stupid lets-look-like-we-are-doing-something environment fee are added, this $495 TV is now costing $595. That's an addition of 100 &%#&%#@ dollars!

And I don't have the heart to make them try to come up with another $100 dollars. That $495 saved for the HDTV had already been in the plans for the past year. My kids just don't have any other money. So it's Mom that will come up with the difference. Because that's what moms do.