The Bucket

I woke up at 8:00 a.m. this morning. Early for a saturday. Daughter waving a very loud, very crinkly package of fruit snacks in my eyes; "Are shrek snacks fruit?" Um, no. The funny thing is she's asking so she can have a bowl of ice cream. Last night I told her she had to eat a fruit or a veggie before she could have a bowl of cookies & cream. She took an apple & came back two minutes later. The apple was "all gone" she had only the stem left to prove it to me. I'm still looking for where she hid the rest of the apple. She's still waiting for a bowl of ice cream.

Four is a funny age. Sometimes I wish I could look in her brain and figure it out a little better than she can explain. Today she's been parading around in her Cinderella dress and her "hooker" shoes. Hooker shoes are really just plastic dress up shoes w/heels. So named because Santa gave her a pair the Christmas she was two. The dad didn't know that Santa had bought these shoes and when daughter unwrapped them he burst out laughing that she had gotten "hooker shoes". Great. The name stuck. The weird part, today, is that she's wearing the get-up so she can marry Cody. She and Cody do NOT get along. They are like oil & water, as his dad says. Yet she is insistent on marrying the boy.

Yesterday she insisted on using a bucket for a purse. She raided my wallet while I blogged and took "just the little head money Mamma." Little head money being George Washington on the $1 bill. All the other bills have much bigger heads (Franklin, Jefferson, etc.). I really wonder why our first president has the smallest head. I also wonder why I never noticed it until daughter decided that big head money was much better than little head money. The only reason she took just the little head money this time is because; A) I had more little head money than big head money (so it seemed like more to her), and B) I always yell when she takes my big head money.

Anyway, she stored her three dollars, and one quarter for the gumball machine, in her bucket then dogged me about going to Walmart until I caved. I needed milk anyway. By the way, I hate Walmart so I'm not giving you a link. Walmart sucks. But it's all we have in this backwater town. A huge super Walmart. Pretty much nothing else. Probably because there is a huge super Walmart. Again, Walmart sucks. When we get to Walmart daughter jumps out of the minivan bucket & all. I stop her and tell her she canNOT bring the bucket into Walmart. A fit ensues in the parking lot of Walmart. Hmmm don't like to use that word quite so much. How about Cheapalot? I finally convince daughter that the money will either fall out of the bucket, someone will reach in the bucket and take the money, or the people at Cheapalot will take the bucket back because it is a Cheapalot bucket.

At this point I'm tired already and we haven't even walked the acres of aisles in Cheapalot yet. From past experience I've learned that daughter behaves better if we do her errands first. It doesn't work to promise her a reward in exchange for good behavior, like it did for the boys, she must see the reward in order to reward me. You'd think that by #5 I'd have this child-rearing gig pat. So we shop the toy aisle. She quickly, amazingly quickly, starts recognizing the dollar amounts that are too much for what she has in my wallet, previously in the bucket. We wind up in the $.88 aisle. I happen to know, thanks to my father-in-law, that 88 is a good luck number in Chinese. That's why he prices all his shirts, he makes Tshirts, ending in .88. Daughter picks out a Princess Paddleball, two fake My Little Pony ponies and a mini-slinky. She happily pays ALL BY HERSELF at the check-out counter, we go home and she breaks the paddleball and the mini-slinky in two minutes flat. Then she takes the big head money out of my wallet. Then I yell. Thank God for Friday SciFi night.