Going Through Another Phase. Sigh
Grandma is such a pain in the arse. I had fun at recess today. Me and Steph. Stephanie. She's my best friend at school. I'm nine and a half. Steph is a year older than me. She has brothers and sisters. I have none. She's smart. I'm not so smart. I really like Steph, a lot. We have fun together. It bothers me when she misses a day at school. I miss lots of days too. When I'm sick (not very often) or when Mom decides to work from home because the weather is so bad, when we get freezing rain or lots of snow and it's blowing around a lot and the visibility, Mom says, is really bad(often, in the winter). Because we live out of town, and it's a long way in to get to school, more than a half hour. On bad country roads, Mom says.
I go to a school far from where we live, in Hammond, because my Granma and my Granpa (Bubbe and Zayde) look after me while Mom is at work, and I'm out of school. The school I go to is close to their house. They've always looked after me. Mom put me in a day care once, long ago, when I was just three and she had moved up to Gatineau. It was horrible. I hated it. I hated the lady who looked after all of us kids, there must have been about six of us, all ages. We had to stay downstairs, but her own kids could go upstairs. She made us go outside in her backyard in the winter, and I hated it. I used to sit and cry. I cried all the time. I missed my Bubbe and my Zayde.
Good thing the guy Mom moved in with decided he wasn't happy about all my screaming, shouting and crying and he said to Mom she should move back into her own house, near my Bubbe and Zayde. That's how I got to be looked after by Bubbe and Zayde again. It was much better. That lady didn't care about me or the other kids. My Bubbe and Zayde love me, they care about me and they look after me. I love them. But Bubbe is still a pain.
Me and Steph have been having loads of fun in the schoolyard at recess. I don't wear ski pants any more the way I had to, last year, because I'm older now, and bigger. Almost as big as my Bubbe, and loads bigger than Steph, even though she's older than me. I even wear my Mom's size, so she doesn't mind if I wear some of her stuff. Like the Ugg boots I wore today; they're suede, pink suede, and they got really wet when me and Steph were having fun sliding on the ice. Trouble is the ice was kind of wet and we got soaked. So when Zayde picked me up at the bus stop after school I was wet. Again. Just like the last few days.
Trouble is, although Zayde doesn't say too much about it, Bubbe makes a whole big fuss about it. As though kids aren't supposed to have fun and get wet. Not in my house, she says, off with the pants. They're not wet! I said to her, and she snorts, they are! What could I do? I felt really mad and I let Boob know it. She doesn't like it when I get like that, angry and stubborn, she says. I'm not, I'm just a kid and kids don't like it when they're told they've got to do this thing and that thing and they don't want to. So there. I used to tell her that she's not the boss of me, but I don't bother any more, because soon as I say that she gets busy showing me how she is really the boss of me and it's a real piss-off.
She hands me dry socks, rummages around in her cupboard for a pair of pants that'll fit me, and hauls out waterproof boots that I know I'll be forced to wear when Mom comes to pick me up for home. Course I'm mad, who wouldn't be? I shove Boob's pants down below my belly-button but they're not the same as my hip-hugger pants and I hate them. Anyway, Zayde bought me a chocolate-covered croissant and I love them, although they make Bubbe shudder. She's funny that way. She gave me a dish of pineapple chunks and another one of red grapes and a glassful of chocolate milk and I started to feel better. Guess I do feel kind of better with dry socks and the pants aren't that bad, I guess. No one's going to see me here, anyway.
I didn't start out such a great day. On the drive in to school this morning Mom rehearsed my spelling words with me, and when I spelled one of them wrong, she kept telling me to try again and I don't see why she doesn't just give me the right spelling and I can spell it back to her right, instead of trying to guess the right spelling the way she wants me to. She got mad at me and told me I had to do better. I've got a good brain, she said, and I'm too lazy to use it. I'm not, I just don't see the sense of keeping on trying and I'm always wrong, when she could just give me the right spelling. Anyway.
Bubbe showed me a magazine she was going to give to Mom, the usual magazine, the one with recipes and all kinds of stuff. There was an article about a dog, and Bubbie wanted me to read it. It was kind of neat. I love dogs and I like reading about them. Boob is always after me to read. Read, read read. She drives me nutso sometimes, asking me all the time what have I read lately. When she doesn't have her glasses on and she wants to know something, like what's in a recipe I have to read it to her. It's not so bad, because she lets me help beat the batter and then I get to lick the spoons and that kind of stuff. She gave me a little wee cook book with lots of nice cookie recipes and I began to read all the different things, like pies, cakes, muffins, and I liked them all, and I told her I wouldn't let Mom throw it out. Mom doesn't like litter in the house and ends up throwing out all kinds of stuff, or sticking it in a bag to take to the Sally Ann.
And Bubbe offered to cut my hair. It's got a little long, and I like it better when it's bobbed a bit, so it looks nicer, like when Boob cut it for me back in the summer. So I said okay, and gathered my dishes into the sink and went into the powder room with Boob. Riley, the little dog followed us and Boob almost tripped over him. We're always tripping over him, he's always getting in the way. He wants Bubbe to pick him up all the time, but mostly she ignores him. I sat up on the vanity top and Bubbe began cutting away. I hate it when someone, anyone, yanks my hair, pulls at it, it hurts and I hate it. Bubbe's okay like that, I told her I hate it when the hairdresser does it, because they want to get all the knots out. My hair gets really knotted all the time, that's why I wash it and then Mom puts a kind of stuff on it to relax the knots so I can brush it. And that's it, I won't brush it again until I wash it next week.
And Bubbe hates that, but Mom doesn't mind. She says it's better than listening to me whine all the time. She hates it when I complain. I call it complaining, she calls it whining. When Bubbe was finished she showed me all the hair she cut off, on the bottom of the bathroom waste container. She says I have beautiful hair. Everyone says that. She said I have red highlights, and it really did look like that, seeing the cut-off hair, shining in the basket, and I felt bad about all that hair cut off. But I felt better when I looked in the mirror, because it looks better. Bubbe saved some of my hair from when she cut it years ago, it's in a small jar. She even has a jarful of hair from Mom's hair from when she cut it a long time ago. Bubbe's funny about a lot of things, she's really strange.
I'm not mad any more.
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, January 12, 2006
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