And this morning I had big fat flakes of melting snow hitting my windshield. It was actually snowing up on the hilltops. It will get below freezing at night for the next couple of days, and they’re talking about the possibility of snow down at the valley floor.
Crazy.
We watched the women’s halfpipe competition last night, from Torino. The U.S. team was so cute. They would crank out these amazing runs, doing acrobatic and athletic moves that made my spine hurt just watching them, then at the bottom of the run they would all hug each other and bounce up and down and shriek. Although they are world-class athletes (and they are), at the bottom of the pipe they are still teenaged girls.
In every relationship there is a division of labor. In my marriage, my wife balances the checkbook. This is partly because I don’t want to, and partly because my wife has a nigh-compulsive need to make the account balance. She cares deeply that the debits and credits add up properly, and we can account for every withdrawal. She’s good at it. I’m more than willing to let her.
It was all the more surprising, then, when she couldn’t reconcile the totals for girl scout cookie sales yesterday. There were the number of boxes of cookies that we had brought to the house, the number of boxes of cookies sold that had been preordered, the number of boxes of cookies sold that hadn’t been preordered, and the cash that had been collected. All of those numbers should be interrelated in a very specific way. And when my wife was doing the math yesterday, they simply weren’t adding up. If you knew my wife, you would appreciate how irritating this would be.
In addition, the stack of boxes that had been set aside as our family’s cookie order didn’t match with her recollection of what had been ordered. It wasn’t until our kids got home from school, when my wife noticed that a box of Thin Mints had spontaneously vanished from our order, that the pieces fell into place.
There was a confrontation with the daughter. Yes, she had just snagged a box of cookies. In fact, she had taken a total of FOUR BOXES, one of which had been completely consumed, and two more had been opened. She had been hiding them under her bed.
Needless to say, this pretty much ruined our day. She will pay for the four boxes she stole, that goes without saying. But we’ve reached a point where we don’t even know how to formulate an appropriate consequence anymore (although I admit to having vivid fantasies of blowtorching her favorite stuffed animals).
In discussions with her counselor, we had decided it was time for her to go back to more one-on-one sessions, rather than the family-oriented sessions we have been trying, and in fact their office had replaced her original counselor with another female therapist. She sees the new doctor on Monday, and we hope she will be able to talk to the new one more readily than she has been talking to her current (male) counselor.
Just another day of parenthood. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.