Please, sir, I want some more.

The other day the kids were a complete, utter pain in the fucking ass for the better part of the morning. By noon Mojo had just about had it as they were loading up the car to go home from downtown.At which point Missy decided she had had just about enough, too.Missy: "I wish I was an ORPHAN so you couldn't tell me what to do!"
Mojo: "Fine. You can stay here, then. Somebody should come along in a while and maybe they'll take you home with them." (Missy's eyes go wide) "So, Peep, do YOU want to be an orphan, too?"
Peep: Naw. The food sucks."For once, I was wise enough to say absolutely nothing.

Despicable Me

There was once a time when the early morning hours were mine alone.

Mojo and the Peep are sleepers. They love their sleep, they crave it, they cherish it like a rare, delightful treasure, and whenever possible they indulge themselves by drowsing on into the late forenoon. And that was always fine with me.
I could get up early and make coffee, savor the rich scent and the dark, earthy taste in silence. I could read, or exercise, or go on-line. It was my private world before the rest of the family got out of bed.

But now I have another early riser; Little Miss is seldom asleep past six and often awake before five. She's never noisy or fretful. She comes stumping out, her little legs determined as her eyes are still full of sleep. She wants to be cuddled, and happily crawls up in my arms and curls onto my lap.So I feel like a real heel resenting the loss of my private mornings.

But I do; as sweet and quiet as she is, the girl won't be ignored or put by; any attempt to park her on the couch or in front of the television results in a monumental sulk, and this girl is an expert sulker; once you've hit the "sulk" button it's nearly impossible to reset - she will fuss and fume for a good hour or so.And even the semi-silence of her immediate snuggling is transient. Soon she is fully awake and wants to play, or use the computer. And I'm reminded of the old saying about playing catch with a dog; you will tire of it long before the dog does. So with Barbies or ponies or LEGOs. There are only so many scenarios the girl can invent, and we usually run through them all inside of five minutes or so. After that the only variable is how durable my patience is; the eventual consuption of it is never in doubt.
So I feel like even more of a lout; I love my little girl and all she wants to do is share my time. But I resent, somewhere ranging from mildly to bitterly, the loss; like a miserly old curmudgeon, I am ungracious about dividing the early hours of the day with this child who loves and depends on me. God, how despicable can I be?

I suspect that this says something truly unflattering about me, and in my better moments I try and staple a smiling face over my bad attitude. But then comes the thumping of the little feet down the morning hallway and my smile fades like the stars in the sunrise.

Tradition!

Big Boy came home this week with something called "Thanksgiving Homework" from his second grade class.

This consisted of a two-page (double-sided) sheet with some fairly incursive questions about what he had done for T-giving and things like his personal favorite sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of the holiday. Oh, and he had to draw a family tree.The question that stumped us, though, was regarding "family traditions".

Because, you see, we're the very worst sort of rootless, mongrel Americans. Homogenized, pasteurized, bland...our families got to this continent and dropped their old customs and mores like a live grenade.

And we have so far successfully resisted the late trend for "re-traditionalizing" families and holidays. We gesture towards the occasion, but, really, I am an utter pagan and Mojo, who does randomly lurch towards some sort of holiday spirit now and then, is really too slothful to complete the effort.

So we sat there, the three of us; the Boy poised with his pencil and his shining evening face looking for parental guidance, and my bride and I, utterly clueless. Bereft. Vacant of inspiration. Utterly gobsmacked.We could not think of a single, solitary family "tradition" - for Thanksgiving, or for any other holiday, for that matter. We were adrift in a sea of postmodern American anomie; we had no traditions.

Finally, in the way my mind always works, it drifted from trying to think of a family tradition to the notion of tradition in general and from there to historic quotes regarding tradition, and from there to Winston Churchill. And that's where I came upon a suggestion for the Peep.

"Rum, buggery, and the lash?"

Mojo and I were forcibly struck by the likely reaction of Peep's very dignified second-grade teacher confronted by this as a family tradition, and spent the next four minutes or so snorting and giggling.

The Peep was NOT amused. He had no idea what the three things were, but he knew that his parents were being irresponsible, and refused to write it down. I think he settled for "Eating Thanksgiving dinner with family".Smart boy.

I suspect that if one of our children turns out to be a serial murderer or a Wikileaker no one at the elementary school will be surprised. We're such bad parents.

You need a license to drive...

...but if you're the woman I encountered today you may freely reproduce without any sort of quality control whatsoever.

Mind you, I probably deserved the punishment for taking the younglings to Chuck E. Cheese on a Halloween Day Sunday.

The place was virtually empty, tho, and the littles had a great time running around playing games and getting tickets redeemable for cheap plastic crap and candy. And Mojo really needed the break.

As I was sitting with Little Miss at the "Chuckster's Extreme Club I.D." machine (which makes little plastic cards with kiddo pictures on them) I noticed a tall kid - probably 13 or 14 years old or so - coming up to the Peep who was playing on the submarine game nearby. I couldn't make out what was going on, exactly, but I could tell that Peep was giving the older boy one of his game tokens. This happened at least twice before I went over and stood behind him. The big kid continued to hang around in a rather scavenging fashion. Eventually I had to take Missy to the toilet, and when I returned most of the Boy's tokens were gone.

I was pretty chapped, but considering I had no hard evidence, and the scam was over, I didn't consider pursuing it any further. We cashed in our tickets, went to the cheap-plastic-crap counter, and were collecting our plastic snakes, vampire teeth, candy, and other oddlots when an Asian woman came up to the Chuck Worker to point out the same tall kid as having scammed HER son out of his tokens.

OK. So this wasn't just a one-off, and I thought that the least I could do was let the little rat know that his slick little game wasn't as slick as he thought. I went over to the table where he was standing with a couple of other, younger, kids and several adults.

"I just thought you should know that cheating little kids is pretty low."

The kid just looked startled. "I didn't..." he started, when a worn-looking blonde woman got up and moved between me and the kid.

"What do you mean?" she began in an angry voice.

The kid, though, was obviously still trying to talk his way out, a fine young con man in the making. "I was...I wasn't taking...I was giving them tickets..." he offered, until the woman - obviously his mother - told him to move away and sit down, and turned back to me.

"How old are you?" she asked me. I just looked at her. What the hell did that have to do with anything? I thought. "What do you mean, coming over and talking to my son like that? Did you think of finding his mother and talking to me first?"

She was right up in my face at this point, angry and accusative, clearly more incensed at my impudence at confronting her spawn than whatever dirty work he had been doing out of her sight.

I looked down at this angry woman, and half a dozen thoughts chased through my head. Why should I come talk to you, woman, first, last, or otherwise, since it seems that you had no interest in what your progeny was up to? What possible good would it have done, since it would seem to be your "upbringing" that produced this conman whose moral compass seemed to have been permanently pointed at "self-interest"? How does this come to be about me, and you, you idiot harridan, and not about your larcenous spawn? Who would even consider you any sort of resource or authority for parenting, since the failure-of-your-birth-control-device was out on his own stealing from children too young to see through him while you were sitting around bullshitting?But she was going on; "What do you think, that I should be with him every moment..?"

This was ridiculous. I had said what I needed to say to young Bernie Madoff, and the ridiculous indignity of standing in the middle of the tacky Chuck E. Cheese "party room" arguing with a woman too dim to be embarrassed by her own faulty by-product was bearing forcibly on me. As I turned and walked away, however, I had the mild gratification of hearing the Asian woman lay into the Mother of the Year about her larva's thieving progress through the Chuckster's playroom.

The real absurdity was when I returned to the cheap plastic crap counter to collect my own younglings the woman had pursued me. She leaned down and tried to make up to the Peep in motherly tones so sweet as to induce insulin shock in a diabetic.

"I'm sorry, little man..." she cooed, "...I promise I'll get your tokens back..."

I was disgusted. So this was her "discipline"? The "apology" came not from the little bastard but from mom, Diane Downs herself?

"We're done here. C'mon, kids." I shepherded my two out the door.

I drove away disgusted with the woman, her offspring, and myself, for not telling her more forcibly what a waste of good oxygen she and her kid are.

But, honestly, to what point? My brief collision makes it fairly clear that this woman has neither pride nor shame, and her kid is clearly an immature sleazeball who will not learn anything better from his parent, whose concern is only for her own self-love.

What the hell can you do with people like that?I have no idea.