whatever

I live next door to Albertsons with a fence separating their parking lot and the back entrance to my building. Usually I don't buy more than a bag of items and can carry it home. Today I stocked up on all their holiday sales and had to push my loaded cart into the alley and to the top of the steps leading into our back "yard".

Odessa: (pausing as if just realizing something was amiss) Mom, did you REALIZE you are taking the cart home??!

We had two very industrious tomato plants this year. At the end of the season, our grape tomato plant just kept chugging away, so when Stephen cleared out our plants, he harvested a bag of little green tomatoes. I tried cooking them in a pork Verde like tomatillos, but they didn't taste as good. I saw no signs of ripening for 2 weeks. So they stayed in the brown paper sack in a corner of the kitchen- forgotten. Fast forward a month and I couldn't remember what was in the bag! I opened it up and all the tomatoes had ripened. It was like some kind of magical Easter egg hunt where the reward was not having to buy tomatoes at the store for a couple of weeks.

The girls and I are having more and more "skirmishes" about what to wear- the only reason I object to their choices is that they want to wear dresses everyday (or shorts) and I have 30 pairs of perfectly good pants between them that I hunted high and low in thrift stores for! After one such "discussion" Odessa came back in to the living room and told Stephen and I how to fix all our parenting problems now and in the future.

Odessa: Mom, I have to tell you something. You just need to let me do whatever I want to do, that's all! (repeat 3 times and place hands on hips)