Kerries Peeves

Books about decluttering crack me up.  Almost everything they recommend you buy to help get your home organized is super-expensive.  Or hard to find without a high-speed Internet access and a ton of money in shipping and handling. 

Or the ideas are unrealistic for my lifestyle since I always seem to have a baby or small child around.

I need to write a book on decluttering for Homeschoolers.  It would tell you what to do with the mounds of paper that get created, what to do with all the crap you need to save in case the State comes knocking on your door, and so on.

Remember when ketchup makers got the big idea to make ketchup different colors, like purple or green?  What kind of crack were they smoking when they made that decision?

Like ketchup needed more appeal?  Kids LOVE ketchup.  Except when it got turned purple and green.  Then it was simply gross.  Hello!  It’s common knowledge that kids don’t like to eat green things (e.g., vegetables).

And like Coke needed to be improved?  Another big mistake.  New Coke.  Then they got rid of that and made the original Coke Classic.  Confusing.

Leave good things alone!  And don’t get me started on remakes of Beatles songs.

I get the idea behind Christmas letters.  I actually enjoy reading the ones my husband’s parents used to send out to their friends all over the country after they moved away.

I started sending out a Christmas letter a few years ago just to give it a shot.  Each year it sounded more and more competitive and full of B.S., no matter how hard I tried to sound like a normal person.  I always ended up reading the darn thing with a Valley Girl accent.

Some letters I get are just too stinkin’ long, chronicling every minute of every day of the past year.  Some are so short you wonder if they spent the year in jail or something.

Joel (age 7) has this friend who won’t just come out and say what she wants.  I’ll be talking about how we’re going to have meatloaf for dinner and later she’ll say, “I really like meatloaf.”  Or I’ll say we’re going to the pool and she’ll say, “I like the pool.”  I tell her, “Quit hinting.  Just tell me what you want.”

My other son will say, “I’m thirsty.”  I say, “Nice to meet you, Thirsty.  My name is Kerrie.”

“I wish I could have more toast.”  Crap in one hand, put that wish in another and see which one fills up first.

Why does anyone care how many kids I have if I am taking good care of them?  They are relatively clean, certainly well-fed, get plenty of attention and mental stimulation and sleep and hugs and kisses and love.  They are well-educated and WANTED.

I don’t call you lazy for having zero or one or two kids, so don’t stare at me like I’m a freaking alien when I walk through a store with my four beautiful children.

I cloth diaper and breastfeed, so I’m saving the planet’s resources.  We homeschool, so we aren’t using bus gas and putting out bus fumes daily.  We even sometimes grow our own food.

What the hell is up with rude church secretaries?  It’s like a wife beater working at a women’s shelter.

I’m getting sick of calling church to ask a simple question only to be met with hostility and a snotty attitude.  She may as well just ask me outright if I’m a complete and total moron and get it over with.

Look, lady, don’t you know I pay part of your salary?  I mean, without a bunch of people going to your church, you wouldn’t have a job there.

She also tries to thwart my homeschool conference fliers that I put up on their bulletin board in the lobby.  Once as I was walking out after putting up a flier, I turned around and caught the secretary taking it down.  I assume she does this because the church also has a school and they wouldn’t want people taking their kids out of the school to go to the dark side known as homeschooling!

I want to invent a gorgeous, flowing, white, fabulous … disposable … wedding gown. 

We use disposable diapers, bibs, condoms, plates, cups, silverware, and so on.  But a wedding dress costing anywhere from a few hundred bucks to thousands of dollars is only worn ONE TIME and then put away or sold.

Which brings me to this:  As a young bride, why would I think my daughter (assuming I even give birth to one and assuming we are even close to the same size) would want to wear MY wedding dress 20-30 years later?

I swear that, as Americans, we ENJOY going into debt and wasting stuff and adding clutter to our homes.

At our local community center there is an awesome coffee maker in the lobby.  The coffee doesn’t taste that great, but there are many yummy-SOUNDING options, like mocha and some sort of fru-fru tea.  It only costs one dollar.

But if I have only a 5-dollar-bill, I’m screwed, because the front desk can’t give me change.

And is it ironic (or some other word) that most of the people at the front desk of the community center are either rude or stupid?  Does this mean I belong to a community of rude and stupid people?

But the pool is cool, with a lazy river and a humongo hot tub.  So I’ll forgive the front desk people.  Lucky them.

As mothers, we have to suffer through a lot of playdates with people we don’t even like.  But we do it for our kids.  We do it because we love them.  Because they need social interaction.  Because they love to be with their friends.

I’ve dealt with a lot of women I could not stand simply because my children enjoyed THEIR children.

This past summer, a “friend” disowned my kids from hers because she found out my family didn’t go to Mass while on vacation.

But she still wanted us to go out sometime.  I told her no thanks, that if she was crazy enough to keep our kids from each other for something so petty that I preferred not to be around her.

I’m getting to old to mess with people like that!