"Peculiar Thing About This Document: It Was Never Notarized"

These Things Are Genetic!

Does it count if you have to ask?

I'm not sure.

Every day I would ask Alexis to clean up her toys and empty the dishwasher and finish a bunch of other chores. Every day she would do those things, but not until after she had piled on a mountain of whining, and certainly not until I asked her to do it forty eleventy bajillion times. Which, really, why do I have to ask? WHY?

A little over a month ago, I decided I was done asking.

Enter the Chore Chart.

I don't know why I didn't start it sooner, but I finally realized it was time to throw together a Chore Chart and stick it on the fridge. The general idea was that Alexis can earn stickers by doing chores. But! But! BUT! Bonus stickers are available! For example, she gets one sticker for doing her homework. The thing is she doesn't have any sort of choice in that issue, though, so that's a giveaway. What she can choose to do is to do her homework without me asking and she can do it without whining. If she manages to do both of those things? Homework is suddenly worth five stickers. Five! That's a lot of stickers!

She can earn stickers for putting away her clean laundry, emptying the dishwasher, cleaning her playroom, doing her homework, picking up her toys in the family room, and all sorts of other things. The tasks themselves aren't the focus, though. It's all about the self-motivation and halfway reasonable attitude.

You guys, I'm kind of a genius sometimes. The whole thing is totally working. So far.

(Excuse me while I go knock on some wood.)

For the past month or so, Alexis has been dutifully collecting her stickers every day. She doesn't do all of the possible chores, but she does some of them each day. It's really a beautiful thing. At the end of the week, she gets to count all of her stickers and I trade her. She gets 20 cents for each sticker, which generally puts her right around $5 earned each week.

Don't tell her this little tidbit, but really we're just giving her money that we would spend on her anyway. Instead of buying her an occasional toy or book or whatever, we let her decide how to spend that $20 or so of disposable income each month. We have almost completely stopped buying her random things, instead forcing her to use her own money. Which she earned. But that we were going to spend on her anyway.

It's really fun being the grown-up sometimes.

Alexis decided to save her money all through October. It's sort of a rare thing for her as she usually acts like her money is on fire and she better spend it NOOOOW! or it will turn to ash. She saved it, however, because she had a plan.

She planned to stand in the Barbie aisle at Walmart for a very long time.

She stood there, just sort of staring at everything, FOREVER. She stood there and she stood there and my hair turned gray and my wrinkles grew deeper and I think Justin Bieber celebrated his 80th birthday. I tried to be patient since we drag her to stores she doesn't like all the time, but I wasn't really expecting to turn into a senior citizen while watching my offspring stare at Barbie dolls.

But then she made her decision.

She skipped right over Barbie and went for a Monster High Doll instead. I know she picked it because she's still in the middle of loving all things Halloween, especially vampires, but still. You guys! She used her own money to buy a creepy doll!

Do you think I can talk her into using her money to buy me the last doll over here? Because I still want him.

Ugly To The Bone

"Would you just shut up? You don't even know what we're talking about." The words cut through the air like swords at a Naval wedding.

Was it a joke? Was it playful teasing? Was it just a case of one woman being mean to another? I wasn't sure. I tried to ignore the whole thing as I shrunk further into my chair.

The manager and my stylist resumed their conversation about stolen samples. Apparently the salon had received a large box of product samples, but someone had made off with all of them. My stylist agreed that she would buy some of the shampoo and conditioner because she really wanted to try it.

Once the agreement was made, silence fell over the salon. Uncomfortable, tense silence.

Later, as I sat under the hair dryer, I heard another side of things.

"We just don't get along," the woman who had been on the receiving end of the cutting words said.

"Why not?" a third woman asked. My stylist, the one who had yelled "Would you just shut up," was was over on the other side of the room. She couldn't hear the conversation.

"Mostly because she's a bitch and I'm not," the woman replied.

That answered that. The original words were meant to be mean. The feeling was mutual.

I tried to ignore the conversation as they continued on and on and on. Hurtful, horrible words were thrown around. They laughed as they called their co-worker cruel names. They enjoyed every second of wallowing in a puddle of Mean Girl Antics.

I sat pondering why it is that women are so awful to one another. Why do we talk about one another like that? And why in front of customers? Everything about the exchange was utterly and completely unprofessional and unnecessary. I began to consider how I would go about interrupting them. I didn't care if I hurt their feelings. I needed silence to wrap around me.

Just as I was about to say something, one of the women suddenly realized she had a client that she should consider talking to. She was waxing her eyebrows, but had hardly even glanced at the teenage girl as she slathered on the wax.

"Do you want me to wax your lip, too? It looks terrible."

And suddenly I was angry. The client was no more than 16 or 17-years old. There was no need to tell her that anything about her was anything less than perfect. Unfortunately, the young girl had already read the memo that her Italian heritage had given her something that needed to be tamed. "I usually do it myself," she replied.

"I'll do a better job than you can at home," the stylist told the young girl.

Talk about rude. My blood started to boil so fast that I couldn't find words. Eventually I managed to form a few sentences as I complained to the manager about the hostile environment she was tolerating. It's on her to stop it, right? I mean, miracles aren't going to happen, but shouldn't people be required to at least be civil to one another when customers are around? And shouldn't the exercise a little kindness towards customers?

Women can be so ugly. It's truly a wonder men have anything to do with us.

Here's to hoping this one never gets sucked into that sort of drama.