If you can't do it right...

Thing 1 has a perfectionist streak that scares me. She’ll be drawing a picture, or ask you to draw a picture, and if it doesn’t turn out perfect she flies into a rage and scribbles violently all over the paper. She was asking me to help her write I love you to a friend and got her “u” upside down. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. But she flew into a rage and wadded up the paper and started to sob. A few minutes earlier she came to me to ask me to draw a gingerbread man for her. I made a large head, arms, and legs, and when I went to join the lines at the top of his head where I had started, I kind of missed. So it looked like he had a beanie on or something. She flipped out and grabbed the marker and scribbled all over it telling me how terrible it was. When I tried to explain that she just needs to calm down and say “That’s good, let’s try it another way” she runs away crying.
Sigh.

The Christmas tree has become a compromise on more levels than I intended. Based on Thing 2’s dismay that there were no colors on the tree, I went out and bought some colored globe lights that I thought were pretty cool. Not just those little twinkling lights, some globes that were probably 1 ½ inches across. Then I plugged them in. And they flash. Sigh. Not what I was looking for. And they were expensive, too. 13 bucks for a string of 12. So I didn’t put them on the tree. I dragged the girls to Modern Display to see what they had. Of course, at one time they had what I was looking for, for 17 bucks a strand of 15 lights, so they were similarly priced. But they are all out of those by now. All they had was one color strings, no multicolor. Come to think of it… I wonder if they had 3 strings of red… That might have worked. But I had a hard time dividing my attention between two little girls running around the store so excited about everything, and the salespeople who were either standing in my way while they were helping someone else, or hovering over me and the girls worried they were going to break something.
So we bought some minor things, came home, and put the flashers on the tree. The kids seem happy with it, I think it looks sort of overwhelming. But it’s not about me anymore, not for a while, anyway. It’s about those kids.