Standoff

You might think since it's just the Boo and me at home together at night that I would have plenty of opportunities to take just absolute buttloads of pictures, but if you did think that, then I would accuse you of being an infinitely fortunate naïf who has not done a whole hell of a lot of hard time with a three-and-a-half-year-old lately.

I mean, seriously, people: I am getting ready to get myself some prison tattoos at this point. Well, ok, maybe not prison tattoos (needles, yeuch!), but I am starting to consider maybe thinking about drawing some spider-web-like patterns on my elbows with washable markers, anyway.

Now, my daughter is, by and large, a good kid, really good, but like every preschooler everywhere ever, she is stubborn as a ram. The fact the she is an Aries does not help (although it is definitely fitting). Her routine has been changed, and it seems that she'll be damned before she changes along with it. All of us will.

We are talking knock-down, drag-out, scratching and clawing and kicking and screaming here. Crying and weeping and rending of garments. She fights me leaving school. She fights me over dinner. She fights me over potty. She fights me over bedtime. She hollers and wails for her Daddy, her Nana, her Pop-pop. She tells me she hates me. She tells me she hates SpongeBob.

(My readers who also have small children [or who are My Anonymous Mother] are all like: "Yeah? And?" and also thinking: "Bitch, please." And believe me -- I know. I can feel you practically rolling your eyes out of your heads right now. I KNOW.)

None of this would bother me so much -- because hey, I am not really happy about this either, not yet, even though I completely know these are total First World Problems, like call the whaaaaaaaaaambulance already, GOD -- but she has otherwise been, for everybody else, a perfect little angel.

That little booger.