Sundays with Stretchy Pants

She’s addicted to the self-scan checkout thing at the library, which is fine, but I don’t have a truck with which to haul her freshly-scanned books home. She walks into the library, card in hand, and randomly grabs and tosses books at me to shove in the library bag as if the bag is like a magic, bottomless bag that can never be filled to capacity. There are usually 3-4 other people who need to shove books into the bag, too, but she hogs it up all for herself. And then I strain my shoulder trying to carry it. And then I take her home and force her to listen to every single book over and over until she cries. I’m passive-aggressive that way.

Maya isn’t the only one who got a new card; all of the girls updated their cards to the fancy new color ones and we got my niece all signed up with one of her very own, too. I really don’t mind lugging home a giant bag of books. I do mind the fact that each child has her very own library bag, but they all claim their bags are “toooooo heeeeaaavvvvyyyyy” *whine, stomp* and when I make them carry their own, they check out books based on weight and ease of carrying. Not cool.

You might have noticed by how rarely I update my sidebar that It takes me forever to finish a book, but that doesn’t stop me from adding books to my pile. I’m a fast reader, but I really only have time to read my own stuff at bedtime. If I’m reading during the day, it’s kid stuff. You know, to the kids. Or toilet stuff, like magazines. You know, on the toilet. (What? Is that TMI? But Everyone Poops. It’s no big deal.)

We usually have a family book going at all times and I used to let Lena and Liberty read ahead if they wanted to, but that got too annoying and hard to keep track of and then they would fight over who got to read it first and I like to have them not fighting and not annoying me at all times, so now they can’t read ahead in the family book, which makes them a little desperate. If I sit down on my own bed, behind closed doors and start to read my own book, it’s only a matter of a few minutes before somebody comes in and says, “Oh, you’re reading? Then you won’t mind reading this to us,” as if my piteous life has no purpose unless I’m serving them in some capacity. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

I long for the days when I had a breastfeeding infant/toddler/pre-schooler and I could retire to my bed with just that wee little one and, under the guise of trying to get the baby to sleep, just read and read and read to my heart’s content, only to emerge from the bedroom hours later with a shrug for Bryan that said, “Whaddya gonna do? Darn baby didn’t wanna sleep. What’s for dinner?” Now the darn baby has her own library card and, even worse, if I tried to take her to bed and put her down for a nap, her mouth wouldn’t stop running long enough for me to read a sentence. Darn baby with her fancy new library card.

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