Jewelry Girls

Of course my daughter loves jewelry, she’s my daughter. I have started selling my jewels on EBAY. Well not my jewels, more other people’s jewels that I buy for cheap and sell for a few dollars more on EBAY. Sometimes not, but this blog isn’t about that. This blog is about my daughter. Whenever I go to buy jewels be it at yard sales, thrift stores, or flea markets I always try to find a prize for my girl. Partly because she loves jewelry, but mostly to keep her away from the jewelry that I am going to sell. You see my girl is not a delicate little flower who treats her bobbles and beads with love and care. She is a bruiser who prefers to wrestle in shining sparkly things.


After the destruction and disappearance of jewelry stock I have taken to hiding my jewelry and buying her own. My last acquisition for Alice was quite a find. A genuine contemporary necklace with machine tied synthetic purple glass beads with a heart shaped Disney Princess pendant. Find of the century and only one dollar. I know that I could have done better on the price, but for my baby I splurge. She wore that necklace night and day for about three days until she smashed the plastic clasp. Then I tied the beads in a knot. She happily wore them another day. She wore them playing, swimming, sleeping, and even in the tub.

Then this morning I find purple bead segments all over the kitchen floor. Since the beads are individually tied I find in segments of single beads with the string still attached tied in a knot on each side.

“Alice?” I say “What happened to your necklace?”

“I done wearing it.”

“Honey why is it broken?” I ask.

“I couldn’t take off.” She points to her little pink scissors lying on the table. I try not to laugh, but I can’t help it. The whole necklace is cut up. She cut up the entire necklace. It is in pieces on the floor.

“Well sweetie, it looks like you found a way to take it off”.

Family Fun An Oxymoron

Every holiday weekend means the same thing. Lots of family fun. Why do we inflict family fun on anyone especially those we love? You know that you do this too. A big weekend rolls around and you have this perfect vision of quality family fun. I always picture the well dressed families displayed in the pages of J. Crew catalogs. They are always well dressed, gorgeous and smiling as they canoe on a beautiful river or play touch football on a scenic private beach. The parents are never yelling and the kids are never fighting with each other. All of the family members always have on matching outfits that are never stained. The mother is never covered with spilled juice or muddy kid’s handprints. The dad is never red in the face from screaming at the kids or from fighting with the GPS system. How do these J. Crew families do it?


I don’t know how, but every holiday I try my best to try. This holiday, Memorial Day, I came up with the great idea. First thing I did was to take the kids to my mom’s house on Cape Cods the day before and come home super late at night so that we’d all be good and tired for the big day. Then the big day arrived and we were all exhausted. We spent the morning relaxing so that we could give the sun a chance to get nice and hot in the sky. Once the temperature is a nice humid 85-90 degrees Dave and I take the kids to get take out as I have neglected to go grocery shopping. Who wants to go into a store on a holiday weekend? We get our food and go to the overcrowded town beach. Do we go to swim like the hundreds of other people? No my great idea is for us to eat at the lake and go for a hike around it.

We eat on the ground as all of the picnic tables are occupied and I have no blanket or chairs. We finish eating and the kids are whining about being hot and about not swimming. They are too hot to play in the lake’s park. We finally talk Dylan into going for the nice cool walk in the woods. Alice on the other hand is not convinced.

We start our nice family walk across the hot beach into the cool tree shaded woods. There we are. Dave has a backpack with waters. Dylan and I are holding hands and there is Alice is standing on the beach screaming and crying. She is standing next to an innocent family trying to eat their BBQ in peace. The family is looking over at us. Their red sauce covered faces frowning as our daughter bellows and waves her arms like an insane bird.

After 20 minutes of shrieking and screaming we are all on the verge of tears. Dave and I are both red faced and frustrated, taking turns carrying Alice across the hot beach, sweat dripping down our backs. Dylan is mad because Alice has ruined yet another family outing. Dave is mad because as usual I have made a badly thought out plan that explodes. I am mad because I have let the family down again. Alice is still at full tilt tantrum kicking and screaming trying to resist our capture. Why are we always “that” Family?

After Alice loses TV for the rest of the day and cries in her rooms for an hour our days actually turns around. We have nice family fun playing in the little kiddy pool in the back yard. So we basically do what we do every day after school. The kids were happily playing. Dave read his book in the shade with a beer. I made snacks and sprayed the kids with the hose. We were boring but we were happy. While we were enjoying our mundane life I figured out why the J. Crew families are so much more fabulous than us. Because they aren’t a real family, they are models paid to make us all feel bad. When they are home with their real families they are just as screwed up as we are.