Mean Mom Coven

<a href="http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/12/22/news/local/35-lorna.txt" >Reporter's Notebook: Mean mom spreads her anti-cheer</a><br />n<br />n<blockquote>The Grinch has nothing on me.<br />n<br />nI'm surly, cranky and mean, and I certainly don't understand how hard it is to be 10 years old with a houseful of toys and somewhere upward of 1 million Pokemon cards.<br />n<br />nJust ask my son, Stephen.<br />n<br />nIf I'm not losing his toys (picking them up), I'm interfering with his intellectual development (making him pick them up).</blockquote><br />n<br />nI really wonder if Lorna Thackeray is giving away any secrets of the Mean Mom Coven here. From the description she gives My Darling Wife must be part of the coven. My children are convinced she is evil for always losing their stuff. I keep telling them to put the stuff away and it wouldn't get lost which brings the response, "then Mom just looks it up and loses it on purpose to be mean." Children have a wonderful way of looking at things, don't they?<br />n<br />n<blockquote>Any attempt to toss some of the excess sends my son Dumpster diving. He is well schooled in the art by his father, who can't bear to part with a magazine less than five years old or shirts less than three sizes too small. They always check after I've been to the garbage can.</blockquote><br />n<br />nI will in my own defense say this is not true here. Where the kids got the ability to root through the garbage to find broken toys that mom has thrown away is beyond me. I never root through the garbage making sure My Darling Wife hasn't thrown any thing away I want. I learned early in my marriage that if I want to keep something I don't let it in the house where My Darling Wife can find it. She can't throw it away then. Simple solution to that problem. <img src="http://www.sarpysam.com/templates/default/img/emoticons/wink.png" alt=";-)" class="emoticon" /><br />n<br />nThe only thing I would really like to know is where My Darling Wife keeps her broom. Maybe if I hid it she wouldn't attend the Mean Mom Coven meetings any more. The children would really like that.<br />n<br />n<strong>Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded. Fyodor Dostoevsky</strong>