Brats.

Crap, crap, crap. Seven pm on a Sunday. Already, the weekend feels like it's over. The only thing left is the laundry, and how can I get excited about that? It doesn't help matters, actually, that we took a nap this afternoon. My neck would like to file charges of abuse, as we fell asleep snuggled on the bed strangely. And my eyes are burning sleepily, not to mention the hour of wasted weekend time. Still. A happy nap on a Sunday afternoon is about as good as life gets. :)

Oh! And let's all be proud of my darling totte, who mowed for two hours and then did the weedeating. I was going to cook some fabulous dinner for him since he was so excellent this afternoon, but as it turns out, we don't have any food and I couldn't think of a single thing that sounded good enough to go get ingredients for. We had lunch rather late, though, so I guess that might be part of it.

My cousin's little boy, who's four, insists on hitting people. One might argue that it's not my place to worry about how to stop him from doing this, but as he slapped my arm hard enough today to leave prints that lasted for several hours, I might disagree. Besides that, his mother has given her blessing and desire for any of us to hit him back (appropriately, of course) if he hits us, so it's not like she doesn't realize there's a problem. I don't really want to hit him back, though, just come up with some other sort of deterrent. I'd settle for making him stop hitting me. ;) Any thoughts?

As for the issue of physical disciple itself, I've firmly decided that I'm not going to make up my mind on how I feel about it until I have a kid of my own, but right now we're both more in the middle of the road than when we first met. Probably leaning more towards being against it, but probably not absolutely, either. I swear, Magnus compared spanking to sex with goats during our first conversation about the subject--similarly barbaric, if you didn't follow the connection. He's since spent more time with children and I've since realized that just because it might be legal here doesn't mean that it's necessarily right.

Speaking of having kids.. there are a lot of things that I'm sure I'll feel differently about when I have a child of my own. I've never said that. But almost every time I have an opinion about parenting, someone (irl) bitches at me that I don't know what I'm talking about until I have my own to worry about. It really disturbs me, actually, because obviously I can't say that my kids will be perfect angels. Wouldn't even want them to be. What bugs me, though, is how defensive everyone gets and how they assume I know nothing because I haven't popped a baby out. I didn't realize that all brain power comes from becoming a parent; why didn't someone tell me that? Would have saved me a lot of time and energy learning things the hard way. Anyway. Certain people that I know with children tend to let them do whatever they want, and worse yet, they let the kids do things that they know they shouldn't be doing just because they can't or won't stand up to them. They tell them "no", the kid does it anyway, and they roll their eyes and let it go. If I say so much as a word about the inconsistencies of this approach, someone gets on her high horse about how I don't understand because I don't have any and so I don't know how hard it is. No, I don't know, but I never said it would be easy, just that they're raising brats with the current approach. (I did not, btw, use those words.. rofl.) Just because it's hard doesn't mean that I'm wrong. I probably should make this entry friends-only due to this spontaneous little rant, but I'm not going to. So there. :P

I'll end this with a bit of humor, if it translate into text. I've been waiting for totte to tell this story, but he doesn't seem to want to. Anyway, Devon (the hitter) smacked Magnus a while back. Various admonishments went unheeded, so Magnus bent down and told him, with a straight face, that if he didn't stop hitting, he would whip him. Magnus lets the kids climb all over him, so any threat from him usually loses something. This time, though, Devon must have believed it. A few minutes later, Magnus saw him shuffling around the livingroom, muttering to himself.

"He's gonna whip me. That's gonna suck."