Reading for Success

(scene opens in crowded middle school cafeteria orientation night)

Alpha: (pushing through milling crowd) Mom! Mom!
Me: (looks up from a signing a million pieces of paperwork) What?
Alpha: I need five dollars (points to bake sale table). I want to get a blunt cake.
Me: (pauses, processes) Blunt. Cake.
Alpha: Yeah! Little round cakes with vanilla frosting!
Me: Oh. Those are bundt cakes. Bun.d.nt. (draws out sounds) Not blunt. Those aren’t legal. Yet.
Alpha: (confused as well as stubborn) Really! They’re blunt cakes. I saw the “L” in there!
Me: Then you’re really not getting one apart from me not having the five dollars.

Unimpressed

(scene opens in moderately organized kitchen)

Alpha: So where are we going?
Me: St. Louis. We’re spending the night and on Monday we’re going to see the eclipse! (with great enthusiasm)
Alpha: (dismayed) But we have school on Monday.
Me: I’m taking you out of school. Once in a lifetime chance! Non-academic learning potential!
Alpha: (wilting further) We’re getting gym locker combinations on Monday.
Me: Solar. Eclipse. In. Totality.
Alpha: (Sagging completely) It’s just….just that…its less time I can hang out with my friend.
Me: Holy god. It’ll be another 99 years before this happens again. Could you just try to enjoy the fact that your nerdly space-obsessed mother finds a 3 minute event to be more important than sitting at a desk for six hours?

Camouflage

(scene opens at the park)

Me: (sitting on bench, running fingers through Gammas’s two-toned hair) The blue is starting to fade. I like the slate blue of it, it looks like stone. Maybe you’re an Earth Witch.
Gamma: (resigned patience) My hair isn’t stone, mommy.
Me: If we do the color again, what color do you want to do? Pink? Red? Green?
Gamma: Black.
Me: (oddly disappointed) Black? Why would you want black?
Gamma: Because I walk through shadow.
Me: Oh. I guess that’s okay then.