I’m not stupid, I know girls are nothing like boys. For instance if there are three girls getting ready to go somewhere, there will always be one still in the house when everyone else is in the car and a number of trips back inside by the others for the water bottles and the correct shoes and the jumper they’ll need at the mall. At a loss this fine but rather windy Saturday morning, it was decided we’d go first to the library and then shopping for nails. Not the sort of nails a mother of boys imagines but finger nails that apparently you can wear to school but the grumpy grandmother thinks they will need to be quite a bit shorter than the fangs I’ve seen in the past. And I’d prefer it if they weren’t yellow but I’m not fighting the colour war as well. The kitchen now smells like a glue factory and I’ve been educated by overhearing You Tubers (yep, it’s a word), with their high pitched, American accented pre-teen voices, putting make-up on one another. I give the “Why would anyone cover up such beautiful skin with makeup?” pitch but am shot down by a duo of nail technicans telling me all she’s doing is making her “model” look as though she’s her sister. One might be white and the other black for all I know but it’s the subtext that makes me long for a broken window from a cricket ball. Thankfully they move on to other equally perky YouTubers making slime which is at least gross enough to make us laugh. But away from the internet many things remain unchanged. Give a kid a couple of dollars and they go straight for the chocolate and machines in the mall that require $2 for sixty seconds of suspense as a hook hovers over a stuffed animal then misses it and gives you a single wrapped sweet as compensation. That is one, single $2 lolly. Even the kids are aware it’s a rip off and I thought we were doing well on them understanding they were gambling and everything was in favour of the machine when Ruby hooked a dinasour. It wasn’t until we were coming home that she worked out it only had 2 legs.
Robyn Anderson 