Do you have a difficult time keep your kids, your grand-kids, your nieces and nephews, your younger siblings–heck yourself still and patient when waiting for excitement to begin? You know, when you get those little fluttering knots in your stomach when excitement sneaks upon you. Like when my kids run up and down the sidewalks tripping other people, stomp on their daddy’s cowboy hat, and then try to climb a construction fence while waiting for a parade to start. Yet somehow they either don’t hear my threats of “No candy for you!” and “I’m telling your daddy when he gets home!” Either that or they quite simply couldn’t care less.
Maybe they just don’t believe me. We’ve got to work on that.
However, when it’s all done–the candy is packed, the parade ends, we cross the street and walk back to our cars–somehow I forget that I was mad at them two minutes before for not standing next to me and running off every which-a-way. So I neglect to tell their dad about the fiasco at the parade, how they’re not supposed to get any candy for being little turds, and how they stepped on his expensive hat. I guess I’m just a sucker. That and I know I lost battle at the parade.
They just think they won.
Check out the 2009 Flower Mound Holiday Parade on Whrrl (feedreaders click over). The first photo I took after I had threatened them for the fiftieth time:
