I'll have a dish of life, no teen-age please...

I think my blogs are getting boring, but at least I'm still posting. My inner artist is on vacation--lately she would rather stare gently at a wall than do anything creative. Perhaps this is because my inner artist is in repression, as I am forcing her not to feel things that she is feeling. It is, I think, a gentle form of protest on her part to refuse to write if I won't let her write about the things that matter to her.

My energy is completely sapped. I chaperoned my cousin Hanna's 15th Birthday Sleepover at Grandma's Lake house this weeekend. The WHOLE ENTIRE weekend. Only after I was there for 24 hours did I begin to wonder what I had gotten myself into. All in all it was a success, but I realize that I can only handle so much 15-year-old girl talk and I realize that I am SO glad that I am not 15 years old anymore and I don't have to sit on the phone talking to boys about absolutely nothing for three hours and I don't have to have stupid conversations like

"Jennifer Lorway is sooooo stuck on herself."
"No she's not."
"Well, she acts like it."
"No she doesn't. She's just prettier than everyone else so everyone hates her."

or...

"What about Travis Chapman?"
(Chorus) "No way, he has about a hundred extra teeth."

It's so difficult for me being around teenagers lately because it really bothers me how they think the whole world should revolve around them. I just want to hit them on the head and grow them up.

Friday night I made them lasagna for dinner, and it took forever to cook because Grandma's oven is all high-tech and weird. You have to press "bake", then "temperature", then the "up" or "down" arrow, then "time", then the "hour" and "minute" arrows, then you have to press "start." I forgot to press "start," so it took forever. Anyways, I made the girls dinner and brought it downstairs and set the table and made a huge salad and made sure they got fed. I washed all the dishes. I did all of this with grumpy Issac having meltdowns because it was WAY past his bedtime. I received no real thanks for this, and to compound the problem, I got blamed for getting grandma's oven dirty and spent Issac's entire naptime the next day scrubbing her oven rack.

The lake is beautiful, but still, it was a difficult weekend. Altough we had fun on the lake, and in the lake breeze, most of the day was occupied either keeping Issac off of Grandma's nice furniture or keeping him from running off the edge of the dock.

You should have seen the girls when I suggested that they start cleaning up after themselves. It wasn't the girls, per se, it was just Hanna. She rolled her eyes and gave me this disgusted look, like I'm some adult ruining her life. I'm not sure she even realized that she did it, because I told her it really makes me angry when she does that since I am sacrificing time in MY life to help her out, and then she said defensively, "I didn't roll my eyes at you! geeze!" and then proceeded to roll them again and scrunch up her mouth in an even uglier, more angry glare.

To be fair, I think Hanna was just as exasperated as I was. I remember what it was like when I was fifteen, and invited a bunch of girls over--it was fun for the first 12 hours, and then we all started pissing each other off, breaking off into cliques, gossiping about each other, getting on each other's nerves. We didn't want to do this, it just happened. I remember wanting to be the center of attention at my birthday party and being upset and disappointed when I wasn't.

I was so glad to see Lynn and Windy. They came to rescue me, and brought a bottle of wine, and after Issac finally fell asleep we left him in the room next to the girls' and we walked out to the dock with a blanket and we talked and let the stars and the moon sparkle off the water and the wind wash our faces.

I was happy to learn that Issac had woken up a few times while I was gone and Hanna had to put him back to sleep for me, as though we were somehow getting closer to even in helping each other out.