Question of The Day: 55

Do you still worry about pumping the gas to an exact dollar figure when you pay with a credit card?

I had to stop to get gas today, and because the Babies! in the car, I used my debit card to pay at the pump. Despite the fact that I wasn't paying with cash, and had no reason to worry about going over or getting change back, I still did that same thing I've done all my life, slowly closing in on $10.00: $9.92. $9.95. $9.99... ah... did it.

And each time I do that, I think Why? Why not just stop at $9.97, or $10.01, or $11.37, for that matter? But I don't. It just doesn't seem right, pumping gas to some weird number.

They are baby geniuses.

I think maybe the hardest part about parenting

-- other than finding a way to keep the pants on the Babies!--

is not knowing what's "normal" or not normal. It starts with the pregnancy itself: how much weight should be gained, what should be eaten, how much should the baby kick, how much should the baby NOT kick, and so on. It drove me crazy.

Then, once the Babies! are there, it's even worse: should they be sitting up? Holding their heads up? Crawling? Standing? Walking? Running? Talking? Eating this? Not eating that?

And other parents around me are no help. I think they're just showing off. I'll say something at the park like "No, they don't talk much yet, they've got maybe 20 words, counting 'banano' as a word," and other parents say something like "Oh, well, my kid's already writing his dissertation for Harvard. He's 1. Your kid sucks."

Back when the Babies! were in daycare, there was another set of twins, and I asked one of their parents whether their babies slept through the night, 'cause ours weren't.

"Oh, sure, they sleep for 12 hours straight," the mom said. But she looked really tired, the kind of tired you get from having kids that don't sleep through the night and then having to lie about it to me.

I've learned to deal with it by going to "Parents Connect," a website where you can pick up all kinds of parenting tips and advice, and get actual posts from other actual parents, parents who don't have the same incentive to lie because they're not standing there in the room with you.

Like today, I was reading an article on "50 Ways To Take The Junk Out Of Junk Food," about a book of that name that gives tips on how to get kids to eat healthier. Since Mr F and Mr Bunches exist primarily on chocolate chip cookies, it's nice to find out that other parents have that problem, and that there's a book about it out there.

And to you other parents that I meet: I'm kidding about all of this. Mr F and Mr Bunches not only speak in complete sentences, they do so in English, Latin and Greek. All at the same time. While piloting a space shuttle. Manually.

For Want Of A Pen And Paper, The Kingdom Was Lost (I Fought The Library, 2)

I am fighting the library over their claim that I did not return two DVDs, and I intend to win. Part 1 of this is here.

No sooner did I get home yesterday than I found, sitting right on Sweetie's desk, a partially torn-DVD cover for the Baby Galileo DVD I had only just hours before emailed the library about, claiming that I had returned it.

Which puts me, I think, on the wrong side, here, morally, at least a little. But I decided how I'd handle it: I would simply take that DVD on Saturday morning, before the library opened, and drop it in the slot, before anyone knew. That would correct the problem, because then I would, in fact, have returned the DVD, just like I said in my email. Of a day earlier. But, what, is timing everything in morality?

I had, on Friday night, already, taken back a couple of CDs I borrowed, and dropped those into the after-hours slot, with Sweetie as my witness: I made her come with me and open each and make sure that the proper CD was in there and then watch while I went up to the return slot and put them in, so it was almost like I was returning it a day earlier.

Right?

Then, this morning, I loaded up Mr F and Mr Bunches to go to the library and put my plan into action. But I got a crisis of conscience on the way there, and thought what kind of example am I setting?

That, and I found, in the car, the case to another DVD that I thought I'd returned, meaning that I'd sent that one back in the wrong case.

So I decided, instead, to do the right thing, "the right thing" being return the DVD, and the DVD case, with a note telling them what was going on, and with that morally-correct position in mind, I pulled up in the parking lot and was ready to write the note when I realized that Sweetie has neither paper nor a pen in her car (which is the car I have to take with the Babies!, because it's got the car seats.)

I finally found the back of a house listing for one of the McMansions we'd wanted to price to see how rich you have to be to live near my boss, but I couldn't find a pen, and I didn't want to wait and take the Babies! into the library and try to explain the whole thing while they ran amuck.

Instead, I took the Babies! to the mall playground and spent the day not going to the library, and my page on their website says I still have an overdue DVD, and I'm onto Plan C, only I don't know what that is.

But I will win this.