what i am doing on my summer vacation...day #20something?

better late than never. maybe today is the first day of a series of "what i did on my summer vacation"-like journal entries.

today i chose to ignore a heated argument btw my kids about whether or not to set a beetle (that i had trapped in an empty gatorade bottle bc i was too lazy to kill it or shoo it outside) free. o wanted to keep it. k wanted to send it back to its "colony." my son knows more about habitats and the behavior of living non-humans than any adult in our family. anyway, i deliberately ignored this argument despite its escalating volume bc, to me, to acknowledge it would somehow make it more real. and the content of the argument was so stupid that the last thing i wanted to do was validate it.

deep thought: made me wonder how often God must think the same thing about us humans and what we choose to fight over. but, He loves us anyway. and He actually cares about said argument bc He cares about what we care about, whereas i chose to block it out. now if only my cares could become what He cares about, we'd be good.

moving on...

if i chose to apply my psych background, i could easily see that my kids were arguing, not bc they cared so much about hapless beetle, but bc they resented each other over the sacrifices they've had to make in the past 2 weeks.  o has had to sit in numerous dr waiting rooms bc k had eye surgery last week, and his belligerence at follow-up appts has pretty much guaranteed that we will need as many follow-up appts as insurance will allow. in turn, k has had to frequent the pool daily for o's swim practice, but he himself is forbidden from entering it until his eyes are ready to handle chlorinated water. this didn't matter so much last week when it was overcast, but during this morning's 90-degree wait, well, the kid was bitter.

enter, beetle.