Haunted houses and apple properties

Yesterday morning I dropped Caroline off at school and then drove to Georgetown to speak at a MOPs group. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes the third time in a week that I have utilized the I-30 toll road around Austin. I cannot adequately express my love for it and especially the fact that the speed limit on it is eighty miles an hour. This makes Sammy Hagar and I so happy.

It totally saved me yesterday because I didn’t properly estimate the amount of time it would take me to get there due to unforeseen circumstances such as Caroline’s current bang woes and that my gas tank was almost on empty. Fortunately, the gas situation was far easier to remedy than the bang situation. Honestly, I can’t even keep track if we’re growing them out or going to get them cut again. It changes by the hour. And that hour is usually between 6:45 and 7:45 a.m.

Georgetown was great. And on my way home I saw a large billboard advertising something called The House of Torment at Highland Mall. According to P, this would describe any mall experience, particularly an hour with me in Anthropologie. But I realized on second glance that this sign was referring to a haunted house at the mall.

Here’s something you may not know about me. I hate a haunted house. I’ve always hated a haunted house. Because I give new meaning to the words scaredy cat.

In fact, I remember in elementary school that there was a big Halloween carnival every year and there was always a haunted house in Mrs. Montgomery’s music room. And I’d always walk through it because, well, all my friends were doing it. Hooray for peer pressure! In hindsight it couldn’t have been that scary but I remember thinking it was the most terrifying thing ever. I hated every minute of it.

I think I managed to avoid haunted houses completely until some point in college when I went with a group of friends to the haunted house the KA’s did every Halloween. Obviously the only reason I was talked into this was CUTE BOYS. But I will tell you it didn’t end well. All of my friends and I were so scared that we basically ran through the last three rooms and then tripped and fell like dominoes on our way out, landing unceremoniously on the sidewalk. I can’t imagine why none of us got a date with a KA after that.

Anyway, I realize some people enjoy a haunted house. I am just not one of them. I do not care to stick my hand in things that feel like brains or to be chased by anyone with a chainsaw. Call me crazy.

I drove straight to pick up Caroline from school and she reminded me that I’d told her I would drive her to Learning Express because she wanted to purchase a Rainbow Loom with her own money. Did anyone see this coming? That bracelets made out of rubberbands would become a cottage industry? I have no vision.

So we went to Learning Express so she could buy the Rainbow Loom and assorted bags of rubberbands in various colors. And then we came back home where I informed her she had to finish all her homework before she could craft any of her fine rubberband jewelry.

I am the worst.

She started with a reading comprehension worksheet and then moved on to math. This required me to google “Division Terms” because I couldn’t remember which number was the “dividend” and which was the other thing that I had no idea about because I have a calculator on my phone. It’s called the “divisor” in case you’re interested.

The next thirty minutes were spent inhaling and exhaling all the air in the room with deep sighs until she finally finished the last problem. And then it was time for science.

Science homework involved a paragraph that discussed the properties of various things. There are physical properties that can be observed and then some other type of properties that require tools to measure. She needed to write an entire page about all the properties of an apple. And I know it had to be an entire page because she had the same assignment last week except it was supposed to be about mixtures and solutions found at the beach. I told her surely 3/4 of the page was good enough but I was wrong. Her teacher wanted the entire page filled out.

Judge me if you want to, but I encouraged her to use her largest handwriting to extol the properties of an apple because, seriously, how much can you say about an apple? They’re red and delicious in a pie.

(If you are her science teacher and happen to be reading this, I’m totally kidding. It’s just a little writing device called humor.)

(If you’re anyone else reading this, I’m totally not kidding. I absolutely told her she needed to write bigger.)

She sighed and blew her bangs out of her face multiple times and asked who invented homework in the first place and shared her theories about government conspiracies to ruin the lives of kids. And that’s when it hit me.

This is why I don’t need a haunted house. Because I’m already a rubberband-withholding head of a house of torment.