a day out, with children

Oh right, I have this blog. Sorry, I sorta forgot. There seems to be a fair bit of work piling up, odd since it's August. Bavaria usually slams shut in August, and L isn't working (and how do you like that, eh? Back when we had the whole translation/exploitation debate, she virtuously informed me that she and K work more than their contracted hours, heavily implying that I should too ... well, because they've both worked so very hard, they get the whole month off - paid in full, if I understand this correctly. So much for virtue and dedication.) but right before she took off for the month, she asked me to put up a page for a conference, and 14 "little pages", one for each speaker's abstract. Two words for ya: Yeah. Right.

Anyway. In light of my massive workload (not just the 15 new pages, which, in case I did not make it clear above, I will probably not do, I have a few site updates and the redesign also), I decided to take the boys to Munich today. To be a Good Mom, and to have some Time for them, because I'm almost always too busy. So we took a tram ride, and went to a store to buy some Duel Masters thing for Kilian, and bought an airplane for Gus, and went to Burger King, and then went and saw the Herbie movie.

And the little monsters spent the whole time hitting eachother and mouthing off to me. This is exactly the way they treat their grandparents, who bend over backwards to be nice to them. Today I was nice, and I got the Oompa treatment. Perhaps this is a pattern.

Robert comments on this a lot. Not so much with Gus, he says, but with Kilian, it's really hard to do nice things for him. You set aside a whole day to do something fun, and he's like, no thanks, I want to hang out with the world's most annoying neighbor kid and play Yu-Gi-Oh, just like I have every damn day for the last four years (okay, I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist). And then if you make him go, he might have fun, but he's just as likely to complain the whole time. It's exhausting. And Gus, well, he's generally nicer, if moody, but he worships Kilian, and imitates him, even in his worst behavior.

So I guess the solution is not to take them both anywhere, just take one kid per trip.