Things I will not do. Ever.

Now that I've been a mother for seven years and an adult for an amount of time I will not currently specify, I've realized that you should probably not say "I will NEVER do that" very often. Almost never, really. I was the best parent in the world before I had kids. "Oh, I'll never let my kids do that", I'd say to my husband, and we sipped coffee and silently passed judgement on the people around us who had procreated. The reality, of course, is the that you don't 'let' your children do anything. Children are going to do stuff, bad stuff, no matter how great of a parent you are, and it's got nothing to do with the fact that you force them to eat vegetables or not. A good parent knows what battles to fight, and the longer you are a parent, the less battles you're willing to fight.

That being said, there are a couple of things I'm not going to do. Mainly because they are stupid. Also maybe a little bit because I'm old(er) and didn't grow up texting and using the internet. Al Gore hadn't invented it yet when I was a kid. I also didn't hang out in coffee shops much in good ol' Fond du Lac, WI, because there weren't any coffee shops there. When we were in high school the cool (I use the term cool very loosely here) thing to do was to go to the Country Kitchen and drink coffee there. We were rebels, that's for sure.

OK, here they are. Number one, I will not use abbreviations while texting or tweeting, etc. that mean "rolling on the floor laughing", or "laughing out loud", or anything like that. I won't do it. It's dumb. Really? You're rolling on the floor laughing right now? Literally rolling around on the ground of wherever you are, be it in the privacy of your own home or out and about in public? I don't think you are. Perhaps you think what you just read was very amusing, but let's not get too carried away here.

As for "laughing out loud". Well, that's great. Laughing is awesome. You know what isn't? LOL. That, right there, is the first and last time I have typed and or written those letters together as a stand alone abbreviation.

The same goes for all of the other abbreviations people use. I'm going to tell you right now, if you use an abbreviation while texting me, I probably won't know what it is. I just recently learned that IDK means 'I don't know'. I know this makes me sound old, but I don't care. Just say what you mean. We're raising a whole group of kids who are actually going to say things like LOL (whoops, I lied up there), ROFL, IDK, WTH, etc. Words are good. Use them.

The other thing I refuse to do is use coffee shops' terms for small, medium, and large. No, I don't want a grande. I want a medium. The middle size. A tall* is not a small. Some may say it's the opposite of small. I, for instance, am not tall. Today I went to Target and decided to stop at the Starbucks for a pumpkin spice latte. I rarely get fancy coffee drinks, but it was rainy and dreary and windy and I had no kids with me. It was clearly time to celebrate.

"Hello! What can I get for you?"

"I'll have a pumpkin spice latte with skim milk."

"What size?"

"Medium"

"Would you like whip on that?"

(Is it really so hard to say whipped cream?)

"Nope"

"OK, that's a grande skinny pumpkin spice latte with no whip..."

Is it just me or does that sound kind of ridiculous?

I know this whole post makes me sound like some crotchety old person who has nothing better to do with her time than complain. I know that. Yet I still wrote it, which is another nice thing about growing up and getting out of your twenties and starting to feel really comfortable in your own** skin. You care less and less what people think of you.

*Full disclosure. I totally had to go to the Starbucks and Caribou coffee websites to see what their sizes were. I now know that at Starbucks a small is a small, the next size up is a tall, then the top two sizes are grande and venti. I still have no idea what they are at Caribou.

**I proofread this and the first time I typed it I said "old skin" instead of "own skin". Wow. Freudian slip much?