Letters of Intent: to my family

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Dear Grammy and Papa(aka my parents):

Since you have already committed these atrocities in the first 8 hours of your visit, I thought I would clearly lay out for you the rules for the remainder of your visit and any future visits.

First of all, you are NOT to show up EIGHT HOURS ahead of schedule and then be pissed off that I am not at home. You took a plane to get here, so you obviously knew when you were getting in. Since I did not think that you would be arriving for another EIGHT HOURS, I was off picking my children up from preschool when you arrived. You are not allowed to be pissed off about this. Next time, be honest about when you are coming in. I'm not sure what you thought you would "catch" me doing by showing up that early, but it was obnoxious.

Next, Bear(or any of my children) is not allowed to play with a jellyfish on the beach. If that is what he is attempting to do and you tell me he is fine, I might just throw said jellyfish at you.

Also, please refrain from bringing an entire suitcase worth of crap for my children. I know you want to spoil them, but you could have bought them each one semi-nice thing for the amount you spent on the useless crap that I will surely throw in the trash the second you are gone. We have enough clutter, thanks.

You also need to recognize that you do, in fact, have 3 grandchildren in this house. I can count n one hand the number of words you have said to Bear since you arrived. I almost hope he reverts to an old habit and BITES you.

No using a game of memory to try to explain the concept of socialism to Monkey. Also, no bringing up Rush anymore, because I don't want to go through that again.

Btw, you can't ask me if I've gained some weight(I'm not the size 0 or 2 that I used to be, but a size 4 is nothing to sneeze at- and it's not like this is something new, it's called having 3 kids). Nor can you open up all the closets in my house- no, I didn't throw junk in there to hide clutter, they are all organized and there's nothing "secret" in there, but it's still rude to go through someone's house and open up every closet you come to.

There's more, but my head just might explode if I think about it any more at this point, though you can pass this message along to my siblings: I went to an extraordinary amount of effort to collect money from you so that we could pool it all and buy each of your children one big, nice gift on each of their birthdays. So, it totally sucks that you are not doing that now that one of my children is having a birthday. And, in fact, unless you are sending belated gifts, only one of you even bothered to send a present. So, if you think that I will be the birthday fairy and be sure that your children get AWESOME presents from the group next time their birthdays roll around, you are mistaken. I'll go back to getting them something on my own. If you can't be bothered to put any thought or effort into my kids, I'm not going to bust my butt for your kids next time, even though I love them. Seriously, you SUCK.

-someone who wishes her family could just love each other, instead of acting insane