noadvertising | Dec. 9th, 2020

...from doing absolutely nothing. Hubby did all the driving, he always does, except when he gets a beer. But son number three and his wife did not even have beer at home, because they do not drink. Never ever, they say. Except when they are at our house. Then number three has one or two beers for dinner, and daughter-in-law one or two glasses of prosecco, and then off to the bed it is, because none of the two tolerate alcohol well. I only wonder why they even drink it when here. We had steak for lunch, and I did my best to eat it. I do not like grilled beef. I eat it when raw and finely chopped, I like stews, but steak is a no go. I made it through the course without causing problems, and I have to admit it tasted fairly good. Elsa was lovely, did not even throw one of the tantrums she does now and then, preferably at a shop, where a howling child on the floor always attracts attention, mostly of the elderly population, and daughter-in-law has been given lots of not so nice advices for such unbecoming behaviour. I got asked what I had done then, when one of our bunch had done that sort of stunt. I have to admit that in the beginning I had been flabbergasted when seeing my usually placid child writhe on the dirty floor of a shopping mall while howling like mad. After a few fruitless attempts at soothing the little one I did the unthinkable: I simply left and turned into the next aisle to let my child ride out its temper tantrum. The moment child did not see me anymore the tantrum miraculously vanished into thin air and did not come back even though I reappeared, picked the little revolutionary up and finished shopping. Mum was back, that was what was important. Daughter-in-law will give it a try, she said, because all her studying child psychology did not prepare her for reality. So Elsa behaved like an angel up to the moment hubby and I said our good-byes. Then she put on her boots, snatched her coat and climbed into our car, determined to go with us to visit aunt Lil and Namo. We did the only thing we could and left in a hurry. The howling of the little one was really impressive! At 7:45 we picked up the pizzas we had ordered and came back home at 8:30. Curfew starts at 8 PM, but there were lots of cars still on their way, maybe because so many are fed up with the current situation, which does not bode well for Christmas family celebrations. At least the shops, which had re-opened the day before, did not get stormed as was expected. People now order via Amazon, partly because the online shopping platform our Federal Economic chamber had commisioned to make us purchase goods at local tradespersons is so bad that a fresh IT student would have done better and, most of all, cheaper than the 650000 Euro wasted in such a fail!