i'll bet little red riding hood never had to deal with mean girls. or their even meaner parents. tho' perhaps wolves come in all kinds of guises. i heard tales yesterday of the awfulness of girls in the seventh grade and the even awfulerness (that's a word i just made up) of their parents. happily, my child was not involved, but i was still shocked.
tales of snotty parents who wouldn't let their daughter play with another girl at her house because she and her family live in a small apartment that wasn't fancy enough for the snotty parents. (i might add that i dropped off said child at her completely ordinary and not at all fancy-looking house yesterday and i wasn't impressed, nor could i see how an apartment, which is all of a block away from their house, was really that inferior.) i hope the child didn't report on our ramshackle, falling down farmhouse to her parents, or she'll never be allowed to come over here again. actually, that's not true, i hope she did report to them, as i'd love a little confrontation on this issue. pretentious gits.
and then there was another tale of a set of snotty parents who bought their child an iPhone 5 in an overtly-stated attempt to make her more popular. happily, it didn't seem to make any difference.
these are nice girls of the pæne pige sort - well, groomed, dressed in a normal, but not over-the-top or designer way. they go to riding and they have long, blunt-cut blonde hair. they appear to be nice girls.
both of these girls ride at the stable where we keep matilde now and at the lesson wednesday, i thought they were riding their own horses. turns out they weren't. neither of them has a horse and they were riding the lesson horses. so much for the pretentions of parents.
what are such parents teaching their children? elitism? snobbishness? in a small, podunk town full of ordinary middle class people? laughable. but i guess you can never underestimate how much people need their albanian. but if their children can't rest in who they are and feel secure, all the iPhone 5s in the world aren't going to help.
