I Really Love My Teen, But ..

According to most (well maybe some) people that know me, I am fairly easy going, but there are times when my daughter knows how to push the right buttons.

My pet peeve is when she tells me "Oh Never Mind"  when I ask her to repeat something that she has muttered. She mumbles from the other room and expects me to hear her. Newsflash honey, I don't have ears like a bat or whatever animal is supposed to have good hearing.

She insists she doesn't mumble, but take the other evening for example, when we took the family out to dinner. The restaurant is noisy and Lindsay is sitting across from me. The waiter has brought our drinks, and left again, but the kids are hungry and want to order their meals.

Lindsay asks "Do you want me to sing to him?"
My first response was "Good God No", but just in case, I asked her to repeat what she said.
"I said do you want me to sing to him ?"
"No I don't want you to sing to him" I reply.
"What on earth are you talking about ?" She  asks.
"You said you were going to sing to the waiter" Says I.
Lindsay, now exasperated" "Oh. My. God. I said do you want me to signal him ?"

She blames my hearing, I blame her for mumbling.

 I get a phone call from Lindsay one afternoon. "Hi mum, I'm having ice-cream with my friends, but I don't want to walk home. Can you come and pick me up ?" I have to assume these are friends I haven't met yet, and she is not in any hurry to change that status and introduce us, because her next command is "Don't come in, wait in the parking lot".  Hmm, that makes me want to grab a wig and a clown nose and march right in there singing Rule Britannia at the top of my lungs. It would serve the little brat right.

Just as an aside, Lindsay is taking Latin in school, and likes to tell me what she has learned each day. She told me tonight that the word for mother was "mater", which also happened to be Latin for dictator.  I had stop & think about it, and for the briefest moment I actually believed her !