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Nov. 5th, 2019 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyDear Care and Feeding,
We live in a drought-impaired area; my in-laws reside in one of the wettest places in North America. Although we have official water-use restrictions, my in-laws ignore them when they visit: taking 40-minute showers, running the dishwasher (which came with the house but which we don’t use) multiple times daily, brushing their teeth with the water running, etc. But their biggest complaint is our lack of lawn: They openly hate on our xeriscaping and food garden.
The problem is how the kids react to them. I got an earful from my mother-in-law after our 11-year-old politely explained what she’d learned at school about the importance of water conservation in a desert community. Her grandmother was insulted and reprimanded my daughter sternly. She was concerned about how the kids “won’t grow up normally with these crazy restrictions” and without a lawn to play on. To that end, my father-in-law attempted to secretly have a lawn installed because “kids needs lawns.” Our 8-year-old son has bought into it and is now begging for a lawn so he can be like “normal kids.” The thing is, few if any people in our area have lawns, and certainly no kids at his school do, so it’s hardly normal.
So, how do we handle this? What do I say to my daughter about her conversation with her grandmother? To my ears, she was being kind, even saying things like, “I understand that it rains all the time where you live, but … ” However, her grandmother took it as being stubborn and argumentative. Now the two seem distant, and my in-laws clearly favor my son. And what do I say to my son about the lawn which, frankly, is the last thing on God’s not-so-green earth that is going to happen?
—The Lawn Is a Unicorn
( Read more... )
We live in a drought-impaired area; my in-laws reside in one of the wettest places in North America. Although we have official water-use restrictions, my in-laws ignore them when they visit: taking 40-minute showers, running the dishwasher (which came with the house but which we don’t use) multiple times daily, brushing their teeth with the water running, etc. But their biggest complaint is our lack of lawn: They openly hate on our xeriscaping and food garden.
The problem is how the kids react to them. I got an earful from my mother-in-law after our 11-year-old politely explained what she’d learned at school about the importance of water conservation in a desert community. Her grandmother was insulted and reprimanded my daughter sternly. She was concerned about how the kids “won’t grow up normally with these crazy restrictions” and without a lawn to play on. To that end, my father-in-law attempted to secretly have a lawn installed because “kids needs lawns.” Our 8-year-old son has bought into it and is now begging for a lawn so he can be like “normal kids.” The thing is, few if any people in our area have lawns, and certainly no kids at his school do, so it’s hardly normal.
So, how do we handle this? What do I say to my daughter about her conversation with her grandmother? To my ears, she was being kind, even saying things like, “I understand that it rains all the time where you live, but … ” However, her grandmother took it as being stubborn and argumentative. Now the two seem distant, and my in-laws clearly favor my son. And what do I say to my son about the lawn which, frankly, is the last thing on God’s not-so-green earth that is going to happen?
—The Lawn Is a Unicorn
( Read more... )