Pardon my ungraceful re-entrance

I'm a little surprised to find that no one's stopped by to leave me a "Lazy-Ass Blogger" Award. It's been days, how has the internet survived without me? In my defense...ah, fuck it, no one really cares. School's over and I've descended to a disgraceful level of slothfulness in matters of housework, hygiene, homeowork and -- what's an aitchey word for something to do with blogging? H...H...hell if I know. A family friend from Halifax and her daughter arrived just as school was let out for summer. The friend stayed with my parents and the daughter scampered over here as fast as her little legs could carry her because she somehow discerned that in the permissive parent races I was waaaaay above her conscientious mother. She has a black and white television at home and has to go to a friend's apartment on Sunday to play on the computer because THEY DON'T HAVE ONE (suffering jesus my kids are spoiled). She left this morning, a drooling, dribbling, dead-eyed shell after days of unrestrained movie-viewing and Webkinz and Club Penguin debauchery. (On a slightly related note, I had a brief impulse to throttle Eve when she made some comment about her 'whole life sucking' because she had to wait a few days to get a pedicure, and then a brief unflattering moment of self-realization a few hours later when the power was out for a couple of hours and then came back on and my laptop had crashed and the tv had no sound and the PS3 wouldn't cough up the movie, and in the midst of all of these incredibly trivial totally-irrelevant-to-actual-life inconveniences I thought 'holy turkey-balls this SUCKS' -- whiny narcissist, meet same. Fantastic).

Angus is playing baseball. Ask him what he's doing for the summer? Playing baseball. Really. He practices from eight to eleven in the morning, and six to eight-thirty at night, every day. He doesn't really like to eat much before playing baseball, which is tricky but not insurmountable when he's playing two games a week in the spring. When he's playing pretty much non-stop? Well, it's a bit of a problem. I asked him if he seriously expects me to just kinda not let him eat all summer, except around nine o'clock at night when he gets home, and he just gave me this look, like 'work it out, woman'. I resorted to what's quickly become the go-to summertime empty threat -- do what I say or no baseball. He more or less plays along, as if we aren't both fully cognizant of the fact that his coaches would be over here in an instant to hogtie me and hide me in the nearest bog if I messed with their precious A-team. Humph.

While we're on the subject of my kids making me sustain one cerebro-vascular incident after another, on Friday night Eve and Lily were out in the sandbox and I was making dinner in the kitchen, listening to them through the screen door. Shirley adopted Lily from China when she was about one. They were in town partly to attend a reunion of families who adopted children at the same time. Eve knows Lily was adopted. Apparently I neglected, though, to cover some of the finer points of adoption and how we talk about it, particularly to children who have actually BEEN adopted. Was it better or worse than the time when, after my mother described the spa to her, she walked in with my Mom to get her pedicure, looked around and loudly declared "you were wrong, Grandma, they're not ALL Chinese!"? You be the judge.

Eve and Lily: innocuous childish chatter

Lily: "My Mom (blah blah blah)

Eve: "Well technically she's not your Mom.:

OH. MY. EFFING. GOD. I narrowly avoid slicing off my thumb with a butcher knife. I blink experimentally to make sure I haven't actually gone blind with shame and horror. I dash to the screen door. I take a deep breath so I don't rupture my larynx.

Me: (really really trying to be calm) "Eve?"

Eve: "What?"

Me: "Shirley ABSOLUTELY IS Lily's Mom".

Eve: (looking totally perplexed) "But I thought you said she was adopted."

Me: (noticing that Lily is plastering the canoe with sand, looking completely unperturbed, awakening a faint hope that she hasn't been irreparably scarred and Shirley isn't going to take out a full-page newspaper ad about this epic parenting fail) "Yes. Shirley adopted her. That means she's HER MOM."

Eve: (watching me with a wary kind of forebearance, the way you might watch a squirrel to figure out if it's about to leap at you and sink its rabies-lathered teeth into your cheek) "Oh...kay."

I retreat, feeling like I still haven't really addressed the situation effectively, but not wanting to harp on it while Lily'a still there. As I go back to making dinner, I hear Lily say "well, she didn't actually give birth to me, so technically you're right", and her tone is pure "I don't know what your Mom's PROBLEM is", and Eve says "yeah, like, I guess your parents probably just couldn't handle a kid", and Lily says "yeah, it was China, and they were probably really poor", and Eve says, "so, were ya just wanderin' around when she found you?" "Nah, I was in an orphanage". "Oh! Like in Madeline?"

I had gin for supper.