Just another day in the Pierce household...

Yesterday morning, two minutes before the bus arrives, Merry (my ten-year-old blonde) informs me that her foot hurts. I inspect her foot and discover no less than four quite large splinters deeply embedded in her second toe, which splinters she informs me she picked up the previous evening while washing the car, "but they only started hurting a minute ago." So, resigning myself to the fact that she is now going to miss the bus and therefore I am going to have to take her to school myself and that is going to make me late to work...I go find tweezers. But the splinters are in way too deep; so I go to the next level: out comes the needle. Merry is not ordinarily one to suffer in silence, or indeed to allow any possible drama to fail to be extracted from a situation; but I do my best to be as gentle as possible, and in return she grits her teeth and all in all does pretty well...except for when, in the middle of particularly stubborn Splinter Number Three, she asks me plaintively, "Daddy, are you sure it's legal to stick needles in little girls' toes?"

The day had started in rather dramatic fashion already, as the previous day our air conditioning had gone dead, and by mid-April Houston is already hot and humid by ordinary standards (though in Houston, mid-80's means that summer's definitely still a ways in the future). So I had kids scattered all over the house trying to find any place where they could get a cross breeze. I get up in the morning and walk past Anya and Kinya's room, and there is fourteen-year-old Kinya -- who, to her father's great inconvenience, given that we live in a neighborhood with a superfluity of fourteen-year-old boys, is a hottie even when the air conditioning is fully operational -- lying sprawled on her bed with both of their double bedroom doors wide open. She has kicked the sheet off in her sleep and her T-shirt has ridden well up her midriff and her unmentionables are not exactly boxers or bloomers and Sean and Kegan are about to be wandering back and forth past her bedroom; so I tiptoe in and do my best to restore some decorum without waking her up (since she still has half an hour to sleep). I tiptoe back out thinking to myself, "Well, THAT'S a different way to start the day."

Forty minutes later the older kids' bus leaves; so I go to wake up Rusty. I turn his bedroom doorknob, I swing open the door -- and there's a full moon shinin', baby.

So in the end I found myself grateful that Kinya was, all things considered, actually relatively modest...