there is a self-absorbed woman who attends our gym. i’ve come to this opinion of her because every time she arrives she requires a personal trainer to keep her motivated and entertained, and her workouts seem to occupy and prevent others from using a full quarter of the gym. there are also superficial indications of this woman’s temperament but i won’t detail all of that here.

a few days ago i was walking in to the market and there was a woman on a cell phone standing at the passenger door of her car. a man in the car next to her had just completed putting his groceries in his trunk and began to patiently wait for the woman to move so he could get in his car.

watching this, and noticing that the woman was oblivious i made a gesture to the man that he should knock her over to get to his car. the man and i shared a smile and i walked in to the market somewhat disappointed that the obnoxious, self-absorbed woman hadn’t been decked.

a few minutes later in the produce section, the rude woman i had seen in the parking lot walked by and was none other than my obnoxious gym mate.

my now ten year old nephew (of some random person’s war fame) turned in the following book report.

allegedly his teacher took off points for not staying on topic, i think she needs to find him other topics…

ethan seems have to arrived at another milestone in his development. he is bringing home homework with words that he has spelled on his own. he is playing more imaginative games by himself and when he wants to play with us he is asking for monopoly. when we capitulate to playing monopoly, he can cipher out his own money. even, the neighbors have noticed and this weekend asked “who is that teenager in you house?”

this is all very cool, except that this new milestone has put some distance between he and logan and you can see that logan is missing her best friend.

given the near heroine like addiction to plastic surgery and botox our generation appears to have, it just occurred to natalie and i that we may be the ones that look odd as we age naturally, not as it should be, the other way around.

when i was thirteen years old i went to a late night drive-in to see an american werewolf in london.

early the next day, i was out in the fog of a cool autumn morning delivering papers on my bicycle. i never rolled my papers, so as i approached each house i would remove a paper from my satchel, lay it down on the doorstep and then ride away without stopping.

at one of the last houses on my route, with the sun just starting to rise and cut through the fog, i had dropped a paper at the door and was riding out the driveway past an el camino when the quiet morning was rent with horrific snarling and howling. scenes of jack being torn to pieces across the yorkshire moors came to mind as i leaped off my bike and turned around raising my paper bag to fend off the attack.

the attack never came, but years were taken off my life all the same. the el camino had two large dog crates in its bed with a werewolf (or some may say large doberman pincher) in each…

yesterday i remarked on the new level of cunning my kids had achieved, naively thinking that was a plateau of sorts that they would test out for a while not realizing it was merely a one day stop in their diabolic progression.

today my son came home with a “caught being good” card from school. before i could figure out how he had earned the card, he asked if i could put some similarly colored paper in my printer and make lots of copies of the card.

with my earlier sense of pride waning, i asked why…

he ducked the question for a while before finally admitting he could turn them in to the principal for treats.

six years old and already masterminding a counterfeiting plot. that certainly trumps the mundane manipulation of a babysitter.

i will always mark my kids development this week through their realization that a new babysitter opens up the endless possibilities of redefining all the rules…

i obviously chose my profession wisely, because amongst my peers i come across as quite ordinary…

“who flushed up the toiled?!?”

given the tone and attitude with which logan asks this question, you’d be certain it was her responsibility to fix the problem.

but in the end its always my problem and the question remains unanswered…

i believe the girlscouts would be the most profitable organization on the planet if their cookies weren’t quite as good as they are.

the problem with being so good is that we all know to buy a limited supply lest we eat a full box, or two, a day.

natalie doesn’t claim to be one of the smartest people on the planet, although clearly she is, but what she is tops at is multiple-guess tests. she has a sixth sense for getting those answers right and successes throughout all levels of school to prove it.

over the past year we’ve been teaching ethan to read. now he will read new books to all of us. as he plows through these stories, logan will throw out words he struggles with as if she has read them, and logan is almost never wrong.

we’re pretty certain this is the early manifestation of the multiple-guess gene.