Both My Kids Are Home & Mouse Irony

M is home: impossibly tan, longer haired, several inches taller and sprouting his very first zit. Having both my kids safely at home always makes me realize how much of a subconscious worry thing goes on when they're not here, because I completely relax. I know they're both okay when they're right in front of me: it's great. We can all get on with the important family business of annoying the hell out of each other and also having weird family fun like visiting Sam's Club strictly for the free samples, and, of course, watching four Buffy episodes back to back. Ah, family. Blood is thicker than water and infinitely more drinkable by cute faux-British vampires.

So, I have explained to M how to pop zits (this is probably bad parenting, you're supposed to say "Don't touch them" I know, but come on. Get real. Everyone pops their zits.) and we went to Target and bought school supplies and T-shirts yesterday. A & I dithered over the school supplies and M kept saying, "Just buy the cheapest thing and let's leave." He is spouting a lot of canned speeches from his father the annoying auto didact & Civil War buff, but that will fade. He says he likes girls, which is worrisome. And, of course, he has commandeered the computer and I only have a few moments to type this.

Last night we had Mouse Irony: Barbieri jumped in through the cat door with a live mouse in his mouth. I shrieked of course & Barbieri was mildly annoyed & M barely looked up from Battlefield 1942. So then, in an effort to get me involved in this big fun game, Barbieri dropped the mouse by the stove. Where it promptly ran towards the wall and got caught in a trap and died like a line from an Alanis Morrissette song, although not as fast as one might have wished (which could also be said of Alanis Morrissette's music.) I had grabbed a big copper ladle thingy off the kitchen wall (noting, as one does at these times, how hideously dusty & greasy it was) and was planning to smush the mouse in a very humane yet final way except knowing, all the time, that I was actually probably not capable of such firm action. I kept yelling at M to get up from the computer.
"And do what, Mom?" he said.
"Anything!" I screamed. "Show some solidarity here!"
Then the mouse died and the cat lost interest and Jackson, who had realized that Barbieri had a mouse first (that hound dog nose) was going ballistic trying to find it, so I got M to pick up the dead mouse & the trap and toss it all into the trash. Which he did, bless him, although not without sort of shaking it at me first - god! That was awful! I screamed like a baby! - and also complaining that we (A vanished into her room at the very beginning of all this) were total wimps.

It's good to have him home.