A'Strepping We Will Go
2005-02-22, 11:05 a.m.

No Horsemen. No plagues. No locusts or frogs or rivers running with blood. No descending from Heaven with angelic choruses and all that. Turns out when my kids told each other �I love you� yesterday, they were simply both delirious, for both Son AND Daughter have strep throat. Feverish delirium could cause them to perceive, for a short while anyway, that they actually like each other. I was too much in shock to enjoy the moment. After they are well regularity will resume, meaning that as long as they avoid each other our home is harmonious.

I didn�t have to deal with this sibling thing. It�s all new to me. Hubby assures me that attempting to throttle one another on a regular basis is all part of it. He and his brother duked it out according to schedule until they grew up. I am using �growing up� as a relative term in this case, as they are both We Be Toys kids and some things you never outgrow. Their older sister still calls down her own sons with �Hubby�s name/whoops, son�s name� out of sheer habit, from decades of damage control with her baby brother. Baby brother�s nearly 40, her youngest son is 12�close enough.

Hubby and his brother must still get some sort of toy every Christmas. If not, they fight with the children for theirs. I�ve learned through the years it�s easier to leave them all in a writhing pile wrestling action figures and spring-launched fighter jets away from one another, and go have another cup of coffee. This past Christmas they all graduated to fighting over computer games, which makes less bruises unless someone gets whacked with the laptop.

It is no secret that in this family I am the scheduler, the planner, the organizer, while Hubby is the jack-of-all-trades doer. I plan it, he does it, and does it better than most. When I plan something for myself, however, there is some sort of relief valve in his brain that triggers the immediate evacuation of said information. I have told him for weeks that this coming Friday I am going on the overnight church retreat. Start taking bets that come Friday afternoon, he will have NO CLUE as to my whereabouts. Let the cell phone calling commence. I really need to write it in his planner in big screaming orange letters and hope that he notices.

One of my cousins relies religiously on his planner, his bible of business trips and meetings and goings-on of typically overfilled days. I threatened to pencil in all sorts of meetings in strange locales, peppered throughout his unsuspecting year, just to see if he�d do it. �PR meeting in Bikini Atoll on Easter Sunday? Better get a flight.�

Son is in here wheedling for computer time, after I slog around the internet on his behalf for Sonic* the Hedgehog* sites. At least it�s a change from *Pokemon. And there�s not a horseman in sight.

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Spritopias posed a query: What are your top 10 Banes of Existence? Here are mine, in no particular order.

1. The cable company
2. Laundry
3. Excess poundage
4. Waiting for the sequel
5. Cholesterol
6. Being a Muggle
7. The cable company
8. Slow drivers in the fast lane
9. eB@y snipers
10. The cable company
And
11. The cable company.

Who�s next? Take it away...

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