My new(ish) job has me back to 12 hour shifts with a rare, blessed 8 thrown in once in awhile.  Being a poor widow woman, I rely heavily on my mother and the graces of the local Boys and Girls Club for the kiddos.  This enables me to work long hours, knowing that my children are cared for and, more importantly, not performing unsupervised experiments on each other or burning each other in effigy.  The way this works is, my mother comes over in time for me to actually arrive to work on time, gets the kids off to school, and then they take a bus from their respective schools to the Boys and Girls Club for a few hours until my mom fetches them home again, jiggity-jig.  FB, despite being far too cool for this, can be relied to arrive at the Club albeit with much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.  SoS, on the other hand, looooooooves the Boys and Girls Club, and will often end up thereon my days off instead of taking the bus home.  Mind you, he is reminded which bus he is to take on a daily basis, which, in good nursing school fashion, he can repeat back verbatim.  Now, this child has a memory to rival Rain Man's.  He has, without consulting a map or signposts, gotten my mother un-lost from the woods.  It is a rare day he doesn't actually know what he's doing; I think we can agree on that.  Apparently, today he "forgot" and came home instead of going to the Club, where all activities are SUPERVISED.  An hour and a half later, my mother went to pick the boys up and found out, after FB searched all over the place, that SoS had never checked in.  She races to my house and the boy is outside, garage door up, bike and scooter out, Knucklehead McSpazatron staked out in the front yard, and my poor retired, neighbors out in their front yard, probably praying for someone to come home, for the love of SHIVA!  The neighbor had fixed SoS's scooter, more than likely got his ear talked off, SoS had staked the dog out because, "we hadn't done it in awhile, and (he) wanted to do it one more time."  I'm just glad he didn't let Crackhead out and ended up chasing him through the county.  Long, fervent conversations on safety followed.

In all the hubbub, my mom meant to make some dinner for the kids before SoS went to Scouts, but SoS's adventure threw off her schedule and they didn't have time to wait for the meatloaf to finish.  So, she left instructions with FB on when to take dinner out of the oven and got SoS McD's to go.  When she got home she discovered that FB had eaten 7/8 of the meatloaf and 6 of the 8 biscuits were gone.  He swears he only ate 2 biscuits and the other 4 must have been devoured by the dogs.  These are some talented dogs, peeps!  They were able to lift those four biscuits individually completely without disturbing the pan.  I'm going to have to hire these guys out for delicate micro-processor building. What is it about tweeners and teenagers that lead them to believe the adults in their lives have the IQ of your basic cabbage?