Welcome home, Daddy.....

Get used to that padded material.
It's probably gonna be your wallpaper someday.

In the last blog entry (Click here for a refresher), I outlined our new, fail-safe, fool-proof schedule. No problem, right? Umm.....Not so much. I left last Sunday to go out of town for five days, and left Uncle Saint Keith (That's his new nickname, by the way. Just get used to it.) in charge of making sure everything went smoothly. But me leaving Keith in charge was basically like having a guy come in to interview for a receptionist position at the Prison for Criminal Masterminds, and then having the warden say to him, "Ehh, screw it. You can have my job. I'm out of here." When I called him throughout the week to check on everyone, it kind of sounded like everything was going okay. Although it was hard to hear him over the sound of Racheal yelling in the background repeatedly, "Tell him I hate him for leaving us here. Just tell him. Tell him he's dead to me." My flight home on Friday wasn't supposed to get in until around midnight, but I went to the airport early to see if I could catch an earlier flight out of Syracuse to get back to my warm, loving family a little sooner. I managed to get the last seat on the noon flight out of Syracuse, which would put me in Charleston at around 5 pm.

When Keith picked me up from the airport on Friday afternoon, we had the following exchange. And since we're guys and we try to downplay everything, I'll put what we actually meant in parentheses.

Keith: How was your trip? (I couldn't honestly care less how your trip was. I'm just making small talk.)

Me: It was good. A little cold. We got done what we needed to get done though, so it was good. (I think I'm hungry. Wait.....yep. I'm hungry. I knew I should've asked for more peanuts.)

Keith: That's cool. (What? I wasn't listening. I was just trying to enjoy the first fifteen minutes of relative silence that I've had in five days.)

Me: Sooo, uhh. How was it here? (What level of horribleness did you have to endure while I was gone?)

Keith: Umm, well. It wasn't terrible. But I gotta tell ya. I was starting to lose my patience at the end there. (I was two seconds away from ripping my ears off, and sending them to you in New York. Rach was right, you suck.)

When I got home, a few of the kids seemed to be acting a little strange. (How crazy is it that I can say 'a few of the kids' and not even be referring to half of them.) It didn't take me long to figure out why they were acting strange, because Scarlett immediately told me that they had gotten their progress reports from school. Scarlett then shows off all of her check marks. (She doesn't get letter grades yet. She's upset by this. Because shoving check marks into her siblings faces isn't nearly as satisfying as shoving all A's would be. That's how we know we don't have to worry about her grades next year.) Gavin shows me his progress report, which included all A's and 2 B's. Both of the B's were above 90, and one of those B's was in the class that he got caught cheating on a test. Good job, Gavin. Then Tori showed me her progress report. A's, B's, and a low C in Spanish. Que? En espanol, por favor? Porque? Tu no quieres escuchen en la classe de espanol? Oh, Dios mio? So then we had this conversation:

Me: Sorry, but your grounded until you pull this grade up. And give me your cell phone.

Tori: It's not my fault. Spanish is hard......

Me: So who's fault is it, then? The Spaniards?

Tori: Nooooahh, I'm Seeeeeerious. It's haaarrrrrrd. (For some reason, she elongates words and adds syllables when she's trying to get something.)

Me: So when something is hard, you just roll over and die? Just accept what you get? And besides, It'd be different if I thought you were really trying, but I've never seen you open your spanish book. I've never even heard you say anything in spanish. I haven't even seen so much as you eating a taco this semester.

Tori: Yaaa-Haaaawwwww. I diiiidddddddd studyyyyyyyyy!

Me: Yeah, I don't remember that?

Tori: Rememmmmmmber? On our way home from school that day?

Me: Tori, it takes 9 minutes to get home.

Tori: Yeah, but I studied.

Me: Ohhhhhh. That's right! I forgot about that time! Nevermind, spanish IS hard! You're not grounded. In fact, here's the keys to my car and my credit card. Go buy yourself a poncho.

Unimpressed with her excuses, I turn to Cole's progress report. Here's how his grades played out.

Math 100
Science 92
Social Studies 75
Reading 89
English/Language Arts 76

And miraculously, his excuse held even LESS water than Tori's! Because below his grades was the letter grade breakdown.

93-100 A
86-92 B
77-85 C
66-75 D
<66 F

So Cole's explanation was: "But I really only got one bad grade because my English grade isn't a C or a D. It's somewhere in between. So you can't really count it."

What? Seriously? You had all day to think about an excuse, and THAT'S the best you could come up with? C'mon Cole, you're better than that. Blame Canada or something.

And all of this happened within the first 15 minutes of me being home. I think maybe I should've taken that later flight.

So let's just say that it has been a tumultuous couple of weeks in the King household. And I'm not even including the little ridiculous stories, like......

-Jaxon keeps biting kids in his daycare to the point that his class is starting to look like a Marv Albert hotel room.

-On Saturday, while I was upstairs doing laundry, Jaxon dropped a deuce in his drawws downstairs, and his uncle, Saint Keith, tried unsuccessfully to clean it up, but then came upstairs looking like he just swallowed a shoe and in a slow, somber voice, said, "Hey, man. I think I need your help." - (Which definitely happened) Judging from Keith's facial expression, I thought he was going to ask me to lend him a kidney.

- Every night for the past 2 weeks, Jaxon gotten up at 3:30, crawled into our bed, and kicked the living crap out of us. This is something else I'm going to do when he gets older. I'm going to go over to his house in the middle of the night, sneak into his bedroom, and just repeatedly kick the crap out of him until he wakes up. I mean, after I take a dump on his living room rug.

-Cole has been acting up at school so much that we've been getting daily emails from his teacher asking us if we have any suggestions on how to keep him on task. Rach's suggestion was to beat him with a wooden hanger. (That wasn't technically her suggestion, but we did set up an appointment with the principal to see if we could bring back corporal punishment.) And after talking with his principal and his teacher, we came up with a plan that I hope might work. We've given Cole a full pardon from being grounded. (If he were to serve out his current grounding sentences consecutively, he would be grounded until roughly 2087........And that's with good behavior.) Instead, we're going to go on a day by day basis. If Cole is able to get ready in the morning without us having to tell him 8.342 times to "brush your teeth, brush your hair, put your shoes on,- no wait. Put your socks on first-, get your bookbag, get in the truck", AND if his teacher gives us a good report from school that day, AND if he does his homework in a timely manner, then he will be able to play video games for an hour that afternoon. So far, so good. We've had 2 good days in a row.

-I caught Gavin taking $2 out of my wallet. When we asked him why he did it, he said that he was tired of Cole being grounded by himself all the time. And I half way believed him.

-We're trying to get Jaxon to be able to go to the bathroom completely by himself. So we told him, "Jax, go use the potty." A couple minutes later, I hear an excited Jaxon yelling, "Come see, Daddy. Come see. I poo-pood." And yep. Walk into the bathroom to see a big steaming pile of crap on the floor next to the toilet. But hey, at least we're getting closer.

-Despite the constant tattling and fight picking, I guess Scarlett has, by default, elevated herself into the 'most well-behaved' (that definitely requires air quotes) position. Her teacher had nothing but nice things to say about her, and she's making lots of friends at school, albeit stereotypical ones. We saw this on the wall outside her classroom.