Maybe I Could Find a Non-Murderous Sitter On Craigslist

Genius is home for Spring Break. The problem is...nobody else has Spring Break this week. That means I have to babysit him. Not so much babysit him as in keep him from drinking bleach under the sink. He didn't even do that as a toddler. We didn't childproof for him. The biggest problem was preventing him from climbing up the refrigerator shelves to grab his bottle (yeah, he was a late weaner), and from removing the labels off 250 video tapes before stacking them to build a city. We did not succeed.

Now, as then, he's night owl. Unlike then, he now takes a nap. He got home yesterday, chatted a bit, then lay down on the short couch for a snooze. A three-hour snooze. The only thing that woke him was his phone. Then he took off to soothe a friend in a crisis until 2:00 a.m. He's a good friend like that. A good boarder, not so much.

On Friday, his original plan for this weekend was to go to the city Saturday, spend the night at the home of a college buddy, and then return to our open arms and open Frig. Plans changed. Seems the others making that trip decided to go to Atlanta instead, to run a marathon. Those wacky kids and their spur-of-the-moment travel plans. Genius said he had originally joined the pact for Atlanta last fall, but since he didn't have time to train for a marathon, he couldn't see forking over $500 for a trip to Atlanta to stand on the sidelines (thank you, Even Steven!) and watch.

Maybe I should be careful what I thank Even Steven for. This afternoon, I gave Genius the debit card to buy us some phones. The house phones are in a sorry state, what with my office landline having a cracked antenna, besides being as big as a shoebox like Jerry's cordless in season one of Seinfeld. The one out by my basement recliner has a rattle. The one I use upstairs has static. The wall phone in the master bathroom rings no more. And the kitchen wall phone only gets a dial tone if you jiggle the wire just right. Don't even suggest that we simply carry our cell phones from room to room. We barely get reception in the living room. Forget putting any walls or floors in between that satellite signal. So...we are $100 poorer, but now have four new phones. The wall phones will have to wait until Genius finds the right units.

He's going to a movie tonight. Tomorrow he's on his own. And the rest of the week, too, because we all work, and I have parent conferences two nights this week.

I suppose I'll see him in passing. He keeps vampire hours, you know.