Tom’s home was foreclosed: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of its vacancy was signed by the bank, the property management company, and the Utica police.

    Shortly thereafter Heather began noticing a cat. It was jet black, and was normally laying under the tree in the front yard or sitting on the porch. In the days that followed we speculated that, perhaps, this was just a neighborhood cat that Tom had been feeding and it was visiting the home from habit and hope**. The days turned into a week and still the cat watched us coming and going, a black silhouette with moon eyes shining from the porch every evening; the cat had been abandoned.

    The temporary cast placed upon Sam by the emergency room doctor started mid-thigh and proceeded awkwardly down her leg and ended only after passing the majority of her toes on its way to misery. Sam wailed through most of the night on Sunday morning* and suffered none-to-quietly through the indignities of having to make use of a small bathroom when you can’t bend at the knee.

    The permanent cast she received on Monday afternoon and apparently colored to match her toenails, is a much better fit in her busy lifestyle.

    Regardless of this improvement she stayed with Grandma the next day, resting while carving out Sam-shaped dent in Grampa’s La-Z-Boy. She wanted to go there again this morning, and was not too keen on the idea of going back to school be-crutched.

    Groaning from under her piled up comforter, she pulled her pillow over her head tightly. “I don’t wanna go…”

    ”You don’t have a choice, Sam,” I reached under the textiles and tussled her hair, “The doctor didn’t say you had to stay home, we don’t have a note, and you need to get back to class.”

    ”But my leg still hurts!”

    I yanked the comforter off the bed, and began tugging at the pillow. “Get up, get up, get up, get up, get up, get up-”
    ”STOP, DADDY!!” she interrupted, and struggled up onto her elbows, and surveyed her leg where it was carefully enshrined atop her penguin Pillow Pet, “I don’t think I should go.”

    Her bed, suspended five feet in the air, was separated from me by a small flight of stairs and it was upon these that I leaned, crossing my arms, and considered. Remembering my eldest daughter’s basic nature, I came up with a sure-fire idea. “Tell you what, Sam”

    ”What?”

    ”I’ll take you in early and walk around the halls with you. If you can’t handle it you don’t have to stay.” I knew that as soon as she was crutching around the school, getting attention from everyone and hamming it up, she’d have no interest in spending another day watching the news with Grandma.

    And I was right.

    Horsing around outside the restaurant, Samantha was running pell-mell at me when one of the boys fell in front of her.

    Sam kicked the boy in the head, fell in such a way as to punch me full-on in the nuts, and everyone lay in a heap moaning.

    After everyone else recovered and staggered to their feet, Sam remained in great pain. Her leg looked straight to me, but she wouldn’t put any weight on it and she sobbed in pain pitifully.

    X-Rays showed, however, a clean fracture straight across the tibia. Second broken bone in less than a year for our little maniac, and here we are waiting for the temporary cast. Our friend’s boy? Absolutely fine and with nary a headache.

    It wasn’t the first time she’s kicked a boy when he’s down, and probably won’t be the last. But hopefully this will be the most painful and every boy she kicks from this point out will get the worst of the affair.

    The disappointment of the Jersey-bound family was extreme. They threatened lawsuits, which we laughed off. They attempted an occult summoning, but our many wards and talismans thwarted their so-called wizard.

    Ultimately they settled on paying for Heather’s airfare. Samantha had been looking forward to the trip more than anyone else, as she missed her second-cousins a lot, so I agreed to pay her way, while Riley and myself remained in Michigan in order to defend our house from looters.

    Mere hours after her arrival in the Garden State I received a text message stating that Samantha had fallen out of a bunk-bed, had hurt her arm, and was to be dropped off at a godless NJ emergency room by a party bus on its way to inebriate the entire family.

    X-rays revealed a broken elbow, and while the trip still involved some amount of fun for all involved, it will forever be remembered as the time that New Jersey broke Samantha.

    So its been a week, and while Sam has been fairly sanguine about the ordeal–at least as sanguine as an ADHD addled 8-year old can ever be–she is still suffering from aches and itches in equal measure.

    And since the whole enterprise had such a miserable ending I can’t even parlay the fact that I didn’t get to go into any sort of credit towards gaining some momentary personal freedom this weekend. *sigh*

    She was sent to school wearing a tiara: an opulent plastic tiara with imitation diamonds made of simulated glass* and bearing a box of Hannah Montana cupcakes–something I’m certain delighted the little boys most of all**.

    Heather bought Sam some nice printed bed sheets. Instead of wrapping the pillowy and awkwardly shaped sheet-bag, a covert operation was successfully executed to dress her bed in the middle of the night. So during the day Heather surreptitiously laundered the new sheets and secreted them within our bedroom.

    At approximately 10pm I scooped her little sleeping form up in my arms along with a tag-along teddy bear, carried her silently down the hall and laid her in our bed.
It was a few minutes later that we’d removed the several dozen books from her bed, stripped it, and carefully installed the replacement sheets, pillow case and comforter.

    I then gathered the little birthday girl up in my arms, carried her back to bed and laid her down amidst the new bedsheets.
    In the morning she spent a few seconds in confusion and a few minutes in delight. Any more time than that would imply an attention span my little girl simply doesn’t have.

    In the evening we laid waste to a local Chuck E Cheese per her specific request.
    It was here that Riley lived some anxious moments fearing the animatronic rodent and then wasted about a half-hour attempting to get its attention. Samantha ran wild; like a gazelle with opposable thumbs and a slight mean streak.

    At night-night time I read her the first two chapters of a new Lauren Child “Clarice Bean” book and thus ended the eight anniversary of my initial parentage.

    Recently we began reading through Eleanor H. Porter’s nearly-century-old novel, “Pollyanna.” Consuming a few chapters a night, we began to crawl through the book. I had no interest in it, and looked forward to each evening’s passages the same way I look forward to mowing the lawn.

    As chapter 14 drew to a close with a mysterious bit of business involving an as-yet unrevealed past between Aunt Polly and injured Mr. Pendleton, I closed the book for the evening and asked Sam what she thought was “the deal with Aunt Polly and Mr. Pendleton”. Her reply was surprising detailed.

    ”Sam, have you been reading ahead?”
    She answered a bit sheepishly, “Yes, but you can still read it to me.”

    I was proud of her for doing such a good job reading independently, and told her so. I certainly wasn’t reading chapter books on my own when I was 7.

    She took the book with her the next morning for use in daily independent reading sessions at her grade school.

    I discovered to my surprise that I was bummed out by the fact that I now have no idea what was going to happen next to Pollyanna, Aunt Polly and Mr. Pendleton.

    While the story seemed oddly calf’s foot jelly centered, the non-calf’s foot jelly parts were entertaining and now I may never know the ending. I can only assume that the exciting conclusion involves some last-minute calf’s foot jelly distribution.

    It seemed to me that young Pollyanna spent 92.38% of her waking hours delivering calf’s foot jelly to various notables throughout her local area. The other 8% was spent dealing with the ice-bitchiness of Aunt Polly and, presumably, placing calf’s foot jelly in jars.

    Nice coat, you say? Yeah, grandparents are good for that sort of thing.

    Bona-fide “Hannah Montana” merchandise, the coat signifies Sam’s enthusiastic endorsement of a fictional persona adopted by a real manufactured celebrity who is herself the offspring of a manufactured country “star”.

    Miley and her alter-ego, the only slightly less real Hannah.