Some Saturdays are made for getting out of the house and adventuring: going to a park and running around or going to the beach, perhaps. Some Saturdays are made for housework. Some Saturdays are made for travelling or socializing or games.

And some Saturdays…aren’t.

Kelsey, Age 7:  I really want all of my dreams to come true.

Me:  Well, they can.  You have to work hard for them.  No one’s going to just give you your dreams, but if you work hard, you can do anything you want.

Kelsey:  I’m working really, really hard for a baby pony.

So it’s been, um, six months since I updated the site.  At all.  That’s just…just…deplorable.  You have my sincerest apologies for being so incredibly lame with the updating.  I’m sure I’ve been very very busy the last six months — I know there’s something which must have kept me from posting anything here.

I’m going to try to be around for you more.  It’s not fair of me to string you along with a number of incisive, witty posts and then drop you like you’re aflame.  I don’t have time for a full post here right now, sadly, but I hope to be back later this weekend — maybe after I see Star Trek tomorrow.  But in the meantime, just to prove to you I have been doing something, I give you two pictures I drew of my lovely daughters:

More soon!

The following conversation took place this afternoon between Kelsey and Brandon, both six years old, while riding home from apple picking:

KELSEY:  We’re gonna vote for Obama.

BRANDON:  John McCain wants to make it so kids won’t have any money when they grow up.

KELSEY:  Yeah, that’s why we’re gonna vote for Obama.

BRANDON:  Me too, I’m voting for Obama.

A pause.

BRANDON:  John McCain sucks.

I’m far too exhausted from helping throw a fantastically successful birthday party to write up a proper post, but I didn’t want to let the day pass without marking the occasion of Kelsey’s turning six. SIX! How in the hell did that happen?!

Happy birthday, little (well, not quite so little anymore) girl!

OK, let me start this off by saying: Kelsey and I are both just fine.

Now: We were in a one-car accident this morning.

Road conditions around here have been fairly consistently treacherous for the last week or so, and this morning Terry told me there were black ice warnings. I told her I’d be fine — I’m a very careful driver anyway, and I figured that most of the roads I’d be traveling on between the house and the office would have been traveled enough to have warmed them up.

Problem is, that didn’t apply to the road right outside our neighborhood.

Kelsey and I got in the Jeep and headed off for school, turning left out of our neighborhood. Fifty yards later, I hit a slick of ice and started sliding. My first thought was “Hey, y’know, no big deal, I’ll stop sliding here in a second.” But I didn’t. I fishtailed back and forth for a few seconds before shooting off the right shoulder, into a drainage ditch and headfirst into an embankment — given that the mud we drove through probably slowed us down a little, I’m guessing we hit the embankment at around thirty miles per hour.

As soon as we were stopped, I turned around immediately to check on Kelsey (all I could think once it became obvious an accident was coming was “Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey”)… who was perfectly fine, and only upset because the impact made her drop the fuzzy little frog she was playing with.

I called Terry as soon as I was sure both Kelsey and I were physically okay, but I had to cut the call short because of some unexpected help (Terry has her own version of events which describe that far too short phone call, so I’ll let her tell that part of the story). I complain sometimes about where we live and talk about missing Boston, but I’m fairly sure what happened next wouldn’t have happened had this accident occured up north: not sixty seconds after the accident, a guy pulled off the side of the road in his ginormous Chevy truck and helped drag me out of the ditch. And the state trooper who showed up to check on us was my neighbor — who thankfully didn’t write us up for having expired out-of-state tags (a situation which was fixed this afternoon). Terry called a tow truck (thank you again, Beth, for the AAA membership you got Terry for her birthday)… and we waited for quite awhile, since the tow trucks around here were quite busy this morning. Supposedly there were numerous accidents all around our area; the tow guy had trouble navigating the roads himself to come get us.

The truck wasn’t really damaged, surprisingly, outside of a blown right front tire, and even that we were able to get re-inflated. I was so, so, so lucky: there was no one else on the road at the time I started skidding, and where I went off the road I managed to split right between a row of mailboxes and a telephone pole. Where I hit the embankment, I was two feet to the right of a cement drainage pipe. Even the fact that I was driving the Jeep and not my Mazda — the Mazda would have been severely damaged by the crash, and quite possibly so would Kelsey and I. All in all, if I’ve got to be in a car accident — especially with my kid in the car — this was a good one to have.

Kelsey had been upstairs in the bathroom by herself for quite awhile — probably fifteen minutes or so. It’s not unusual for her to spend that much time in the bathroom, and I wouldn’t have thought much about it if we’d been at home. But we were at her grandmother’s house, and I decided she’s been in there long enough.

Jeff was standing near the foot of the stairs, so I asked him to yell up to Kelsey and make sure she was OK. I stood up and followed behind him just to be sure. We both stood on the stairs as he called in to her:

“You OK in there, Kelsey?”

“I’m doin’ good,” came the muffled voice behind the door. “I’m combing my hair.”

Satisfied that she was fine, I started back down the stairs… but then thought better of it, turned around and went back up to the bathroom.

I knocked on the door and told her I was coming in. She didn’t say anything. I pushed the door open… and the first thing I noticed was the sickening quantity of honey-brown hair in piles on the floor. Then I looked up into her eyes, open wide with fear (that “Oh shit, I’m in trouble” look in them). And at the pair of hair-cutting scissors still in her right hand, still held up near her head.

I’m cutting my hair, she hsd said. Not combing. Cutting.

I don’t remember yelling or screaming or anything of the sort, but I know that Terry was standing in the doorway behind me in a matter of seconds.

“It’s just hair,” I told myself as I picked Kelsey up and hugged her tight to my chest, stroking the ragged mop that remained on her beautiful head. Yes, it was just hair — but I cried as I tried not to think about what else could have happened to a four-year-old alone in a bathroom with a sharp pair of scissors.

(Pictures of her handiwork and the new ‘do after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »