Einstein wine time

So I’ve been vacationing with the kids in Michigan for the last week. My dad teaches a summer course at a Christian environmental college camp way up in the boonies where they house all the professors and their families in cottages on a crystal clear lake. Basically I’ve been way too busy beating the pants off everyone in Boggle and Scribblish and basketball to bother blogging. Well, that and the fact that you have to park in the woods across the street from nearby neighbors (whom we don’t know) to steal some wireless, which smacks of being slightly creepy.

Jannika spends her days running with “the pack” – a group of my siblings and other professors’ kids who spend their days building forts in the woods, digging trenches on the beach, and screaming at each other over a rather sad collection of broken McDonalds happy meal toys housed in a ripped cardboard box (playtime gets a little desperate here on rainy days).

So after a week of living the wild life and really really not getting enough sleep, Jannika crashed – a complete nosedive complete with burning wreckage. Sadly, this monstrous meltdown was over an Einstein figurine missing half his brain and hair (I’m not exaggerating – the cardboard box really is that sad). I’ll spare you the details, but it transformed into a blowout that resulted in a prompted apology that went something like “I’m sorry I was so naughty about crying for my guy…and kicking grandma’s seat with goat-poop shoes…and putting soap on the wall…and yelling at you to wipe my bottom again and again even though I was already wiped.”

Here is where I started formulating my wine-drinking plan for the evening. Wanting to savor the experience, however, I decided to hold off until after dinner where I could couple my glass of wine with a few armloads of snacks.

And then I discovered Silas in the laundry room/bathroom/cat litter room.

And then I discovered that Silas had discovered the ultra-concentrated laundry soap.

And the cat litter scoop.

And the cat poop chunks in the litter.

When I opened the door, he was guiltily standing amid a soup of soapy, goopy puddles filled with scoop after scoop of used litter (and its contents).

30 minutes, 56 paper towels, and 3 gagging sessions later, I was just wiping up the last of the soapy poop goo off the floor when a sister (who shall remain nameless and ageless) entered and questioned, “This clean yet?” And amidst my woe-is-me mopey mopping (and, really, woe was me), I thought she was kindly checking in on me and sharing in my pain…until she nodded at my “Almost – maybe 5 more minutes?” and briskly shut the door, walked over to the toilet, and promptly starting taking a dump.

Needless to say, my wine-drinking and vat-o’-snacks-consuming plan was executed quite proficiently last night. Go me.