serendipity

Waiting for Impetigo

She bites her lips in the winter time. Consequently her lips get chapped and cracked and we spend the winter trying to heal her adorably ragged mouth. This is why I didn't get alarmed by the dry skin that formed around her mouth a week ago. Or at least that is what I'm telling myself. I suspect that if I wasn't so busy working on this business project of mine I might have noticed that the skin was worse than usual, that the cold season had not really begun, that something was actually wrong.

But I didn't. In fact I almost didn't take her to the doctor. Her sister was sick and I made an appointment for her to see the doctor at the end of an afternoon. During the day a corner of my Juju's red skin turned yellow and cracked open. It was as if she'd eaten curry and let it dry on her mouth. It was horrific. So even though my eldest was feeling better by the time of the appointment, we went to the doctor.

Impetigo.

It sounds so exotic, like something you'd catch on vacation in Fiji or the Maldives. In reality it's one of the more common skin disorders in children and sometimes you don't need medicine to treat it. Good hygiene and warm soakings tend to do the trick.

She needed medicine.

I'm not sure why I continue to be exposed to the kinds of diseases that require hazmat levels of house cleaning. I'm so bad at it and it makes me resentful to do repeated armfuls of laundry. When my big girl was a baby she got scabies in Mexico. Two years ago they both got lice from school. Then lice again. Then lice again. Every time we had to wash everything that might harbor the critters in scalding hot water. What couldn't be washed was exiled to the garage, to spend the next 90 days in plastic garbage bags. (This turns out to be an excellent way to purge the house of stuffed animals, by the way.)

Impetigo is extremely contagious. Being that she is seven, she touches everything and everyone with love and affection. Or a good smack. But mostly she's a cuddler who loves to kiss and hug and hug and kiss and cuddle and get those germy Impetigos all over everyone. Okay, she isn't doing that now, but before she was diagnosed it was constant cuddling as usual. No, I don't actually know if she has infected any of her friends, we're on holiday this week, but you're right: seven year old girls are extremely touchy with each other. I expect pitchforks and firebrands come Monday. 

Whenever we would suspect lice my skin would begin to crawl uncontrollably. I never caught it myself, but I experienced the symptoms each time. I have combed my hair and combed my hair and combed my hair until I combed myself half bald. I have seriously considered shaving it all off just so I wouldn't have to wonder anymore.

It's the same with this Impetigo. My mouth is itchy. My nose is itchy. The skin around both is pink (but not because I'm rubbing it non stop). Do I have it? Probably not, but who knows? All I know is that I itch. Oh, and I know that before we knew she had Impetigo we thought she had chapped lips, so we, uh, put chapstick on her. Yes the same ones we use and have been using this whole week. I think I've disposed of them all, but oh my god, little girls squirrel away lip balm like nuts for nuclear winter. I'm convinced there are inch-long Impetigo lip bombs hiding under beds and in drawers all over my house. I have no idea how long bacteria can survive in a lip balm, which, if you think about it is a completely unregulated product and probably made of toxic materials that will combine with the Impetigo to create a whole new strain of resistant bacteria. I have a way of letting my worst case scenarios run away with my imagination.

My girl feels like a leper, of course. She, who is so addicted to physical shows of affection complains loudly and with repetition about how no one wants to kiss her. This is not entirely true, but we are much more careful about kissing her. It's all about her forehead now, or the top of her head. Cheeks are out of the question and she is not allowed to kiss us back. Her laundry needs to be separated and I'm supposed to be washing her sheets every day. I'm not exactly doing that.

We've spent this entire school break inside the house. We leave for little errands but come home quickly because 1) she's infectious and 2) she hates the way people look at her. Thankfully she goes through waves of self consciousness, swinging between hiding in corners and being sad, to acting perfectly normal, to threatening to infect her sister on purpose. Ah, my little Juju, you are such a complicated little thing.

The incubation period for Impetigo is, according to medical sites, 1-3 days. My question is, when does the 1-3 days begin and end? One to three days sounds positively manageable, until you realize she's had this for 10 days and has very recently become kind-of, mostly non infectious. What I mean by this is that if you kissed her on the lips you might get it, but if you don't touch her you're probably fine. (Nice definition don't you think? It's the one that enables me to leave the house without feeling that I'm endangering the world with our puss contagion. And no, we don't actually call her that.)

It's that kind of thinking that will remind my karma that I haven't had a good lesson lately. My karma is terribly efficient at taking care of this kind of stuff however, and if I am truly being bad,  my karma will ensure my lips bear the brunt of it soon enough.

Farewell to the Square

After many years of loyal service, and not wanting to make a fuss, my computer monitor quietly flickered and went out in the middle of my website rebuild project. Wanting to resuscitate, and not wanting to believe the worst, I immediately performed CPR by vigorously banging on each side of the monitor. "Stay with me, damn you! You can't leave me now! I need you!" One last slap on the monitor's face left nothing but a slightly greasy hand print. The last one I would ever leave.

The computer monitor's death (suicide?) immediately put me into a hostage situation. My critical spreadsheets had vanished; my new home page designs, my 6,000+ product inventory export, were all effectively trapped in the mysterious black box still humming contentedly (could this be murder?) below the desk. Without my trusted monitor to find them they might as well be in Australia.

Despite the fact that I would rather chew glass than go to Best Buy, I packed up the kids and went to Best Buy. It's amazing to me how the staff there can talk and gesticulate so expertly, yet be so completely unhelpful. I walked out with the same monitor I would have bought before the Geek demo, because it was the right size at the right price and I was a desperate woman.

My new monitor is rectangular, the old one was square. While the new one is technically only an inch larger, the fact that the inch comes in a landscape form instead of a box, makes a world of difference. The world seems a bigger place now, brighter too. And while I do think my old monitor should have done a better job of hanging on until the end of my rebuild (resentful much?), I've stopped missing it already.

Freshly Fluffed

The dryer bell has sounded to tell me my sheets are ready. Unlike the washer, which plays a happy tune to announce the end of a cycle, the dryer sounds like it's announcing the end of a work shift at a Russian ball bearing factory. "Enhhhhhh" it shouts. "Come and get your crappy laundry, it's time for my break."

It'd be nice to have a modern dryer that sings to me, but my dryer still does a fine job blowing hot air on my wet clothes and I've never been one to give up an appliance without an actual death certificate. Appliances only make it out of my house on a stretcher and they always go straight to the morgue. By the time I'm done with them they're not even good for parts, although in theory I'm a card-carrying organ donor. 

Today I'm happy for the Russian factory whistle, I've been waiting for it. Inside Old Ironsides are my sheets, clean and fresh and smelling oh so nice. Much nicer than when they went into the wash. Why is that? We're clean people. We don't wear our shoes in bed. We don't even wear our clothes to bed. We shower daily and wear expensive perfume and clean clothes, but after a week or more, our sheets start to get that worn out, I'm done with you smell. That we-don't-have-bedbugs-but-we-can-still-give-you-the-creepy-crawlies smell. Ew, just thinking about bedbugs makes me itch.

I love love love a clean bed. It's one of my most favorite things after, you know, The Mister and the Kidlets and Senior Gringo. A clean bed is a fresh start. A new night followed by a new day. A clean bed says "Come here, sugar. Lay yourself down on me and I will make it all better."  A clean bed invites, it soothes with calming fluffiness, and once I'm in, I lose all desire to do anything but stay there and sniff the pillow cases.

Maybe I'll read a book.

It's funny, as much as I love a clean bed, and I think we have established that I love a clean bed, I hate to wash and make the bed. I hate to strip off the sheets. To unbutton the buttons on the duvet. To unbutton the buttons on the pillow cases (I know, but they were so cute in the store). Then drag it all to the dreaded laundry room, where there is still all that laundry to be folded from last week (maybe if I shut my eyes...) Then program the freakishly optimistic washer that sings, and the dryer that doesn't.

Even after an hour in Old Ironsides the sheets will not be dry because the sheets have a thing for each other. They wrap themselves up in loops and macrame knots so they can never be separated. I think they're in love. I have to forcibly separate them for another round of hot air because while this part is too hot too touch, that part is still wet. I don't like wet parts. Wet parts are not fluffy.  The towels never have this problem, although they may simply be too short to cause that kind of trouble. We'll never know because they haven't spoken to anyone since they were banished to the kid's bathroom all those years ago. They hate being wadded up wet on the floor, but what can I do?

Once dry, the sheets are carefully brought back to my room and stretched out for the tucking in. They are not permitted to touch the floor, lest they pick up the dreaded Gringo hair. The bottom sheet doesn't have elastic corners and I have to tuck it tightly or bad things will happen during the night. Every now and then, usually when it's getting close to wash day, the sheet will refuse to stay tucked in and I'll wake up to find it halfway down the bed. It's as if it is trying to escape the bed, or maybe just from us. But we're clean I tell you. We smell nice. Almost all the time.

Once the corners are tucked and the buttons are buttoned and the duvet is safely back in place, I always stop to admire the result of the work I hate. Invariable some child will come running in and try to slide into home base across the bed. It is a testament of my love for them that I only yell for them to "Get Out!" without actually physically removing them (I sometimes imagine ejecting them via  human slingshot), before restoring the bed to its freshly-fluffed beauty.

I don't remember feeling this way about my bed as a child. I would go for weeks without making it. I would go so long without washing it that I would literally not remember the month it had last happened - my kids are like this too.  My mom, being way smarter than me, came up with a you-wear-it-you-wash-it policy by the time I was 12 that included bedding. She did not, however, ban food in the bed and it's a downright miracle I slept alone, unmolested by crumb-snatching rodents.

These days there is no food allowed near any of the beds, least of all mine. (Have you noticed how I keep calling it "my" bed, and not "our" bed? He has certainly noticed this too. I mean, he has a side and all, and technically 50% of the bed is his. But possession is 9/10ths of the law and he's out of town this week.)

Twice a year, on Mother's Day and my birthday, a breakfast is served in my bed. Once consumed, the  breakfast tray is swiftly removed downstairs. I always hope that the clanging sounds I hear from the kitchen are from my family cleaning up after my meal, since you know, it's My Day. But no, that clanging sound is the sound of them using every single pan in the kitchen and then stacking them on the kitchen counter, waiting for me to get out of bed.

Uh huh.

Not without a crowbar.

Or a human slingshot.

In what can only be described as a miracle sent by god, I have just successfully exported my database of over 11,000 products to an excel spreadsheet.

Hallelujah.
Amen.

Wedding Reflections

In an interesting juxtaposition of timing, two months before my 25th wedding anniversary one of my dearest friends got married. Not only did it give me a chance to see and remember what it's like to be full of hope, so heartbreakingly sweet and also slightly naive, but it gave me a chance to think about wedding vows and the promises we make.

In light of my impending anniversary, the Silver one, I've been thinking about how to celebrate it.  Should we go away the four of us? The two of us? Should we have a big party? A small party? What about just a really nice dinner? Maybe send the kids away and have a lovely dinner at home. Or maybe we should grab a good bottle, go to the beach and hang out. Or we could go to Paris.

So many options.

In an average lifespan, 25 years together seems like an optimistic halfway point. Maybe we should (gulp) renew our wedding vows? The idea is daunting and yet, 25 years seems like a good marker to say some nice words to each other. To put the shine back on the wedding rings. To make sure the other knows exactly how we feel, even after all that and everything we've been though. 

It's funny, people sometimes ask me how we've stayed together so long, and I always feel like I should give some sage advice. The truth is that I'm not sure how we've managed it. We're in love, to be sure. But love often isn't enough. I've seen plenty of relationships wither and die, not for the lack of love, but for the lack of...I don't know, something else. Attention? Consideration? Work?  I wish I knew. There was always a sense of them having lost something, of having given up, of having failed in some way and my heart always broke for them. And yet, I also wondered if they'd really tried enough, if they'd worked at it enough. Because if nothing else, marriage is work.

A lot of it.

It's work worth doing, don't get me wrong. And most of the time the work isn't even hard. But if you don't do it, if you try to coast through on good faith, good sex and the occasional bouquet of flowers, the whole thing will evaporate into a whisper of smoke from a fire untended. And then tears. And bewildered heartache.

Marriage is work, you say? What kind of work?

The simple work that makes the other person feel special. Yes, you can vomit into your wastebasket now if you wish, but the truth is that we all want someone to make us feel special. The minute you stop doing special nothings for the person you love is the minute you make them feel less special. And then they feel less loved. And then love isn't enough. So maybe the key to marriage is putting gas in her car when it's almost empty. And wearing that dress he likes. Or seeing the movie he/she really wants to see and you could care less about. See, it's mostly small stuff.  Easy stuff.

And yet.

I think most people give up in a benign kind of way. It's not that they don't care, quite the contrary. But somewhere along the way they get to feeling comfortable enough, or passive aggressive enough to stop working at it.  And why not? We're settled down now, right? And we have to spend so much of our time trying to make everyone else in our lives happy. Bosses, children, parents, friends and nosy neighbors. We figure, hey, he knows I love him. I'll do something nice for him tonight, this weekend, next month, on his birthday. Later.

The other day The Mister came home with a small box of Reschuitti chocolate, my absolute, mortgage-the-house-to-pay-for-it,-it's-that-good, favorite. There was no holiday, no fight to get over, no event. He just happened to be in the city and remembered how much I liked it. Now every time I eat a piece it makes me smile. (Shut up. There is nothing wrong with being so sentimental, and P.s, you knew I was sentimental like this when you met me. When did you get so jaded?)

The Mister hates, more than almost anything, packing and unpacking his suitcase. Consequently he leaves his suitcase on the floor of our bedroom in a semi-permanent state of halfpackedness. He knows this makes me nuts, but he just can't help himself.

I think of our bedroom as the one consistently tidy place in my house. The sheets are white. The walls are white. The chests of drawers are blond wood. The ceilings are high and we have no curtains - just white wooden blinds. It might drive some folks crazy, all of this white, open space, but for me it's peaceful.

Except for the fact that in the middle of this room is a perpetually half-packed suitcase.

The answer is obvious, right? Except no. "Don't touch my stuff. I never know where anything is after you've moved it." So there it sits. For months.

But then I came up with a compromise, a way to make him happy without making him unhappy, if that makes sense. I unpacked everything and placed it all in nice piles against the bedroom wall so that he could decide what goes where without actually unpacking his suitcase. And yes, eventually this will also be a nice thing for me, to have his stuff put away. But that's not why I did it. I did it because he hates to unpack. He doesn't mind putting his stuff away. He has a thing about the suitcase. (No, I have no idea where this thing came from, but there are way worse foibles a person could have.) Coming home and seeing his stuff neatly organized, but not hidden away, will make him happy.

I don't count his fly fishing rods and he doesn't complain about my dozens of mismatched shoes taking over the floor of our SHARED closet. How we share a closet I cannot tell you, because honestly I have no idea. Yes, his side is smaller. But not that much smaller. I could totally take over that side and still need more room.

Every morning I bring him coffee in bed.

Every night he makes dinner.

When he comes home from work I have a cocktail or a glass of wine waiting for him.

He does all the shopping and remembers the brands I prefer.

I dress nicely for him when we go out, even though I am more comfortable in pants. He likes skirts, so he gets them.

And this is how it goes. We bat the Niceness ball back and forth, not counting goal points until things get really off kilter. Then we have a blow out. We shout and say mean things until we get it all out. We don't go to bed until it's over, and when it's over, it's over. He doesn't hold a grudge and while I might, I can never remember what it is that I'm mad about long enough to do so.

When I think about the vows I might try to write for a renewal ceremony I get a little overwhelmed. Is this the time to simply thank each other for having kept the old vows or should we try to come up with different vows, ones that are more representative of who we are today? Twenty five years ago, we were married by, well let's count them, first there was the Swedenborgian priest, then the Mayor of Speracedes, then finally a French Catholic priest. We've made so many promises, agreed to so many vows, that I'm not sure where to start. Frankly, I'm not totally sure I know what I agreed to the first time.

And here's the thing, through our ups and downs, ins and outs, highs and lows, and with the occasional thrown avocado (that was me), we seem to be doing a pretty good job riding the wave of our first vows. And as much as I like the symbolism of making things new again, I'm pretty content with the old stuff. I don't want to jinx anything, or have the universe get the idea that I don't appreciate how good I've got it. Yes, I have a superstitious side, too.

So this year, like the many years before it, I think we will simply turn to each other and toast our happiness and good fortune. We'll look into each other's eyes and say "I love you" like we really mean it. And then since this will happen on New Year's Eve, we'll kiss our kids and our friends and eat until we're stuffed and drink until we can't anymore.

And then we'll start on the next 25 years. Which we'll take, just like the last set, one nice deed and one thrown avocado at a time.

It would be wrong to post now. There is simply no time for it.

No, I tell you. I can't.
I have such a long list, have you seen my list?
Look at it!
It's just nuts.
And it all has to get done by next Friday.

Yes, I know, that would be an interesting story to tell. I could write about that thing that just happened this morning. Or that thing that happened the other day, that's still fresh enough to share. I should just go ahead and write about it, while I can still remember the details, 'cause you know how I am, I forget everything.

But there are events to prepare for and trips to the airport to make.
And beds to make.
And snack to make.
And children to fetch.

Oh shit!
CHILDREN TO FETCH!

now playing:
"so let go
just get in
oh, it's so amazing here
it's alright
'cause there's beauty in the breakdown"

Last FM has the video.

Siblinghood

In order to show my appreciation for my sister, I have to start somewhere around 1985. That was the year I got married, she was my maid of honor and we officially reconciled. Before that, we spent a lot of time not talking and not getting along.

Truth be told, I was a terrible older sister. Selfish and self-absorbed I was jealous of her. My mom seemed to like her better. ("Paging Doctor Freud to the nursing station, please"). She was (and is) blond, tan, talented, smart and stronger than me - even though she's three years younger. I'll never forget the day she gave me a bloody nose. Sure I deserved it, but man, little sisters are not supposed to beat up big sisters. After that I kind of hated her.

For awhile.

Coming from a somewhat dysfunctional, divorced and unhappily-ever-after family, we couldn't find a level playing field until we both ran away from home and started our "real" lives. Me, close to our childhood home with her hundreds of miles away.

When I look back on my childhood there is only one person on the planet who understands and shares my history. Without explanation, she knows what happened, who did what and why - in as much as we can ever know "why." And I don't mean to imply some deep, dark secret, or that my family is especially awful, they're not. It's just that, as a friend recently reminded me, every family has it's own special flavor of dysfunctionality.  And when you season that with allspice of divorce, the results can be bitter.

My best friend, the one I have known since college, the one who is so close to me she knows what I'm thinking before I do, doesn't have that history. She knows my stories, but she wasn't actually there. And when my parents get old and need help, she will be there to provide support and advice, but she won't be able to actually help with my parents. That job will fall to my sister.

There is something very precious and reassuring to have someone in my life who understands my formative experiences. Someone I can count on to help with our parents, the day they need help.  I say to my girls "this is the only sibling you will ever have - I'm not making any more" (yes, I really do say things like that). "Your sister is the only other person on earth who will understand what it's like to grow up in our family." Of course they give me these blank,"there she goes again" looks and nod their heads without understanding. But one day they will understand. And if we're lucky enough to grow old and frail and to need their help, they will have each other to lean on as they care for The Mister and me. That, for me, is reason enough to justify my decision to have two kids when so many these days are only having one. And you know what? If I'd started earlier in life, I might have even had three. Having gotten so much out of my relationship with my sister, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have another - or a brother.

My sister is my touchstone, the one I can cry to, bitch at and generally be my most ungenerous, ungracious self without being judged. She knows what happened. She knows who did what. And she knows why.

She gets me.

Premature Assimilation

It happens to everyone, they say, at some time or another. One writes a set of instructions, clear and concise and plain as day, so the reader knows exactly what to do next, only to realize you've left out something Really Important.

The information the garbage company forgot to say was this: Even though we have taken away your normal-sized garbage bins and replaced them with the ones used by Lilliputians, we are not actually going to take away your compost. Yes, we know we told you that if you didn't compost your garbage we would refuse to collect it. But what we forgot to say (oops, our bad) was "Not Yet."

What are you supposed to do with the garbage that doesn't fit in the mini-bin but we won't accept as composting yet? Beats the heck out of us. If you put it on the street the raccoons will get it, turn it into a scene from Twister and there's no way we're cleaning that up. But if you keep it in your garage until January, which is when Not Yet ends and Now begins, you'll end up on an episode of Hoarders (if you're feeling a little queasy, don't hit that link).

But of course, the garbage mafia literature didn't say any of this. They said "Your New Carts Have Arrived!"

I wanted to show my eldest girl that, despite 46 years of evidence to the contrary, I did not actually want to kill the planet, so I started composting. First, I finally picked up all the leaves in the yard from pruning I hadn't cleaned up yet. Inspired, I pruned some more. That made the bin half full. Every day I trained myself: don't throw this in the garbage, take this out to the compost bin. Mid-week it was time to clean out the fridge. In my new role as a dutiful, non-planet hater, I put it all into the bin.

And then the day before garbage pickup day I had a bad feeling. That feeling that says you're about to get the pointy end of the stick in a place you don't like. And no, I don't know of a good place to put the pointy end of a stick, except perhaps in the big toe of someone you really don't like (like the garbage mafia). I called to "make sure tomorrow was recyling day and that we should be composting."

Aha. "NO. Not Yet."

How great! The mafia guys are not going to empty my now (as predicted) fly-ridden compost bin unless something dramatic - or sneaky - happens. One option I refused to consider was removing the food from the bin by hand. No way was I sticking anything of mine in there. I come from New Jersey. I watched the Sopranos. And despite everything I said the other day about lying, I do not count hiding my composting as lying to the garbage mafia. So I did what anyone would do: I cleaned up the yard.

By the time I was done all of the leaves, sticks, (dog poop,) dead flowers and predatory wisteria were piled high in the green bin, effectively covering up any evidence of premature composting.

They'll never know.

So now I get a fresh start. Or if not exactly fresh, at least not with 5 pounds of dinnner leftovers fermenting until January.

And what will I do with the garbage that is too big to fit in the Lilliputian bin but too delicious to leave out for the raccoons?

The heck if I know. 

An Age of Reason - and of Lies

It was certainly not the first lie she ever told, but it was the first Real Lie. The one where there was no doubt at all about whether what she was saying was true. She knew it was a lie and she was counting on me to believe it. I almost did.

I was tucking her into bed and asking about her 2nd grade homework, which she has been doing independently every day, almost without prompting. She said, very proudly, that it was all done. I pressed her with "really? How 'bout I check your English folder?" knowing that this was the homework she liked the least. "NO!" she shouted. "It's done! I did it! You don't have to look at it!"

And that's when I knew.

I opened the folder to confirm that nothing had been done. No sentences written, no handouts completed. The homework was as free of smudges and eraser marks as the day it left the copier.

Visibly sad and disappointed, in part because it's my job to look that way and in part because I really was disappointed, we had a long talk about lying and trust. How can I believe her in the future if I know that sometimes she lies? This played out over the next few days as I challenged her statements and she swore she was telling the truth. "I promise."

And then she did it again.

It's funny, because she is so reasonable these days. And when I say "reasonable" I don't mean that she's easy to get along with but more that she can be reasoned with. If you use logic she is able to follow along and to understand - and even agree (when it suits her). It's a remarkable and wonderful transformation from babyland to big girl territory. In the car after school she follows conversations between her older sister and me and gives sage advice like "don't get involved in that, you'll only get hurt" and "he probably has a crush on you, otherwise he wouldn't do that." She loves intrigue (unless it's intrigue about her) but she doesn't stir it up, she listens and applies reason to a solution.

It's quite fabulous and I feel like I'm in an age of reason. Not The Age of Reason, because I know that when puberty hits, reason will fly out the window like a foul ball. But it is An Age of Reason, one I am enjoying very much.

If only the price of reason wasn't being paid for in the currency of lies.

This morning I was getting out some plates for breakfast when I spotted a new, very dangerous addition to the plate cabinet: a shattered and jaggedly reassembled juice glass. 

It is her job to put the dishes away, this is how she earns her allowance. She is normally very careful, unless she is distracted by, say, Scooby Doo, and then sometimes accidents happen. And hey, sometimes accidents happen. When you break a glass in our house you get scolded but you do not get a time out.  Mostly I am worried for their bare feet and the dog and having to pull glass out of tender paws of all kinds. The idea that she would break something and hide it from us was, if not a total surprise, a disappointing one. Because in our house, when you hide something you did it counts as a lie. And we talked about lies, right?

So this time, after I vacuumed the kitchen and wiped down the counters looking for tiny fragments of glass, I sent her to her room. To think about it.

Later I asked her what she would do in my place. I do this every now and then even though I know this kind of role reversal is not truly possible for kids. I mean, without a job, mortgage,  baby-weight, in-law trouble, and a host of other RESPONSIBILITIES to jade you, how can one truly know what it's like to be a grownup? And if we knew, would we ever do it? Her answer was this: "I would tell myself not to lie because lying brings bad luck and your mother will be mad at you. But you don't have to say this to me now, because I already know it."

See? Totally reasonable, if a tad superstitious.

The Mister says "all kids lie, it's just a part of growing up" and I suppose he's right. But I was a pathological truth teller and still am, for better or worse. (Being a grownup sure would be easier if I was a better liar.) And I need to get this girl's lying thing under control during this temporary Age of Reason or I will be totally screwed during the up-and-coming Age of Insanity (aka Puberty).