Mr. Lucky's Out of Town (Again)

Mr. Lucky went up to Georgia yesterday to visit his parents, taking our firstborn and the smaller dog, Jasper, with him. Baby Bear and I are staying home because things can become very volatile between our two autistic sons, especially if they're together for too long and in less than familiar surroundings. It's the main reason the older boy now lives in a group home.

Jasper's a sweetheart, especially when he turns onto his back, looks at me upside-down with those huge brown eyes, and beats his tail. But Buddy chews up everything that doesn't belong to Mr. Lucky (why is that?) and is always digging his way under the fence and into other people's yards. Needless to say, I wanted Buddy to go to Georgia. But it's precisely because Jasper is the smaller dog that he was picked to go, to my everlasting chagrin.

Instead of the minivan which would've had plenty of room for Buddy the Beagle From Hell, the husband took his snazzy black, two-door, sun-roofed, playboyish Buick Riviera, which I do not want to be stuck with should the necessity arise because it has a tire that's always running low on air. In fact, when Mr. Lucky was deployed for four months last year, he asked me to take the Buick out once in a while, "just to keep it in running condition." But after he left, I had to e-mail him that I found it sitting in the driveway with a flat.

"It gets that way sometimes," he e-mailed back. "It just needs air now and then. We have a pump for it somewhere out in the garage."

Somewhere, he said. I loved how he waited till he was halfway around the world to tell me all of this.

I'll stick to my reliable Chrysler minivan with the warranty, thank you.

Once again, it's just me and Bear--and the troublemaking dog. So far Buddy has knocked over the Christmas tree (not even Bear has ever tried that), figured out how to jump onto the kitchen counter, and has now maimed half of Bear's Teletubbies. While Mr. Lucky was out of town earlier this month, Buddy chewed the ear off Dipsy. This afternoon I found Tinky-Winky missing his nose.

Meanwhile, Bear was up at four in the morning, rocking on his bed while his electronic keyboard played an annoying rhythm full blast. I had to unplug the keyboard and remove it from his room, but after breakfast he hauled it back into his room, plugged it in, and resumed rocking.

Around mid-morning he dropped the remote control onto our ceramic tile kitchen floor, and it burst into pieces like Humpty Dumpty. Ordinarily I would say good riddance to this annoying object which is usually attached to Mr. Lucky's hand, but thanks to his powers of programming, we cannot switch from the DVD player or Playstation to the TV or vice-versa without it. So I had to figure out how to put it back together, and without any help from all the king's horses or all the king's men. Only once it was reassembled, I couldn't get it to work. It was dead.

This was not good. Baby Bear literally screamed in horror when I pointed it at the TV, and nothing happened. When he gets upset, he tends to either hit himself or bang his head into the wall--and we have lots of cracks and holes in the drywall to prove it.

Eventually I figured out that one of the batteries was reinserted backwards--but not after a new hole appeared in the living room wall, only inches above the back of the sofa. That kid is so tall for his age--if only he could make the holes higher, then I could cover them up with pictures. If I rearranged the furniture, swapped the sofa with the electric Charmglow fireplace, then either the mantel clock would conceal the hole, or I could use that picture of my children that sits next to the clock and needs a new frame after I caught a certain dog chewing on it.

Only I can't move the sofa or fireplace by myself, and Mr. Lucky doesn't like to rearrange the furniture unless it's his idea. Yeah, I know what I have to do--make it his idea, and remember to tell him how brilliant he is for thinking of it.

He called this morning, not only to make sure I wasn't entertaining any of the aforementioned king's men in his absence, but to announce the low tire was officially flat. Oh, he and the Crown Prince and Jasper made it to the in-laws' house all right yesterday, but when they tried to go out for breakfast this morning, that perpetually low tire finally blew out. The spare tire, meanwhile, was like the one in A Christmas Story. It was round, it had once been made of rubber.

At least I have four bags of chocolate to get me through Sunday, when he comes home. (He bought them for me the day before he left, wasn't that sweet of him? Of course, they were on sale.)

Number of times I had to get up while writing this post: 4

Nothing like a full moon to make Baby Bear bounce off the battered walls!