It's good to be with Mrs. Reed

If you're under the age of 10 and you have limited wants and needs, there's not really many better places to be than with Mrs. Reed.

Case in point: It's Presidents' Day so the local schools are closed down. Alison and Alex are hanging out with me today.

Officially, I'm in charge of them. Unofficially, Alex is providing childcare while I check in at work, do a little recreational reading and recover from weekend yard work.

They beat a path downstairs for Club Penguin when he first arrived. They've checked in on SpongeBob and their Webkinz pals. While I have a couple movies, I think Wii Sports is next in the line-up.

Around 11, Alex was hungry so I let them have some gogurt but then said we'd have lunch and they needed to think about what they wanted. I was planning on marching their little couch potato butts to McDonald's. It's a little cold but the restaurant is only a mile away and the sun is out.

But we couldn't agree on lunch. So we stopped in (via the Honda) at McDonald's, Arby's and Taco Bell. I'm making them eat fruit before they get to even think about dessert.

We may hit the park and/or library later. We would have lunch with the brass penguins downstairs from the library -- They're Glendale Mall institutions and kids get to climb and slide all over them until they stand taller than the sculpted trio -- but they claimed they were having stomach issues. So we ended up driving home, me in the front with the heat blasting, them in the back with the windows down sucking up frigid fresh air like queasy Cocker Spaniels.

All traces of illness vanished once we hit my driveway. It's magic like that. They grabbed their bags of booty and headed downstairs again.

They sound like they've finished lunch now. I'll have to check the fruit and milk supply.

Judging from the latest Alison outcry: "Alex, peee--u! That's just nasty!" Alex just farted.

He doesn't care. He's playing Wii tennis. Alison is coaching him. That counts as exercise, doesn't it?