And then the police banged on my door

The chaos all started around seven twenty-five in the morning as I was scooping the goopy, organic all-chicken cat food out of the can, trying to avoid getting it on my fingers. I love my cats and want them to eat healthy food, but something about that food seriously grosses me out. So I was concentrating on exactly where the cat food was going- into the cat dish- when Katherine came racing into the kitchen.
"Mommy, I'm bleeding!"

She was bleeding. A lot.

I pulled her over to the sink and held her bleeding finger under the running water but had to turn the water off almost immediately because she started screaming, "it hurts!"

A straight slit ran vertically down the tip of her middle finger. I looked back and saw a trail of blood coming from the family room.
"What happened?"
"I was crawling around pretending to be a kitty and then I felt something and then it just slitted my finger."

I applied a band-aid and it immediately bled through, leaving a red line running down her hand that she was holding up. I removed the bloody band-aid and applied another and that one soaked through, too. The third band-aid seemed to stay.

At that point we had exactly fourteen minutes before we had to pick up Max, the carpool boy, and we still had to eat breakfast, pack snack and water, apply sunscreen, pick books for the carpool ride, change the cat water and use the bathroom. So I got Katherine sitting down, holding her finger in the air, eating a yogurt, thanked Caroline for cleaning up the blood on the kitchen floor and went into the family room thinking I would find glass on the floor but instead I found sharp scissors at the craft table.

The scissor conversation didn't go well.
"NO! I TOLD you. I was crawling and then it just got slitted."

And then Cooper, our one-year-old cat, pounced through the air, landing on a big fat-bellied lizard.
"A lizard!" the girls screamed in unison.

Caroline corralled Cooper into her bedroom, Katherine opened the patio door, still holding her bloody finger in the air and I reached for the dust pan and broom. Charles, our seventeen-year old Siamese, came over to see what the commotion was all about and stepped right onto the lizard without even noticing it. The lizard froze, making it tricky to get it onto the dustpan. Eventually, I shoved its front end on and lifted the dustpan. The lizard clung on, its fat body dangling to and fro.

I deposited the lizard outside. Mission accomplished. This past summer Cooper snagged another lizard in the house and that lizard dropped its tail. There's something very creepy about a lizard tail flip flopping around on the floor not attached to a lizard body. I was glad I saved this lizard's tail.

We managed to get everything done, although not in fourteen minutes. Finally in the car we flew down the hill and around the corner and two older ladies out walking waved their arms at me crazily. They thought I was going to hit them. I wasn't. They didn't know we were late to pick up Max and had a slit finger in the back seat that had bled through three band-aids.

We collected Max and zipped onto the first of four freeways and Katherine said, "Mommy, what if all the blood in my whole body comes out through my slitted finger?"

In the afternoon I returned to school for the pick up. Normally I only do the afternoon run but Max's mom is in New York so this week I'm doing both drop-off and pick-up. The kids piled into the back and the girls immediately started shouting in high-pitched voices.
"Give me water. MOMMY! I'm going to die if I don't get water like in the next second!"
"Give me water! Open it! Where's my gum?"

I pulled over and we had a conversation about patience and manners and got everyone buckled in and the waters were opened and distributed.

We were almost at Max's house and had managed to avoid potty talk for most of the ride when the phone rang. I have a bluetooth but don't use it. I can never figure out how to synch the sound to the bluetooth so it always comes through on the phone when I want it in my ear and when I want it on the phone it comes through the bluetooth which is never anywhere near my ear. A gut feeling told me I should answer the phone and after reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink I try to always trust my gut so I asked Katherine to answer the phone because there's a law in Los Angeles that you're not allowed to touch a phone while driving. It was Max's dad. After a lot of giggling and "whats?" Max's dad came through on the speaker phone. Did I have Max? Yes, I did. I wasn't supposed to have him. Right then his nanny was at the school in a panic because no one could find Max. Apparently Max's dad had left two voicemails for me. Oops.

So Max came home with us. As the kids were getting out of the car the girls started yelling.
"Eewww! It smells like pee back here! Do you smell pee? Did someone pee their pants?"

In the house they disappeared into Caroline's room. Caroline reappeared shortly thereafter to tell me that Max had peed his pants. He had a big wet stain on his pants and she didn't want him sitting on her bed or rug. I told her to be careful not to embarrass him and suggested she entice him outside to play. After Max's nanny came to collect him Caroline wanted to know what we could do about her car seat cover because that's where Max was sitting and she didn't want to sit on a car seat that smelled like pee. She got the car seat from the car and I washed the cover.

For dinner we had chicken salad and Katherine shouted out that she was "dead with chicken salad, that's how much I love it!" That reminded me that the girls love the chicken salad sandwiches at school which then reminded me that I had forgotten to place their lunch orders for the week which had to be done by six o'clock and it was five minutes before six. We all ran to the computer and the girls made their choices and we were done with a minute to spare.

Part way through dinner thunder crashed. Loudly. Very Loudly. And very suddenly. We all jumped. It rumbled again. Katherine said she was scared. We almost never get thunder in Los Angeles. The sky was covered with dark clouds and there was an eery calm before the storm feeling in the air. Katherine wanted to know what would happen if the thunder crashed right through the house. What if the thunder crashed the trees into the house?

So we put down our forks and went outside and looked up at the clouds and talked about clouds banging together and how thunder happens and as we were talking a plane flew overhead and Katherine said, "what if the thunder crashes the airplane right out of the sky and it lands right over here and deads the tree and the squirrel that lives in the tree?"

Several hours later, the girls were in bed, Tim was still at work and I was reading a book with CNN on TV. Cooper jumped straight up in the air from his perch on the sofa arm. I got up, thinking he was after another lizard. Two lizards in one day seemed like a lot. But I didn't see another lizard. Cooper's tail got all poofy. Charles is deaf and didn't stir from his prostrate position on the sofa.

Suddenly I heard a fierce knock on the back door. I called Tim.
"Someone's banging on the door."
 They banged again.
"Don't answer it," Tim told me.

More banging on the door. A flashlight beam danced around in the garage.

"Oh my gosh, they're shining a flashlight in here!"
Cooper was in hiding at this point. I made a note that I'd really like to get a dog.
"Call the neighbor," Tim told me. More loud banging.

But then rational thinking kicked in. I thought I heard a police radio. I turned off the TV and listened again. I heard two voices. I calmly walked to the back door and swung it open.

Two policeman with shiny shoes and shiny hair were standing on my driveway in front of their cruiser.

They had the wrong address for an alarm.
"Don't you guys say you're the police when you knock?" I asked.
"Never!" One of them said. "What if you were a bad guy!"




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