I also did all the dishes and stuff and kept at Russell to do fun things all day because it was a unbelievably beautiful day today. I worked on developing my freckle collection and have a light sunburn, but it felt good.

As the day wore on, Russell was kind of whiny and demanding, so I kept sending him outside. By the time we went to go pick up Mike at the uni, I was darned close to throttling the kidlet because he had been a royal pain in the ass. The last hour before we went to pick up Mike, I had been dozing off in the chair and every time I'd start to nod off, Russell would say,"Mom!" to get my attention and then say some three or four word phrase that was NOT worth being woken up for. About the time I was ready to kill him, it was time to get Mike.

When we got Mike, I simply said,"I'm going to bed." and I crawled into bed with my aching horrible back and Mike handed me my vibrating heating pad and helped me hook up the fan. I conked out cold. And of course, Russell saw fit to wake me up twice in an hour for stupid things. The child is on death row in our house.

When Mike found out that his carefully orchestrated work to keep Russell out of the bedroom had failed, he was ready to kill the kidlet, too. I finally gave up on napping and I sat for about an hour in a daze in the recliner trying to remember what it was I was supposed to be doing to help get dinner on. Fortunately, Mike was conscious and started doing things and I would remember, get up and help cut vegetables or whatever.

Mike made a reasonable semblance of my teriyaki marinade and cooked up the t-bone steak I'd found on sale a week or two back on the barbecue. Bless him. Bless red meat. God bless us everyone.

Russell got busted just before dinner time because we'd told him he could play outside with some neighborhood kids,aka the Twins, but that he couldn't go inside. The kids' parents smoke and it's not good for Bear, but also because we want to make him come find us, if he's wants a change of venue. Mike was watching him over the fence as he was doing the barbecue and checking on him every so often and then we realized we hadn't heard from him in about 15 minutes, so Mike went looking.

After Mike found him inside at the Twins' place, Bear came up with the excuse that he never *heard* us tell him he couldn't go inside, even though he'd repeated it back to us and we'd told him three times. He got busted for lying, not checking with us and we had a whole discussion about how God doesn't think much of liars and neither do his parents. We did our dead level best to scare the crap out of him and he took it quite seriously that God doesn't like liars. He cried when we told him that if he lied, we couldn't trust him and that if he kept lying that we'd be apt to believe others before him and that would make us sad. Then we got him with the "for us to stick together as a family it's important that we are all as truthful as possible with each other." He was positively crestfallen.

Guilt -- the wonder weapon of disciplining kids.

The good news: he did clean his room!

On the sick and ick front, the antibiotics are kicking in and doing a decent job. I still feel like run over dog poo, but it's better than yesterday. I'm still tired as hell, but I am always in a quandry on Saturday nights between sleep and such TV favorites as "The Pretender" "The Profiler" and my all-time favorite show so far,"The Others." I'll grant you, I haven't got much taste, but the last show, "The Others" really does something for me. I think because I sometimes have a real sense of how far reaching my empathic abilities go, so that show gets me.

I've been able to lay my hands on people and have their pain stop. The times it's happened have scared the crap out of me because I know I can't explain that and I can't control it either because usually it doesn't seem to apply to me and I can't make it happen whenever I want. Sometimes, it just happens.

As a result, I'm curious about a show where people have weird freaky abilities that they are able to control.

And I know things sometimes.

I knew that Russell was a boy from very early on. I don't know how I knew, but I did and all my friends said,"Oh, that's Wendy." And when he came out as a boy, they all shook their heads and smiled about their freaky friend. I knew that Genevieve was a girl when I was two weeks pregnant. I told Mike that I couldn't guarantee it, but that she felt different to me than Russell did and that's why I thought she was a girl. When the amnio confirmed it, Michael said something about my weirdness. He still claims that there must be a scientific explanation for the way that I know the things I know because I can nail him on all kinds of things which I shouldn't be able to know, but do. I can play card identification with him and guess the cards correctly about 80% of the time, if he concentrates on the card. In card guessing games, it requires a level of established intimacy. I could do it with my brother and as a result, he'd rarely play cards with me.