After the age of two, O’s focus turned from cooler spelunking to waste management. There was not a garbage can in the house that the kid did not overturn, pilfering through the contents at least a dozen times before noon each day. And then, as he grew older and wiser, he developed a keen affinity for the grappling truck. Each week an enormous vehicle equipped with a crane and hook would drive the streets of our hometown picking up yard clippings and trash and old appliances that otherwise civilized residents would discard in trash-pits on the front lawn. The sheer size of the thing was captivating with the stilted, blundering movements of the hook fishing for curbside debris. O insisted he was going to be grapple hook-truck driver one day. I smiled patiently and secretly willed it to be otherwise. Navy Seal – dangerous but respectable. Garbage truck driver – I’ve got nothing.

With G, it’s been a harder read. She’s difficult to pin down. She’s sort of passingly interested in a whole variety of things – art, candy, soccer, making candy, The Red Sox, eating candy, finding vending machines with candy, searching for loose pieces of candy in purses and in street gutters along parade routes. Perhaps she’ll be a chocolatier or purveyor of rare and unusual jelly beans. Suits me fine. I’m a candyoholic myself though I would never stoop to sample old candy strewn on sidewalks and in parking lots (really, I wouldn’t).

But just the other night, G discovered a new talent that, quite like candy hunting, is frighteningly addictive. It was Friday night, game night and the four of us gathered around to play Yahtzee, the game of dice, roll ‘em and weep and so on. There’ s a lot of trash talking during our family game-athons and I was feeling lucky until little G began throwing the bones. She just couldn’t miss. She’d be rolling for a full house and a full house it would be. She’d gun for a large straight and the dice would fall obligingly. I could tell she was really getting her groove on when she shouted, “This game makes me feel OUTRAGEOUS!” She actually threw two Yahtzees that night (one Yahtzee being the Holy Grail, two Yahtzees being astonishingly, statistic-defyingly HOLY SHIT SHE’S THROWN ANOTHER YAHTZEE AND GET THAT CHILD A SCRATCH AND WIN TICKET KIND OF LUCKY!!!!) G has found her calling. She is a gambler. She blows on the dice. She taps her left shoulder twice, chants a little lucky song and chucks a fist full of dice for the win. All the while she wears the grin of someone supremely above the law of averages. This weekend we’ll begin our poker training and come spring – it’s Vegas.

They have waste management opportunities in Vegas, right? Because O will need something to do while G holds forth at the Bellagio.

Yesterday I received a phone call from G’s teacher. She was calling to ask if G was supposed to be buying breakfast at school because each morning she’s been getting off the bus and marching into the cafeteria with her Lunch-Deposit pin number and spending her parents’ hard earned cash on a second breakfast, usually Belgian waffles and a hot cocoa. Finally, someone over there on the first grade teaching team thought to ask G if she was, in fact, sent off to school with an empty stomach. She quietly explained that her school breakfast was her second meal of the day, right after her at home breakfast which was nowhere near as good and suspiciously devoid of sugary syrups and sticky buns and hot chocolate.

She’s a clever and wily one, that G, a double agent, a natural with the covert-ops. She has convinced at least two friends to join her in eating a second breakfast at school. She not only has a firm grasp on executing a secret mission, she also has recruitment skills. We are in SO MUCH TROUBLE. Now, in second grade, it’s breakfast pastries. Can you imagine the variety and complexity of the stunts she’ll be pulling come seventh grade?

For now I have removed all funds from her school meal account. She’ll be brown bagging it for awhile. She has agreed to pay us back for all the unauthorized meals and there will now be a Wii embargo, two weeks without holding a Wii Nunchuck, that should learn her.

My end of the deal is to revisit Madmarriage menu options and include an occasional breakfast that does not come from a box that says General Mills or Kellogg in the upper right hand corner. This is a small act of contrition, my saying that I have played a part in sending G into the arms of the enemy, for what six year old can resist the charms of those offering French Toast Stix when all they get at home is Wheat Chex?

And about dinner, you ask? After all it is Friday. Fuddruckers anyone?

As for Spider Mama and mini-me – they are all gone. GONE I say. Not a single spider is left hanging in the now tattered and forgotten web in my east bedroom window. There are tons of bugs still stuck in the awkward, splayed poses of the vanquished but there is no spider left to eat them. Rather than think of the spider-absence as a sure sign of arachnoid demise, I prefer to think of it as a temporary loss. Those spiders packed it up and went to Bonita Springs for the Winter. They’ll be back, come April, with the robins and the tulips and the sweet smell of new grass.

*****

There’s been a nice and unexpected development in the bus situation and I’m left feeling reassured that there are some kind kids still left on the planet. I did a little reconnaissance yesterday. And hired a fifth grader to do my snooping. I have an acquaintance whose son rides the bus with O and G. He’s a quiet kid, a well-behaved eleven year old who is rarely in trouble. I asked this child’s mother if she had heard any bus-tales from her mild son. She had heard nothing but promised to ask him about the bus on his return from school.

She called last night to say she’d spoken with her son and he had validated O’s cry of foul. According to quiet-boy there are two or three kids who give my O a really hard time. This child not only felt concerned about how O was being treated, he felt sympathetic enough to offer to be O’s seat partner on the bus. There is safety in numbers. There is safety among the green vinyl seats of school bus hell when a big fifth grader offers to watch your back. Needless to say, O and I are thrilled and thankful and anxious to see how this new alliance changes the dynamic on Bus 7.

*****

While I’m talking about dynamics, I’ve gotta share the interesting news that was presented to me last night. (Yes, it was a very busy phone night at the Madmarriage household). I was chatting with my friend and mother of another student in O’s class, (okay, I was complaining about the trials and tribulations of being a room parent and she was patiently listening), when she broke in to tell me about the true drama at hand in classroom 137. According to my friend, there has been a great to-do surrounding a the new kid, I’ll call him Justin. Apparently Justin has a penchant for developing long and violently disturbing stories during journal time. His tales of animal dismemberment and bloody conflicts have frightened some of his classmates. The mothers of the frightened classmates have launched a full offensive designed to remove Justin from the class and the school. Phone calls home to Justin’s parents have not been returned. Child services may be called in to do a home visit. A witch hunt, perhaps justified, perhaps not, has been launched. There are angry mothers demanding that this Justin-kid be burned at the stake.

I feel sort of sorry for Justin, clearly there are issues at hand. And I feel deeply sorry for the teacher, Mr. S, who must soldier through the brouhaha and sort fact from fiction all while trying to reach Justin’s disinterested parents and dodging the expert advance of mothers with inflamed imaginations who, if left to their own devices, would have Justin hog tied and roasted on a spit.

I am confused by my own reactions to the news about Justin. After all, I had a perfectly normal conversation with Justin’s mother just yesterday about the upcoming class Halloween party. She didn’t strike me as negligent or pathological. She did mention that they had just moved. Perhaps, in the relocation process, her voice mail was broken and phone calls from the school were lost rather than ignored. I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and I guess I’m naive, but I have a very hard time believing that a parent would purposely ignore phone calls from their own child’s teacher. The idea of deliberate neglect is just so hard for me to fathom.

But while I’m feeling all kinds of progressive and accepting, I’m also wrestling with my inner neurotic. After all, there have been more than 50 school shootings since 1997, Columbine (the mother of all school disasters) and Paducah and Jonesboro and Va. Tech and Cleveland, all jangling at my nerves, making me feel edgy and irrational and fiercely protective.

This Justin-thing is a tough one as it is really none of my business until, well, it is. And it will only become my business once my O is directly effected, violently or otherwise. So I soothe myself with the facts. All but one of the notorious school shootings were perpetrated by children twelve years old or older. There is only Mount Township, Michigan to remind us that even six and seven year olds can die at the hands of their peers.

Amid all this worrying, my e-mails to the parents of Room 137 about candy corn relays and spider web cookies and Monster Mash Freeze Dance must seem incredibly discordant and unbelievable. But, really, eight year old children and their parents should be concerned with pumpkin table clothes and how many jelly beans are in the Halloween jelly bean jar. Morbid thoughts of potential grade school violence are just not normal.

Each year, this parenting thing gets a little more complicated. The answers to difficult questions become more elusive and obtuse as my children grow older and spend their days swimming up stream, in a river of peers and perverts and juvenile delinquents. What a world. What a world.