Tonight at 8:05 I was thinking hey. I’m pretty good at this. 5 years experience and I’m gettin’ pretty slick, if I do say so myself (and since there are no multiple choice tests for mothers, I’m the only one who’s likely to say so.)

I’m tucking in the two “big kids”. The baby’s been out for over an hour. Everyone’s hair has been washed (this is an ordeal in our house). Baby had simple dinner. Big kids and I had actual pork chops with mushroom gravy and brussel sprouts. Which they ate. Really.

All’s pretty good.

Then I hear the crash.

No, this isn’t how Kissy bites it. This turns out to be the entire tray of Valentine’s Day cookies we spent all afternoon on. Sugar cookies, shaped like hearts, and then you cut out another heart in the middle, drop in a Jolly Rancher (or, in this case, a life saver, because that’s all I could find, but Jolly Ranchers work better) and it makes this very cute, very appealing to a kid stained glass cookie. Sam loves Valentine’s Day.

But they are all toast. So I beat the crap out of the dog…I’m a really bad person…and then for good measure I beat the crap out of the other dog (come on, I popped one on the nose hard and just chased the other around the house, what do you think I am, some kind of pet murderer? Oh, yes, I’m getting to that.) THen I remade the cookies. The original cookies were home made. These I made with a three year old cookie mix I found in a drawer. I don’t think the kindergardeners will know the difference. Then I stretched the remaining life savers out and it seems to have worked. The cookies…well, I’ve had worse. Not recently, but still.

And then I remembered the fish. The fish who, according to my best google diagnosis, has dropsy. Last stage dropsy, shall we say. It’s floating upside down at the bottom of the tank with a ridiculously swollen belly. It seems there’s some slim chance that antibiotic drops, available only half an hour’s drive away, might help.

Yeah.

So, more google. How to kill the fish? The apparent most humane method: clove oil. I can’t even imagine where I’d get clove oil in rural New Hampshire at nine o’clock at night, even if the kids weren’t sleeping. (I’m soloing.) The fish looks, frankly, miserable. I think letting it float upside down until I can find clove oil (have I mentioned we’re expecting snow?) is arguably worse than anything else I could do at this point. So, second best method.

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