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2001-07-16 | 1:50 p.m.

Tonight Jasper and I will drive to the airport to pick up Duff and the girls. Jasper doesn't know it but the grandparents have loaded them down with three new scooters. He'll be beside himself and will want to ride his immediately, even though it will be dark by the time we get home and anyway, the damn things aren't intended for children under five. Jasper is still two, though I forget sometimes and think he is already three. Today I would like to videotape him talking because he is at that interesting age where he can go into a long discursive monologue that only five or six people in the whole world can understand.

I really enjoyed being a single mother of a single child this weekend. (I never got to have one kid, you'll recall. I started out with two.) It was great. Everything was easier. We had big lofty expanses of time to fill, though the weekend went by too fast. We went to the fair yesterday and when we came home we just crashed together and slept all night. There was no one around to keep us awake or make me feel guilty for going to bed so early, with so much left undone.

Sometimes I feel like a deadbeat Dad in disguise. I haven't really missed the girls since those wobbly first few hours. When I talked to them, they always sounded deliriously happy. I felt a little twinge, sure, maybe teared up a little, but that's all. How could I be unhappy when they are so happy? When they are here, they are sometimes happy, laughing, singing, but most often fighting, screaming, or crying. I'll bet they didn't fight once at their grandparents'. (Even if they did, I'll never hear about it, because the grandparents are about as reliable as Pravda when it comes to conveying bad news). Not only have the girls been trained to behave MORE and BETTER in other people's houses than their own, but they've been treated like little she-pashas every day for the last two weeks, ferried around from one kid-friendly location to the next, and kept to a wholesome diet and restful schedule. Well, maybe the diet wasn't all that wholesome, but it surely wasn't characterized by excess. Tomorrow morning they will climb up on my bed and wake me and say, "We're bored." Then we will pick up where we left off.

Duff did go dancing with Barbie and Midge and six or seven other people, but due to plans somebody else in the group had made, they ended up at some club called the Have a Nice Day Caf�, which has a smiley-faced '70s theme and played "happy '70s white-people music" like the Partridge Family, which wasn't at all to Duff's taste. He said eventually they started mixing it up with more disco and the music became a little more tolerable. I asked him if he ever got to dance and he said, "Yeah, we got out there and shuffled around with the rest of 'em." We both love to dance but we hardly ever get to do it. So I understood that he was downplaying whatever fun there was to try to protect my feelings. Which is sweet. He told me the night before they went there, the biggest player in the NFL (as in 450 pounds) had been arrested after punching out one of the smiley-face club bouncers. Apparently the football player grabbed some woman's butt and when the bouncer took him to task, he took out the bouncer. I smell a lawsuit...

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