In which Rebekah explains her absence . . .

. . . in order that she might keep the peace with her Mothers and assure them that she has neither fallen from the Eiffel Tower nor drowned in the Seine.

My excuses, in no particular order

1) I've been really, really busy doing things that you don't really want to read about. No, really. I don't think that anyone can make being on hold with the electric company sound interesting. And you don't want to read about unloading the dishwasher or hanging up laundry or that sort of thing either.

2) The kids have been going to bed really late, because it's only really getting dark at 10:20 or so, and so their schedules are all out of whack. Unfortunately, I'm pretty much ready to crash by then too.

3) I have about a million lines of tax forms that I'm supposed to be filling in. I haven't done any of them yet either. (See, I'm an equal opportunity procrastinator!)

4) The World Cup has been on.

5) It is imperative that I read as many George Simenon mysteries as possible before we leave Paris, so that when I walk around I can look at street signs and think, "Oh, they found a body here" or "This is where the victim's girlfriend lived." It's much harder to do that in Manhattan.

6) Blaise's been super busy (although that's getting better) and so we haven't been doing very many of the sorts of things that I find myself getting really excited about writing about.

7) It's hard to start writing again once I've been away from it for several days.

So, really, I don't have any very good excuses, other than procrastination and general busyness. (And may I add that it's currently very, very hot. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything except that I think my brain may be melting.)

In any case, if you would like the short version of what's been going on for the last few weeks it goes something like this:

Deal with bureaucracy--end of school stuff--camp stuff--more bureaucracy--dentist--end of school stuff--dentist--party--dentist--party--camp stuff--doctor--end of school stuff--bureaucracy. . .

I'll try to fill in some more of the details over the next days (just as soon as I finish dealing with the rest of the dentist stuff [Sapphire and Cherry are both getting filling tomorrow, and evidently Ezio needs them as well] and the end of school stuff [last day tomorrow] and the camp stuff [Sapphire leaves Monday morning] . . .).