After a pathetic attempt to start spring cleaning my house this weekend (read: a lot of sighing and whining on my part) I sent the kids outside to murder one another quietly as I abandoned my ill-fated cleaning spree to sit on my deck and play on the interweb.

It was a beautiful day; perfect for washing windows sitting on the deck with my laptop and playing solitaire while I ordered the kids about to pick up garbage. (Someone has to make sure we don’t live in a complete hovel.)

I tried to ignore Fric and Frac and they tried to ignore me. Who wants to pick up dog poop and old pop cans when they could run around, jump on one another and try to make each other eat dirt?

Life was good. I had a cold beverage, a dog by my feet, the sun on my face and a wireless internet connection.

The only thing that could have made the day better was if my husband were home to take the garbage left festering out back to the dump.

I guess you can’t have it all. Sigh.

As I surfed the net and avoided any parental or homeowning obligations, my kids ran around like wildebeests who had just been released from captivity. They argued and bickered and I pretended to be deaf to it all.

I wasn’t going to let a pair of squawking siblings kill my mood.

This would be why I keep winning those parent of the year awards.

I should have known something was wrong when the only thing I could hear was my dog softly farting and the chirping of the birds around me. Every parent worth their salt knows if the kids are quiet trouble soon follows.

This holds true even when they aren’t toddlers. Except they no longer try to flush legos down the toilet, toss the television remote into the garbage or smear makeup all over their bedroom walls.

Nowadays when they are quiet they are planning a mutiny, listing their sibling on e-bay or going online to learn how to hot wire Mom’s car.

I didn’t have to wonder for long where they were or what they were doing. The screaming and bellering led me straight to them.

This was the type of screaming that any parent knows not to ignore. It signals imminent destruction, painful injury or sounds as the three second warning before one of them goes postal and tries to physically rip the limbs off their sibling to beat them with.

I trotted out back to see what was up, mentally preparing myself for the worse. Maybe they fell out of a tree while climbing it, my mind raced in one direction. Maybe a bear found them and thinks they look really tasty, my mind raced in the other direction.

I expected bruised and broken children who needed Florence Nightingale.

What I didn’t expect to find were my children screaming at each other simultaneously, one howling in pain, the other howling indignantly, both of them smacking at each other like two little sissies.

“What’s going on here?” I barked. Which of course is code for “Commence your screaming at me simultaneously so that I can’t understand a word either of you are saying because I really like that when you do that.”

At the sounds of both of them hollering at me in tandem, the only thing I could pick out was one was a ‘booger nut’ and the other was ‘a cheating loser.’

Good to know.

“Slow down, I can’t understand you.” What I did understand was that Fric was sprawled out in a pile of moose poop with little brown nuggets clinging to her hair and covering her shirt. Lovely.

Frac was worse off, though while dung-free, he was shoeless and clutching his foot as though it may fall off.

Both of them were so filthy that the only clean parts of them were where the tear tracks on their faces had streaked down leaving clean stripes amid the filth.

I was tempted to hop in my car and drive off, game to pretend this never happened, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t win me any more of those mother of the year awards so I soldiered on.

“What happened to your foot?” I could see now Fric’s foot was actually bleeding but he held onto it so tightly I couldn’t really see the injury.

Pushing his hand away, I could see he had stepped on a nail. Great. Thankfully it wasn’t imbedded very deeply and he had already had a tetanus shot.

“Ow. That sucks,” I said as I held his injured foot in my hand. I thought about lecturing him for running around with out shoes on, but at this point I was more interested in why his sister still layed sprawled out on the ground covered in moose pellets.

Both of them had clammed up at this point and just lay there sniveling. Apparently the code of sibling silence had kicked in and neither of them were going to narc the other out.

“Well you can just sit there all day bleeding while your sister starts to attract flies, or we could solve this problem like rational humans and you can tell me what happened.”

Silence.

“Fine. Let me just go get my camera so I can take pictures to put on my blog about what nincoompoops I have for kids.”

Heh. That worked. My daughter’s vanity kicked in and she cracked. Just like an egg.

“We were playing tag,” she sniffed, “and Frac was cheating. He was supposed to count to twenty but he wasn’t-”

“I did too!”

“So I got mad and chased him through the garden and I may have accidentally pushed him but it wasn’t my fault he stepped on the nail,” she concluded.

Nothing like one side of the story to clear things up.

“Uh huh. So just why are you sitting in a pile of poop?”

Frac piped up (rather gleefully I thought) “After I stepped on the nail she was going to go get you but I may have accidentally stuck out my foot and tripped her. It’s not my fault she landed in poop,” he parroted back to me.

“Uh huh.”

I helped Fric up and tried to shake some of the poop pellets loose and then I picked up Frac and helped limp him into the bathroom where I put on my Mommy Doctor hat and tugged the nail loose.

As I doctored Frac up, Fric continued to pick little brown pellets out of her hair and clothing.

“You know guys, there is such a thing as Karma. What goes around comes around,” I explained as I applied antiseptic to Frac’s foot.

“What does that mean,” Fric asked as she started to get ready to shower herself clean.

“It means that if you cheat you will get caught. It means that if you push your brother and he steps on a nail, he may just trip you so that you land in a pile of shit.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. OH. So be nice to each other so that nice things will happen to you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

They hugged it out and the entire incident would soon be forgotten as they moved onto something new to argue and fight over.

But my peaceful afternoon was shattered and I was left wondering what the hell I did for Karma to bite me on the ass and earn such a delightful turn of events as the afternoon had delivered.

Relaying the story later that evening to their father, Boo chimed in that Karma was paying me back.

“Oh, really? Why is that?” I asked him.

“You’re not earning any good karma points lately.”

“Really? Just how does one earn good karma?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure a blowjob would solve everything.”

Thanks for the spiritual enlightenment Boo. I’ll get right on it.