This post is brought to you by the letter ‘K,’ along with the letter ‘L.’  For ‘literary license,’ which I’ll be taking plenty of today.  Writers can do that, see. 

Holy smoke and good grief!  If I’d’ve had a klue as to what was involved, I might’ve signed up to be a pet groomer instead.  Or a taxi driver or a meat packer or a washer woman.

Oh, wait.  I am a washer woman.

Anyway, I had no idea what was coming or just what we were in for when we said “yes” to the whole parenting deal.  By the time we figured it out, we had a whole kwartet, and it was too late to back out.

By all appearances, our friends who have no kids lead an idyllic life.  No one leaves the top off the milk jug.  No one’s tracking in mud on their freshly-washed bathroom rugs.  No one’s sneaking cookies, and no one’s kleaning out the pantry or putting muddy hand prints on the fancy fingertip towels that have embroidery.

No one riots over there.  There’s no kavorting up and down the (wooden) stairs.  No one’s kajoling them to make a trip to Barnes and Noble because the money he just earned from Grandpa is burning a hole in his pocket.  (Which may, by the way, require a full-thickness skin graft on that right thigh, judging by the urgency he seems to feel.)  But I digress.

There are no kabooms in their back yard because someone (a minor) snuck out with a Thunder King in his hot little hand.  Their matches are used only for lighting lovely cinnamon candles and not for making flame throwers with aerosol cans.

They get no phone kalls at the mall, the coffee shop, or at the grocery store because they haven’t farmed their numbers out to the Krispy Kreme Krowd.  Who, by the way, hit redial 39 times, asking you to “bring home the Krispies” when you’re out having date night with their father.

It’s enough to make a mother keel over, that’s what.  And that’s before the constant “knock-knock-knock” on the bathroom door, your one place of refuge, from a little fist attached to the period on the end of your krazy sentence.

Yes, there are days (we didn’t know this) that you’re ready to keel-haul the lot of ’em.  You’re pretty sure you’re not kapable of raising these kids and you know in your heart way on down to your knees that they’ll be lucky to see 16.  You do!

And that’s when the King and the Kween make a kwick break, sneaking out like the kraftiest of ninjas, running like all get out for Mishawaka where they stock sanity on the shelf beside the Starbucks koffee at the local book store.

Sigh.

When you get home, the goofiest thing happens.  Those kids look wonderful again, you shred the one-way tickets you’d picked up for Kenya, and you kiss their tousled heads.  Sounds krazy, but it’s true.