What an excellent weekend. It's a pity we have to go back to school and work.

We had sort of a weird experience today though, and I'm not sure what to do about it.

We went to the rec center to work out this morning, and took the kids and their friends--a brother and sister that are Anna's and Conor's ages. In fact, Anna has known the sister since she was four, so eight years.

Now, these kids don't have a great life at all. They're being raised by their great-grandparents because they've been taken away from their mom and their grandmother was in no way able to care for them. It's a pretty sad situation, really.

So while we were working out, all four kids went swimming. They're old enough to be at the pool by themselves, according to the rec center rules. As far as we knew, everything was just peachy.

Once we finished, we rounded up three of the kids--Anna's friend met up with another friend and decided to stay longer. As we were leaving, I noticed a large scratch on onse side of Conor's neck, and a bunch of small ones on the other side of his neck.

I asked both of my kids what happened, and at first they denied any knowledge. It was obvious to me that they knew exactly what the scratches were from, though. It took about five minutes of convincing them I knew something was wonky, and they finally told me the truth.

Apparently Anna's friend decided it would be funny to hold Conor underwater. She held him by the neck with enough strength and viciousness to scrape him. Anna did nothing to defend her brother--in fact, she encouraged it.

Once Conor broke away and they saw the scratches, Anna asked Conor to lie about what happened because she knew I'd be pissed.

So we all piled into the car to take the brother home. No one was there. He's not old enough to stay home by himself. So we trundled him around while we did some errands, tried to track down another grandma, checked back at his house, and overall spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what to do with him. Finally, we located a grandma (not the great-grandma, though) and dropped him off with her.

What a mess. This is actually the second time we've been unable to drop the brother off after he's been with us. I feel badly for the kids, but between the sister's weirdness and the lack of adult concern, I'm having a difficult time convincing myself that we'll invite the kids to go anywhere with us again...