Arthur/Penny: Emergency Post - Has Anyone Seen My Daughter?

This especially goes out to anybody in Old Orchard right now!  I haven't seen Millie all day, and while that's not entirely unusual - she's pretty free-range, and she'd stayed over with a friend last night because they had tennis practice in the morning - but she's usually a lot better about texting me where she's at and if plans changed.  Still, she's 13, and can get forgetful or let her phone die, so we weren't really worried until the afternoon, and even then, we just figured it was normal tween girl stuff and didn't start calling folks until dinner time.

Which is when we found out she actually popped in late to grab her tennis racket,  Normally, she'd call out, even if we hadn't been kind of at odds all week because Ray and I were asking her to choose between tennis and cross-country skiing (there has been a lot of talk about how this wasn't fair because Grandma and Grandpa Lincoln didn't make "me" choose between lacrosse and swimming when I was her age).  Last night, though, it is entirely possible that she came in while one of us was saying that raising a girl like Millie would be difficult even if she was a hundred percent mine, but that's the Trading Post Inn for you.

A lot of kids might have burst into the living room at that, wanting to know what the hell we were saying, but as much as she has inherited Nell's athleticism from me (or at least, the DNA I inherited from her), she's also got a lot of the traits that make Ray a pretty decent lawyer, and that includes not giving people who may have lied to her the chance to lie to her again.  She once confronted us with a voice recorder that I use for interviews that she'd left out to capture us constructing presents from "Santa".

So, it's possible that we've fucked up really badly here.  It's also possible that this is just something that happens when your kids start getting independent, but better safe than sorry!

-Penny