My dearest Deidrebane, it pains me acutely to have to write you this column and expose our personal goings-on to the somewhat wider audience of the world at large, but I can’t find any of our personal stationary and I’m not about to go tearing up the entire house when the computer is right here.

Simply put and plainly typed, your new children have become a nuisance.

I can only assume these children were adopted by you on one of your recent humanitarian skylarkings, some time while my attention was turned elsewhere, say to the televised gladiatorial matches or to Bolivian chicken racing, whose season is now thrillingly underway. I know you claim these children to be the fruits of your loom, or loins, whatever it is you have down there nowadays, but needless to say, I find this to be horrifyingly implausible. To the best of my knowledge your plumbing has not been snaked in a generation. And word on the street is that things are drier down there than a jerky stand in the Sahara. For the sake of decorum, I shall fail to go into the gruesome details, though believe me when I say the word is out.

I can only imagine how our first wave of real children feel about this latest batch of imposters, suckling at their mother’s dry, unproductive teat. Wherever they are, Deidrebane, out in the world making their fortune or spending ours, it is surely a sad day for them. If I could remember their names, I would send my condolences by post card or fruit basket, whichever we have in stock at the moment.

And no, I will not refer to these new hangers-on as “our” children. I fell for that trick once, many years ago, and shant repeat my folly. I’m quite convinced I never had anything to do with the first batch, and so I’m not about to piss my markings onto these latest home-invaders. These are your children, Deidrebane, and I’ve had enough of them playing “bakery” with my angel dust collection.

Firstly, there’s the matter of your oldest new son, Montpellier, who I recently heard through the grapevine was kicked out of the Hentwistle Correctional Facility for Incorrect Boys. It had been my understanding that Hentwistle was nothing more than a nicely-named prison house, and if they’re offering expulsion for misbehavior these days I fear for the message this sends to baddies and goodies alike. Montpellier must truly be a special child.

But the one sycophant I truly cannot abide is your new young son, Cartegney. This one is really the tops. Just last week he got into my gun collection, and you don’t need a fertile imagination to discern what happened next. That’s right; the child organized my guns by model number, then put them all away neatly in the gun safe! Now what am I supposed to do if I need to shoot something in a hurry?

I shall fail, I fear, not unlike your newest daughter Steenburgen when she tried to bake us an anniversary cake last week. You can say what you want, but if a child doesn’t understand the concept of needing to bake the cake before hiding yourself inside, I say she has a valuable lesson to learn from the skin grafts. I know I’ve kept nothing but fond memories from the summer I spent as the Human Torch at a county fair in my youth, and not just because the unpleasant parts are either blacked out from my memory or masked by a thick curtain of Vicodin.

No my dear, these new children just aren’t working out, and I think it’s time they were sent back. Dig up your receipt and return them to the adoption cart at the mall or Kids “R” Us or wherever it was that you picked up these wayward moppets in the first place. I would rid our house of them myself, but my plot was already foiled by Cartegney, who informed me that the car I had loaded them all into did not have an adequate safety rating and regardless, he was too young to drive. So do what you must, Deidrebane. I won’t have these precocious ragamuffins pointing out the folly of my planning. Now if you need me, I’ll be in the den, watching the Crusades on pay-per-view.