Family values take a wrong turn up a Lakeland Florida dirt road.

We live in a time where PS3 and Xbox are parental substitutes, guidance counselor, and baby sitter all rolled into one. Parents get divorced, Dad more often than not is an absentee sperm donor. Sadly, the family unit is as outdated as that bottle of Penicillin I still keep as a memento from a case of clap I contracted from a Hippie chick in the late 70's. So it warms the partly clogged arteries of my mostly jaded heart to hear of a family that still does stuff together.


Enter Edward George Weise II, and wife Ann Marie Weise, parents of 9 year old Edward George Weise III. Sure they had their problems, in fact their marriage was on the rocks, but they were able to put whatever marital problems they had aside for the sake of the kids. Ann Marie has a new beau who lives with her, young Edward III, his 20 year old sister, and Edward the II. You heard me right, even though Edward and Ann have split the proverbial marital sheets, and despite the fact that Ann was cohabitating with a new lovah boy, they still all reside in the same house. Nothing says devotion to family and preservation of the 2 parent home like listening to your wife and her new dood bang the headboard against what was once your bedroom wall.

Now that's dedication and devotion to the family unit. and it was probably that same sense of family values that prompted George the second, to include his 9 year old son in the making of an explosive device.

What? You thought this was going to be a heart warming story? Sorry, wrong blog.

Ann Marie Weise, 39, bought at least one inert grenade from an auction on U.S. Highway 98 in Lakeland about two years ago. The Lakeland Florida Sheriff's Office said that sometime around July 4, 2009, the boy and his father, 44-year-old Edward George Weise II, removed black powder from firecrackers and put the powder into the grenade. A wick also was installed in the grenade to detonate it, according to the Sheriff's Office. When the father and son attempted to set off the grenade at the time, though, the device didn't explode.


In a perfect world, or even an imperfect one, we would all breathe a collective sigh of relief, figuring that these two stellar parents would have disposed of the grenade, or at the very least pulled the wick out of it and stashed it in the closet. Then again, a former couple who still live in the same house, which I suspect is a mid 1970's single wide, probably don't go by the same play book as the rest of us. So it really comes as no surprise that Ann Marie placed the still loaded grenade in a flower pot atop the entertainment center, probably right next to a fiber optic spinning Christmas tree, or one of those wolf picture clocks made out of a slice from a tree limb and covered in shellac.

And this is where the story turns serious.

Ann saw her 9 year son playing with a lighter this past Friday. Most adults would have taken the lighter from the kid. Ann just told him to put it up. He didn't. What he did do is get the grenade down from the shelf. Unfortunately this time it worked. The 9 year old was airlifted to a local hospital with critical injuries.

No charges have been filed as of this writing, and there has been no court order issued to castrate the boys father or tie the mothers tubes into a double square knot. But there should be. Hopefully the kid will survive, and the parents will be driven from the trailer park. Every time I hear a story like this, where the home environment is more dangerous than holding a Cub Scout Jamboree in the same hotel as a NAMBLA convention, it's amazing the kids ever manage to survive as long as they have.
*** A strange thing in the news story on this incident. Apparently some of the boys classmates drew pictures, made get well cards. Not to take away from the serious nature of what transpired, but here is a money quote from the story that should leave you scratching your head.
" Kids drew pictures of Eddie playing football, digging, or riding a go-cart."

Digging? WTF?