Thanksgiving leftovers.

Oh dear lord, there are less than two weeks until I fly cross country with a highly active two year old next to me and a squirmy, mercurial 9-month old on my lap. This is my biggest nightmare mortification scenario EVER. Not to mention just plain old exhausting, what with the strollers and the diaper bags and the running off and laughing and the general there-will-be-no-magazine-reading nature of the whole ordeal. I just have to remember that no matter how bad it is, it is at least for a finite period of time and when it’s over there will hopefully be a large glass of chardonnay waiting for me. Not to mention several sets of eager hands waiting to bounce the exalted ones on their knees for 2 weeks.

You know, twice in the last week I have used adjectives when writing this blog that, had I not looked them up in the dictionary before posting, would have resulted in literary embarrassment. The first example is the worst: I referred to my kids as succubi, thinking it meant they were sucking the life out of me. Er, no. I would have been referring to my tiny children as “demons assuming a female form to have sex with men in their sleep,” and I think that would have been perhaps less than accurate. Then above I wrote “bounce the prodigal ones,” harkening back to the expression “prodigal son” which I vaguely thought meant favored or something similar. Again, no – it means “recklessly spendthrift,” which isn’t at least directly true. I guess you can tell I don’t read the bible, huh.

Speaking of which, this weekend I took Eeyore with me to the library to pick up some books I had reserved. I rarely do this, because he is like a loud, motorized butterfly among the stacks; flitting and buzzing and shouting about books and how nice the library looks, but this time I did. He acted as anticipated, but he also alit briefly on a shelf of books from which he wanted to choose a book. He spied one with big, colorful photographs of animals and held it up: “How about this one, Mommy!?” “Sure…. Oh, no,” I said. He had chosen a big picture book of “Farm Animals of the Bible.” Is it wrong of me that I automatically removed it from his hand and said brightly, “Not that one!” My knee-jerk reaction was to avoid exposure to anything using the word “bible,” but really, it was only a bunch of pictures of donkeys and stuff. I guess I just don’t want to get into the discussion yet about what is the bible and what is God and why don’t we go to church and on and on. I’m not sure how we’re going to deal with that.

The good news is if my kids ever choose on their own to be Christians, they have both already been emergency baptized as Catholics by their grandparents. Apparently “emergency” baptism by laypeople is permissible in extreme circumstances such as those in our heathen little home – since our children’s fates were in jeopardy due to our callous renunciation of organized religion, my dad was able to save their souls while giving them baths in the kitchen sink. God takes ‘em where he can get ‘em!