She's a Quick Draw

This is the question I am greeted with when I go, bright and smiling, into my innocent child's bedroom yesterday morning. No "Good morning, Mama" no parental pre-caffeination in place, just a straight-up kaplowie: "Mama, you have an egg that is part of you like a chicken, right?" "Uhhh, yes." "And Papa has a spurn." "Mmmm, unh huh." "And they come together and make the new baby in your uterus." "Yep." "How?" "Uhhh, what was that?" "How? How do the egg and the spurn come together inside you?" She's not even three. I thought I had a few years before I had to answer this one. "They fly through the air!" cries Charles, helpfully. I of course have immediate visions of my child running through the mall, saying in her crowd-cutting voice: "Are there eggs and spurn in the air here, Mama? Are they going to make a baby?" "Love," I reply, and deftly change the subject.

There is still no name for the new Small Person, who has finally forced my body to assume the bearing of a small but sturdy whaling vessel. (The other day there was a man smiling goofily at me on the street. I smiled back at him, and he blurted out, "You're ready to pop! My dalmation is about to have puppies!") We are tossing about some old-fashioned family names but the toddler, long a proponent of "Jesse or Woody from Toy Story 2", has decided on "Snazzeola." So that's settled, I guess. Ladies and gentlemen, announcing the future President of the United States, Snazzeola Quistilton!

My little child has started preschool. I can tell that I have already been deemed "neurotic parent" by the lovely and accomodating teachers there. I stay the longest in the morning, and am the first to arrive in the afternoon. I spend the roughly four hours that she is there alone sweating bullets, trying not to call and ask if she has peed yet or if someone remembered to open the little plastic containers in her lunch.

I was a chaperone for the class field trip to a funky public art gallery downtown. "I need to pee," said a little girl who had wet her pants approximately twenty minutes beforehand. The bathroom request set off the herd instinct in the rest of the class, and we hustled to the back of the gallery with five or six others in tow. A teacher manned one bathroom while I stood in the other, trying to keep the kids from touching the mungy walls or picking up cigarette butts. A skinny Hip Young Thing came out of an adjoining room, smiling disdainfully with curled upper lip. "Do you mind? We're trying to have interviews in here." (Brief note: When you are in the ninth month of pregnancy and all of your clothes look like either tents or sausage casings, Hipness sends you into a panic. You want to shout, defensively, "I used to wear black! And spend time artfully placing product in my hair! I have unorthodox ear piercings! I am not just a breeder!") Do I MIND? What did she expect me to do, wrap their yabbering mouths and flailing limbs with duct tape? Let me add that we were INVITED to come to the gallery that day. What do you expect from a bunch of 3 to 6 year olds? I smiled and nodded, and she disappeared back into her lair, only to appear again while I had a forty-pound munchkin precariously balanced on my upraised leg so she could wash her hands at the sink. "We're having interviews in here," she stated in an exaggerated way, as if I did not speak English or was developmentally disabled. "We'll be done in a minute," I gasped with a smile, fighting the urge to smack her. (Not a good example for the kids! Must control rage!)

People like her remind me of the woman who recently wrote to the paper about a debate over whether to allow dogs on the Commons, a pedestrian shopping mall here in town. She pointed out that people were allowed to bring their children to the Commons, so it clearly followed that dogs should be welcome too. Because, you know, children also normally defecate and urinate on the ground, and run the risk of randomly attacking others. That is why you will see my new product, the "Kid Muzzle" for sale at a Babies R Us near you soon. Please note, I love dogs! This is not an attack on dogs, simply an acknowledgement that some people do not control their dogs, which, after all, are NOT PEOPLE! And children are, in fact, PEOPLE! *sigh.*