Stop, Drop, and Roll

If you stop by my house on any given day at 5:30pm, the odds are 50-50 that you will find my children either rolling around on the frozen grass in the front yard or army crawling toward the front door. Invariably, one safety expert will remind the others that the good air is closest to the ground.

"Stay away from that smoke," someone will scream, pointing to the ceiling.

"Get out of there while you still can!" someone else will yell in my direction as he or she somersaults off the front stoop.

After opening all the windows and frantically fanning the air under and around the smoke detector, I will join my troop of junior fire marshals on the driveway. We will stand there exposed to the scornful eye of Marge, the elderly woman who lives across the street and spies on us through her living room blinds, until the smoke detector gives up the ghost or one of my children recites a tidbit of wisdom gleaned from a Smokey Bear public service announcement, whichever comes first.


"Remember, only you can prevent wild fires."

"Thank you Cortlen," I said tonight through clenched teeth.

I have the unfortunate habit of burning dinners. The contents of the oven can't hold my attention like, say, the three-legged squirrel that lives in the tree next to our roof line.

It's not all bad or wasteful, I tell myself. My children are very well versed in fire safety.

Money Down the Drain...Literally

My older children are walking metal detectors. It seems that every time we are out in public, at least one six-year-old wins the lottery in the form of a blackened dime found in the gutter or a rusty penny pried out of a sidewalk crack.

Yesterday afternoon, Kellen screamed "I'm rich!!!!!" after finding a flattened nickel in the parking lot of Old Navy.

Due to the growing concern that my thirteenth-month-old might find some of his siblings' coins lying around the house and put them into his mouth, I confiscated everyone's loose change and put it in a basket next to the kitchen sink.

After several hours of staring longingly at the basket, my boys asked if they could count its contents.

"We just want to make sure that it's all there," they said.

The baby was napping so I agreed.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the weight of 327 pennies, 24 nickels, and 17 dimes. The basket slipped out of my hands and 368 coins slid down the mouth of the garbage disposal.

I spent the next 15 minutes fishing slimy pennies out of a sea of last night's dinner scraps.

"Why are you throwing my pennies away?" shrieked Cortlen. "WHY?"

Someday my son will know the answer. For the next 30 years, however, he will believe that I am the meanest mom in the world. Or the craziest.

Probably both.

The McDonalds Whopper

"Two Whoppers please," I told the cashier, as I slid a BOGO free coupon across the counter.

The cashier handed the coupon back to me. "We don't have Whoppers here," she said.

It wasn't until after I asked the poor girl what kind of Burger King doesn't sell Whoppers that I realized that I was at McDonald's.

In moments when I am confronted with my own stupidity, I almost always choose to throw myself off the cliff rather than back away from its edge with my tail between my legs.

In this economy, retailers are doing whatever they can to make a sale; I figured that fast food restaurants would be no exception.

"It's a competitors' coupon," I explained, as I scanned the overhead menu. After a quick ingredient comparison, I decided that I could be just as happy with two quarter-pounders.

The manager was called over to explain to me the difference between the 40% off coupons handed out by national chain craft stores and the item-specific coupons mailed out by individual restaurant franchises.

"Burger King and McDonald's are not the same restaurant," he told me. "Completely different."

I wasn't convinced of the man's claim, but for the sake of my children, who were wondering why it was taking so long to get their food, I chose to take the high road and not pick a fight over hamburgers (feel free to applaud my maturity in the comments).

The manager was feeling pretty good about how our conversation ended until I asked him if he would consider selling me a Big Mac for $2.50 since it was Whopper Wednesday.

I was only sort of joking.

What Not to Wear (when you're pregnant)

The moment that I laid eyes on Dorothy I knew that she was my kind of woman. In her late eighties, Dorothy is one of the oldest members of our church congregation and something of a celebrity. Whenever she enters a room, the waters part and everyone jumps up to offer her their seat. Everyone that is, except for me. I refuse to move a muscle because if I do, it will pretty much guarantee that I won't get to sit next to Dorothy, something that I aspire to do.

Despite numerous attempts to entice Dorothy to sit next to me, she hasn't taken the bait yet. In fact, Dorothy hasn't ever said more than three words to me, that is, until last Sunday when she cornered me in the hallway.

"You shouldn't be wearing those shoes when you're pregnant," she told me.
I looked down, but couldn't see my shoes, so I wasn't sure what pair she was talking about. I said a silent prayer that I wasn't wearing my zebra-print stilettos, because they are my favorite.

Before I could ask Dorothy why my shoes were unacceptable, she told me.
"You could trip and fall and crush your baby in those things," she said.
That did not sound good at all.

Perhaps Dorothy had a point. Maybe I wasn't exercising the best judgment by wearing hooker heels after 30 weeks. Still, to wear flats to church would mean that I would no longer be taller than all of the men in the congregation, save my husband, who is 6'4''. I thought long and hard about Dorothy's admonition. In the end, though, I decided that the cost of swapping out my beloved heels for a stylish pair of pregnant woman huaraches was not a price that I was willing to pay, even if it did jeopardize Junior.

As I explained to my husband in the car on the ride home, I like having men look up to me. Especially those wearing short-sleeved dress shirts, bolo ties, and braided belts.