Saturday, August 02, 2008

That's One Way to Look at it...

On the brighter side, my family went to the school earlier. We were planning on spending the morning riding bikes, or at least...the kids would ride while my husband ran alongside shouting encouragement and I took pictures. It's a fun outing. And eventually my oldest even let him take a break and watch with me. :)

While there, the girls found some trash in the bushes. Some bottles, and bottletops. They read the lids and asked us about them. "Alcohol," we said, "Someone must have left those behind."

My oldest started explaining alcohol to the youngest, then. It's bad. It makes people go crazy, which is probably why they were loopy enough to litter, at a school of all places. (My husband and I had raised eyebrows, we aren't exactly prohibitionists, though we don't drink much.) Then she paused. "Except my teacher said red wine is good. It's really healthy and makes you relax if you drink a little bit and so I think we should have some a lot of the time when we grow up. But only for grown ups." She paused again, as my husband and I tried hard not laugh and asked each other whether the teacher had any idea what message she had gotten across.

"Except for Mommy, Mommy's allergic to wine, probably."
I nodded, I probably am. I wouldn't trust it. And frankly, I'm not interested enough in drinking to even take a chance. I can be goofy without alcohol, and heaven knows I'm capable of getting sick as a hangover on the most trivial seeming things.

Then her face lit up. "Mommy, you're allergic to going crazy!"
And my youngest took up the chant, and gave me a huge hug, "Yay, mommy can't go crazy! She's allergic!"

I guess that's one more blessing to count. I'm allergic to going crazy. :)
(I'll just remind myself of that fact the next time I argue with a customer service person on the telephone who's trying to tell me that corn isn't one of the top 8 and therefore isn't a "real" allergy.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

aren't kids wonderful! i'm allergic to going crazy too. that's definitely a thought i'll pull out on my down days. thanks!