I Am Waiting…

…To eat the first ripe tomato in my garden. One that is bigger than a cherry so I can slice it for my sourdough toast. I do not remember ever waiting this long, and if checking on them could produce results, I would have had slices of vine-ripened tomato weeks ago. They are large and green, very green, but apparently we have not had enough hot sunshine yet. Even the dog who loves tomatoes has become impatient. Yesterday she picked an enormous slicer, very green, and brought it guiltily to me.

…For Greg’s car to sell so I don’t have to move it to a different spot in the yard every time we mow. There have been many interested parties, but when they hear that it needs a new exhaust system, they turn sadly away. Or they turn away, sadly.

…For my neighbor to notice that we are perfectly capable of mowing our own grass. He is a good neighbor, especially because he has a personal vendetta against chicken-stealing raccoons, of which there are many in this area. He simply cannot resist mowing a stripe along the front of our lawn as he passes to mow the other neighbor’s lawn, with his deck set much lower than we do. It may be a picayune thing to be bothered about, but it does bother me. It has just occurred to me that Gregory parked his for-sale car on that side of the lane yesterday, straddling the stripe. Maybe we have solved the problem without any hard feelings, because surely he will not attempt to mow around a car…? Stay tuned for further bulletins on this country drama.

…For the guy who said he could come fix our driveway in mid-July. Now that it is mid-August, I am guessing a suitable amount of time has elapsed. I am curious why contractors of services do this? Are they ever early? Is it so that people are duly impressed by how busy they are and extra happy to pay them for the work that they didn’t do in the time they said they would? I just wonder about these things. Would it really be so hard to put a buffer into your calendar so that you can show up when you said you would?

…To use the bagged mulch I bought on clearance and stacked under the sunporch awning. It has an assignment: the borders along the lane, but I can’t use them until the guy who fixes driveways comes.

…For inspiration to braid the garlic that is drying in the shed, and to make more pickles with the accumulation of cucumbers in the fridge. Unlike the tomatoes, the cucumbers are having a heyday of a summer.

…For my probiotics to do all the amazing things that they said they will do. It would also be nice for my body to figure out how it’s going to behave for the rest of my life. Does anybody know how long that wait will be?

…For a slightly slower pace of life where we can pick up our morning read-aloud tradition before we do lessons. When Addy confided in me with shining eyes, “I think this school year is going to be really fun,” she was thinking about extra stories, tea and poetry, and fun supplies from Walmart. She was not thinking so much about getting in some serious progress in the math books in August so that we can travel without math books in September, but here we are.

…For our Walmart to get its act together and stop remodeling and just have things where they are supposed to be so that I can find matches and toilet paper without hunting through half the store. My sympathies are with the elderly gentleman who grumped to me, “They are just doing this on purpose so I have to walk all over the place and see more stuff to buy.”

…For a good place to sell some of my extra chickens, but not the sale barn, because I took five of my prized pullets there, almost old enough to start laying olive-colored eggs. The pullets I babied and hand-raised after their mother got eaten by a raccoon, and I got two bucks apiece for them. It appears they kept half as a fee so that my check in the mail was five dollars. Hilarious.

…For my dahlias to bloom. They are really underachieving this year, and the only reason I can think of is that they are planted closer to the other perennials because I didn’t want them to get destroyed when the driveway gets fixed, only they would have been fine in the normal place. Maybe like the tomatoes, they have not had enough brilliant sunshine in this summer of overcast skies from wildfires and abundant rain. Normally I take in cuttings all through August, but they are only just starting to bud a little bit.

…To taste the blackberry kefir to see if it is as special as the raspberry was.

**********

In which both the potential glories of dahlias and tomatoes are captured in one photo.

I learned about making “I am waiting” lists in the writing course I took this spring. It is an interesting way to explore what is going on inside. This list happens to be a trivial one of everyday waits. They have their merit; they shape character, as anyone who has waited for their first taste of a vine-ripened tomato knows. They are not like the earnest yearnings/waitings of the soul: for slaves set free, for tears wiped away, for peace on earth, for equality, for all Creation to be redeemed. There are things I am one hundred percent convinced God will do in His time. I keep faith, and I wait.

(Maybe the longer we wait for the desire to be fulfilled, the greater the glory.)

What are you waiting for?

Pinky Purple Days

I sat outside on the deck until the last light faded out of the bits of sky I could see through the towering hickory trees to the west. It was the longest day of the year; there should have been some sort of solemn ceremony as it passed. But the mosquitoes were biting me in the evening chill. I did the prosaic thing and came inside. It is difficult to realize that we are already heading toward the tedium of winter darkness: ugh.

Right now we are in the blessed noonday and it is glorious. This is what we waited for all through the dreary months. The garden is silvery, pink, and purple, with one scarlet Oriental poppy lifting its showy head. The sort of flowers I like to plant are cottage garden flowers, kind of shy and old fashioned, but I cannot resist a poppy, even though it is a bit of a braggart. My neighbor gave me red hot poker roots and I dutifully planted them. They looked so out of their element in my purple coneflower and Russian sage border that I took a dislike to them and tossed them to the chickens.

We are deep into the spindly, ethereal florals, some with scents so cloying you cannot really bring them inside. The bees are not wasting a minute of it, and its a good thing too, because it’s only a matter of days until the Japanese beetles crawl out of the ground to ravage the sweetest blossoms. Rita brought in my favorite sort of bouquet today, and I love how it looks with that white valerian in it, but it is so powerfully scented I will have to banish those.

Our hummingbird feeder broke in storage over the winter, so we decided to plant hummingbird feeders instead. We looked for trumpet-shaped flowers and I have seen hummingbirds at every one of these. It’s the best reason for planting the ubiquitous petunia. I don’t even know what some of these blooms are. They just sort of slid into my wagon at the greenhouse and I didn’t argue with them.

Today I noticed that the first baby yellow tomato was ripe, and I ate it without even showing it to anybody else. I paid a foolish fifteen dollars for a large plant that was blooming already back in the chill of spring because I do weird things like that when I am fed up with cold weather. It would be premature to say that it was worth the money, but if it continues to produce such sweet orbs of tomato-ness, the summer is looking promising.

Last year I bought strawberry plants at the local hardware store and I wish I could remember what they were called so that I could warn you not to bother with them. After all the watering, weeding, mulching, fertilizing the plants, covering them when it frosted, I am picking the weirdest, smooshiest berries I have ever grown. (There aren’t many, because of the late freeze I didn’t see coming.) A day in the fridge leaves them looking so tired and wilted I am not even tempted to eat them. The best way is to stand in the garden and eat them immediately. “If you don’t expect them to be strawberries, they are good,” Rita concluded. I do not quite know how to do that. Shut my eyes? Hold my nose? Because they are perfect, red, seedy, and smell right. It’s a texture thing. This week I showed Little Bee and her brother where the strawberries are and they obliged me by eating them all that day, foraging up and down the row and experiencing no difficulty with unmet expectations.

Speaking of expectations, there is a small fruit stand a few miles west of us, run by an Amish family. On Saturdays they sell donuts and I have seen the sign often, but never happened to pass on a Saturday until last week. I took a look at the donuts and promptly bought a half dozen. They were enormous, glistening things, with hardened glaze drips at the edges, and I could hardly wait to give everybody one when I got home. My first bite revealed a sorry truth: they were obviously fried in rancid lard. I took another bite and weighed the question, “Are these worth the calories?” But surely, so I took another bite. I got some milk, and I ate the donut. Almost it was not worth the disappointment that was every bite, but I had paid for an experience that I was reluctant to give up. In retrospect, I paid for a lesson but it isn’t clear what it is. Maybe it will come to me the next time I am picking the strawberries I don’t like.

This spring I needed a strong new stick teepee for my cucumbers. Gabriel and I started with bigger saplings and screwed them together instead of tying them with twine. It took longer this way, but I hope it holds up. He also made a beautiful new arbor for the hardy kiwi vine after I had started it on my own when he was working. My arbor panels were pitifully lacking in structural integrity. When I asked for help to assemble the lot, he was kind enough to lay aside his work in the shop and spent hours finding some stronger supports. We cut down most of the sycamore saplings down by the creek for this project, and I pulled wild grapevines out of the woods for the finishing touches. I am really liking the homegrown look of these supports.

It’s early days in the garden, but things are flourishing and by the time the dahlias do their thing, it will be full to bursting. Every day I walk around and marvel at what is happening, how the leaves unfurl and buds form, some puffy like marshmallows and some spiky like chestnuts, but all brilliant.

When I was a child I had a startling thought one day, “If God had made everything brown, would we even know it wasn’t pretty?” I can’t say for sure when my lifelong yearning for color started, but I was too little to even know what it was. ( I just knew that I hated my grey double-knit dress that made me feel ugly.)

God walked in the garden too, you know. It’s a great time to lay down my smallness and offer to join my work to His great work. I’ll just keep planting the pink and purple things in my bit of earth.

Noticing

I am in the middle of doing a writing course by Rachel Devenish Ford called Writing From the Heart. Right now we are practicing noticing, and jotting it down. All those tiny sights and sounds around us, as well as the big ones. They all make up life, and I decided it might be fun to do it here. It’s not going to be profound, but it is a good thing for me to do in these days when my default mode is creeping about with a cup of tea, trying to look productive. Here’s yesterday’s twenty minutes of observing.

First thing I look at the forecast, and it is too dismal for my soul to bear. Ten solid days of clouds. I know in my head that it can change daily, but my heart is dismayed.

I arrange a bright quilt on the back of a chair, fill the teakettle, light candles all through the house, and sit down to write, far away from my phone.

A spoon scrapes a cereal bowl, and pages turn as the breakfast eater reads while she eats Life.

My son reads quotes from a Babylon Bee article and mutters that this leftover coffee tastes like old tires, but he drinks it anyway.

The parakeets chirp shrill good mornings as the first bit of light filters into the schoolroom upstairs.

Tires crunch on the lane as my son heads off to work; the tracks on the lane are frozen this morning, an improvement on the squelching mud of the past week.

I glance out the window, see the chickens in the slight glow of the light in their coop, scratching, scratching through the straw. I am hopeful that the fake daylight will urge them to greater egg production.

The world outside is lightening slowly, but monochrome. Trees hold their undressed limbs to the sky, and I can tell by their bones that this one is an oak and that one is a cherry, and the other one is a walnut.

Only the tin signs on my husband’s shop reflect any color: “Pepsi, the taste that beats the others cold,” and “Atlantic Motor Oil,” and the neon yellow “No Outlet.”

My candy cane tea is brewed just right. I pair it with a spiced raisin cookie, iced on top. I smell the cardamom that I ground in my daughter’s mortar and pestle. A morsel of sweet.

Errands for the Birds

We’ve run into a small snag with our poultry operation. We finally got the temperatures that we expect in November, which is to say frigid, which also means that every morning the water is frozen in the chicken tractor. Addy lovingly takes warm water out for the flock and by evening it’s frozen solid again. So this morning I decided to slog the weary (two) miles to the Farm and Home store. Across the street I would have the option of a Tractor Supply, and if I go one mile further I can go to the Ace Hardware.

I asked my son to start my vehicle when he went outside, and a half hour later I looked out the window and noticed little puffs of exhaust coming from my Suburban. Oh. It would now be toasty warm, although outside it was 25° with a brisk wind, but I was dressed for it. When I parked at the Farm and Home, the guy in the car next to me got out and strolled nonchalantly by, Carhartt unzipped, munching on a Klondike bar. Granted, he had a beard impressive enough to cover the space where his coat didn’t close. I shivered in my down puffer and fur lined boots and dashed inside.

There was another lady in the poultry aisle, and we did some quick bonding over which heated waterer would be the best in my situation. I was grateful for her help and we shared a laugh over the pumpkin spice supplement blocks for chickens. Then I did the hilarious thing and bought one. Shouldn’t my hens have Thanksgiving too?

As I breezed past the bird seeds, I snagged a large bag of sunflower seeds. At home Addy hung the feeder on a branch where we can see the activity from our living room windows. Winter can now commence. We are officially ready.

And that’s how one spends eighty-nine dollars for the birds. 🫣

What to do with Your Stuff

We started our married life with big ideas about living minimalist. Stuff just seemed so immaterial. It was quite trendy to be disdainful of the status quo in the circles we socialized with. We weren’t going to buy a lot of furniture, which was an easy resolution, because we couldn’t afford it. A card table and some folding chairs it would be. Then a family friend gave us with a round oak dining table and chairs that she was planning to get rid of, so there we were. They were a bit rickety, but they worked.

The living room furnishings were sourced from a paper called The Traders Guide, with actual print ads, imagine that! There was no Facebook Marketplace, imagine THAT! I remember meeting a guy at a storage locker in the evening. It was dark, so we looked at his couch with flashlights and took it home with us.

My parents were raised with the tradition that you provide a bedroom suite for your daughters. Since our first house was tiny, we didn’t have space for one, but they bought us a good mattress and an antique dresser at an estate auction.

Ideally, I thought, our belongings should fit into a ~~Conestoga wagon~~ U-haul trailer, or less. We were not going to have a lot of stuff because that’s what everybody did and stuff weighs you down.

Welp. Here I am, twenty some years later, with a bigger house and it’s full of stuff from the attic to the basement. I’m the lady with four bedrooms furnished, admittedly mismatched, but functional. We are on the third table since the round table days, each one bigger than the last, and we have cycled through a number of couches. You do have to sit somewhere, we found, and it’s nicer if you don’t need to use a pry bar to get out of a broken sofa.

I’m the one with shelves in the basement to store the five gallon water cooler, the thirty cup coffee maker, and all the huge bowls. I have four big baking sheets, and ten bread pans, what? I have a large variety of measuring cups, and I was only going to have one set because why would you ever need more than that? I’m the lady with stacks of plates from the thrift store and enough tea cups to serve a small crowd, and how did I grow into not-a-maximalist, but pretty far from the girl who didn’t want a bridal shower?

It may have had something to do with giving birth to children. I am grateful that our minimalist goals did not extend to excluding little people, but you can’t avoid getting stuff when you have children. Also they break things and they want bikes.

A lot of our ideas were noble and good for that newlywed season. We didn’t want a load of debt and we wanted to invest in the Kingdom of God, not the American dream. We had not yet had much experience in laying down our lives for others. Surely it would be more high and holy than being one of those wage-earning, tax-paying, load-bearing citizens who own property and invite people home for Sunday lunch and loan their vehicles to people whose cars are broken and host crowds at the missions retreats.

Well.

To my minimalist self I would like to say: You’re going to need some stuff. Not ten crock pots, but maybe three. Because there may come a time when you have rice in the instant pot, and taco meat in the one with the broken handle, and cheese sauce in the little one. Because you are serving guests.

I would like to pat that idealist on the shoulder and reassure her. You know what stuff is for, right? It’s for other people. It’s for you to use to bless other people. You don’t need 10 bread pans to bless other people, but if you happen to be the kind of person who likes to make bread, then it isn’t wrong to have them. And yes, of course you can serve tea in styrofoam cups and that is better than saying, “I can’t have people at my house because I don’t have enough dishes.” But it actually is nicer to serve tea in cups if you have them.

The same goes for your house. It’s not just for you. Hospitality is a big deal for the children of God. When you welcome someone into your living space, you touch them in a way that nothing else does. You are saying that you really do want to get to know them, and that you care about them. You are sharing your best stuff, and maybe you’re letting them see your worst stuff.

That’s what your stuff is for: to use and bless. Human nature being what it is, there seem to be plenty of ways to be selfish. If you find yourself hoarding your good things in the closets so you don’t need to feel obligated to share, saving the butter for yourself and serving margarine to others, so to speak, well, then give the old heart a check.

If you can’t bear the idea of feet on your new carpet, scuffs on your baseboards, or smudges on your towels, prepare the old heart for a lonely existence.

If you find yourself mourning the things that break more than caring about how sad the person feels who accidentally broke them, then give the old heart another check. Teach it to hold things with an open hand.

If you have all the things in your kitchen that you need to cook lovely things, but you are too busy drool-scrolling through other people’s gorgeous kitchens, then just lay the old phone down and go bake some cookies to give away.

You can own lots of things. Just make sure you live generously with your things! Don’t bury them in a museum where they look nice and stay unchipped and unstained and worthless.

********

I had this in the drafts folder for a long time. Last week I took it out and dusted it, plumped it up and shined its face. That very day I had a conversation with a friend, and out of the blue she said many of the things I had just written, so I know there are at least two of us. Anybody else out there who can relate?

March

The sun is nervous

As a kite

That can’t quite keep

Its own string tight.

Some days are fair,

And some are raw.

The timid earth

Decides to thaw.

Shy budlets peep

From twigs on trees,

And robins join

The chickadees.

Pale crocuses

Poke through the ground

Like noses come

To sniff around.

The mud smells happy

On our shoes.

We still wear mittens,

Which we lose.

-John Updike in The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury

I like this, because when I look out the window, I can see an abandoned coat under the monkey tree, a pair of cast away mittens on the neighbor lady’s lawn, a broken toboggan by the garden’s edge and a bike cart with assorted bikes in the lean-to of the garden shed.

I see bits of fly away pampas grass, dead lavender stalks, detritus that the snowplows threw into our lawn, and daffodils shooting up in the sheltered spots.

Some days I step out the door and rush back inside for my insulated coat, and other days the sun really is as benevolent as it looks, and that is just how it is in March.

In March we rake the gravels back out of the lawn onto the lane and severely prune the grapevine and sweep out the accumulation of junk in the playhouse because you never know. We put the skates back into the attic and order seeds and clean up the game closet from the winter’s depredations. In March we feel as though we may need therapy. But in March there is always the possibility that Tomorrow May Be Fine!

A Question

I have a son (not mentioning names here or anything) who baffles me and delights me and makes me howl with laughter and irritates me terribly by turns.

How is it that the person who last brushed his teeth “the day after tomorrow” (he was serious) can tell me long involved stories about the digestive processes of owls?

How can a child who forgot every day where his seat was at the table even though it never changed, be able to show me the perfect little chef delineated by Minnesota, Wisconsin, and so on, ending with the Kentucky frying pan where he is making chicken?

And today when I told him to put the gloves away “where they belong”, he said, “I am going to need latitude and longitude for that.” Yet he could quote verbatim a long Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Can somebody tell me what is up with that?

Can somebody tell me whether I should continually pull him ruthlessly back to reality and the job at hand, or should I laugh and let it go?

About that Oobleck I Mentioned

Here it is, but take it from me and just don’t do it. See, it sounds so deceptively simple. My boys stirred the 1 1/2 cups of water into the 16 oz. of cornstarch and suddenly it all seized up. “Hey, this isn’t working! It said to knead it together with your hands.” Naturally I plunged my hands into the mass to knead it and instantly got a traumatic flashback from years gone by.

Back then I was working part time at a bulk food store and occasionally there was a need to scoop corn starch from a large bag into smaller sized bags for the shelf. The first time I was assigned that job, I scooped right into the powdery stuff. It squeaked and felt silky and hard at the same time and my every hair stood on end in horror. I was too embarrassed to tell my boss that I would rather do anything else, please just let me wash up the floors on my hands and knees. Anything else. That day I got cornstarch overload and I got really good at being busy whenever it needed to be bagged again. Anytime a recipe calls for cornstarch, I am very, very careful with spooning it out. I get a nasty little chill just stirring a few tablespoons into liquid.

But after reading how neat this stuff is, today I dug my fingers into the oobleck, then shuddered and quickly went to the sink to wash the mass off my hands. The children found it terribly fascinating, how it gelled and wept and turned mysteriously solid by turns. I let them make a huge mess all over the kitchen because I knew cornstarch washes up very easily. My oldest son couldn’t believe I tolerated the drippings and spills. He got a spatula and tried valiantly to keep it in one spot on the table, to corral it into a bowl, just anything to contain it. “Mama! They even have it on the wall! Make them stop.” He was nearly frantic so I reassured him and sent him out of the room until the little girls were done having fun. They tiptoed into the bathroom for a full scrub down and then I cleaned the kitchen for the second time today.

This is one “neat” experiment that is definitely not for the faint of heart. I guess next time we probably will just pass on it.

Interrupting Myself

I should be cleaning the cornstarch play goo off the kitchen table and floor, but first I wish to describe to you the meandering journey I sometimes make through the house.

It is 10 A.M.

The scholars are schooling, the littles have a snack to feed their dolls and now I need to Get Something Done, AKA Beat Aside the Chaos.

I start with the bathroom, because for me personally, chaos in the bathroom is terribly disheartening.

One boy already took the dirty laundry downstairs for me, but he dribbled a few socks and missed the towels hanging on the hooks, so I pick them up and take them down to add to the laundry piles.

I notice that one load is finished washing, throw it into the dryer, put in another load.

Oh, I am low on soap, need to write that on the grocery list.

I look over the shoulders of students, correct sloppy handwriting, encourage accuracy in math.

On the way back upstairs, I see that the tot has taken all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books off the shelf again, and I put them back into their spot.

Hey! There is that extra owl button I need to replace the one we lost so I put it in a safe place.

I am walking past the freezers so I think about supper, naturally, and take out a pack of hamburger.

I hear a squabble in the girls’ room, drop the burger into the sink, and go to settle it.

Sit here, little girl, and look at these books. And you, sit over there and look at those books.

Okay. Where was I?

Oh, the bathroom!

Yeah, the toothpaste splatters on the mirrors are really getting to me. I wash them off.

As long as I am cleaning glass surfaces, I might as well go shine the appliances, especially the spot on the dishwasher where gravy dribbled last night at supper.

Speaking of gravy, I should use that leftover gravy with meatballs tonight instead of making a spaghetti sauce.

I check the cupboard for rice. Almost out. Shopping list.

What was that other thing I was going to write down?

I can’t remember for anything! Oh well, it will come to me.

Hey, is that a trail of ants carrying off crumbs?

Get the broom, quickly!

I am gonna have to set outsome traps again.

I open the closet door, nearly get beaned on the head by my box of household tools.

“Boys!” I have a few choice admonitions for them on getting a stool to put the tools properly back on the shelf so that other unsuspecting folks don’t get hammered and wrenched when all they wanted was an ant trap.

I set the trap carefully in a spot only readily accessible by ants.

There is a hair bow under the table. I pick it up and take it to the bathroom.

I am right back where I started.

A half hour has passed and I have been very busy, but it doesn’t look as thought I have accomplished anything, really, except to cause myself to feel a little dizzy.

I don’t think I am ADD. At least I didn’t use to be. I used to pride myself on being so efficient I took my own breath away. 🙂

I think that I get so used to being interrupted that I even do it to myself. This goes way beyond multitasking to plain downright silly. I sort of hope I am not the only one who does this.

I am trying to stop it; I am trying to be more productive. I have to discipline myself to actually, literally stay in a room until I am done with it. I pile all the stuff that doesn’t belong in that room outside the door. Then I pick up one pile and take it to its home and stay there until I have done all that needs to be done there before I go back for another pile. I can’t tell you how hard it is to break the habit of suspending what I am doing to pursue yet another partial trail.

Wait… Am I hearing someone in the candy bowl?

Be Kind to Everything and Don’t Say “Stupid”

Nap time. It is so restful when the time comes to settle down quietly after a strenuous morning of striving to be nice to each other despite… everything. That includes the slow start in school, with a wrestling match that abruptly vanished without a trace as soon as my feet hit the staircase to go down to the schoolroom. By the time I hit the bottom step, the boys were busily pulling out math books. It also includes juggling Learning to Read, spelling word lists, grammar quizzes, and laundry for a few hours, secure in the knowledge that the two smallest ones were sweetly playing babies in their room. Later I discovered that in the course of the morning they were also skinning a cucumber and feasting on it in the top bunk bed; they were peeling oranges in the living room; they were eating a lot of sliced lunchmeat and graham crackers. For some reason, they still ate salad like starved bunnies with a ranch dressing love affair at lunchtime. One would think there has been naught but bread and water for days if one didn’t distinctly recall feeding them quite often and well.

So yes, naptime: when all efforts of goodness and mischief are suspended for a while. It is my favorite time of day every day when I lie beside my two year old until she falls asleep. Much of the day I am too distracted to listen closely to the piping little voice that is Addy, but at naptime she unwinds by saying every thought that enters her little head until suddenly she conks, just like that. I get much amusement out of her chatter. There are only seconds between each of these bits of confidences.

I like dogs, mama. Do you like dogs?”

Mmmhmm.

Little dogs. Not big dogs. Do you like big dogs?

Hhhmmm.

We just like little dogs, right, Mama?

I have lots of excuses, Mama.

I’m sorry. I’m a little tired in the bed.

Mmmhmm. Me too.

Lollipops are sour, Mama.

But we don’t have any lollipops, do we, Mama?

Huhuh.

Maybe I could have some candy when I wake up?

That would be fun.

We don’t have any candy, do we, Mama?

Do you like candy?

You shouldn’t snip yourself. You might get hurt.

And then you would cry. You would cry for a bandaid.

Do you know where the bandaids are, Mama?

Mmmhmm.

When I have a bleeding owie, I cry for a bandaid.

And then I need a Mama.

If I eat too much toothpaste, I might get sick.

Then I would have to go to the doctor. And pump my belly out.

Yeah. Now shhhh.

(Quiet little whisper) I can talk, Mama.

No kidding.

The Bible says be kind to everything. And don’t hit.

And be kind and don’t say “stupid”.

We like little dogs. But we don’t have a dog.

We just have cats.

Mmmhmm.

And a rabbit at Jakes.

But no dogs, Mama.

Am I your baby, Mama?

Mmmhmm.

Be quiet now.

I love you, Mama.

I love you, too. But no more talking.

Okay, Mama.

ZZZZZZ.