I want pepper-spray as a baby shower gift now

Attended my sister's hard-core cooking group last night at the lovely Jeri's house (she of the redesigning my blog fame). Got to gasp in awe at the food storage bunker that came with the house, with its multitude of shelving. "Old people lived here before us," she said by way of explanation.

The theme was aphrodesiac foods, and we've decided that men had to have made the list of supposed aphrodesiacs, because only a man could imagine that looking at phallic-shaped foods would be a big turn-on for women. (You know, cuz we're all about those.) I could, however, absolutely imagine a guy seeing a cake shaped like boobs and having that work for them. Maybe I'm wrong. But I digress. The food was amazing, even if it did not result in us having one of those Victoria Secret pillow-fights that the commercials think we have.

Because most of the group consisted of women with small children, the conversation at one point turned to Insane Things Those Small Children Have Done. Have now resolved never to have little boys, because it turns out that they do things like shake out entire cartons of orange juice on the living room floor, and ruin people's vintage furniture, and dump out gallons of chocolate milk on living room carpets, and pee under couches, which, how is that even possible. Or maybe I should go ahead and have boys, but remove everything of beauty or value from my home first. And get disposable couches. Maybe the inflatable kind. And install carpet made of paper towels.

And then the conversation turned to People Who Walk up to One in Public and Criticize One's Parenting. Now, I'm sure there are lots of mommies who feel that I fall into that category. I don't, though. When I draw a parent's attention to something going on with their child it is either because a) Mom is busy using the public library computer and has seemingly forgotten that she owns a child and so said child is placing his body or life in danger, or b) the child is ruining my life, or the lives of others. Those are the only times. Also most of those times occur in the library where I'm just doing my dang job, people.

But Jeri talked about how she finally resorted to putting her likes-to-dart-into-traffic daughter into a kiddie harness so that she could keep her alive. And people would walk up and say things to her all the time about what a bad parent she is for doing such a thing. Some guy walked up and was all, "Do you really think it's appropriate to leash your daughter like some kind of animal?" And bless her, she replied, "No, what I think would be really appropriate is if I let her run into traffic and get killed." She should have kicked him in the face while she was at it, but she was trying to wrangle two kids at the time, including the kamikaze one. We thought another good idea would have been to say, "Do you really think it's appropriate to walk up to a complete stranger and offer unsolicited parenting advice about children you don't know at all?" (And then kick him in the face.) Or maybe, "Actually, this harness is just a screening device to see who the complete suckwads are. Congratulations!"

I came home and told GH that if he ever gets a call that I've been arrested, it'll be because I was out with our children and somebody talked smack to me. And then I stabbed them.

Posted in: on my crap list,things that make me stare in disbelief