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Friday, September 25, 2009

If the President called me and asked me

"Monica, tell me something, now that we've made it clear that waterboarding is not an acceptable method for interrogation, what in the world will we use?"

I would tell him to take my children for 5 days of too-sick-to-go-to-school-but-not-sick-enough-to-shut-up-and-sleep, lock them in a room with an interogatee, and within minutes, they'd get all of the information they needed. And the President would say: "But we're trying to avoid torture."

This week, I've had a song stuck in my head all week. Most parents I know should know it, it's this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_BG_8Wjo88. I keep singing the refrain: "I love my kids. I love my kids. Gosh I love my kids." Because I do. No lie. I love my kids with a ferocity that should be terrifying to anyone who isn't a parent and all to familiar to those with children. I adore them more deeply than anything or anyone I have ever encountered (sorry Mom & Dad, Sisters & Bro, and most of all husband. You're all close seconds, I promise). Sometimes when I'm sitting in the silence of my home while both of them are at school or off with their dad or simply playing in the backyard, I weep because they are not right here breathing on me. This happens rarely, of course, because they usually are right here. Especially when they are sick.

And I share all of that so that we are very clear from the beginning that I adore my children but we are sick this week and here they are staring at me, coughing at me, breathing on me, sneezing on my dinner, and wiping their noses on my sleeves. I think this week I would love them much more if they came equipped with mute buttons or some sort of filter for idiotic information. My daughter loves me nearly as desperately as I love her, and as such she seeks connection with me in every possible way. This means that this week, in her H1N1 haze, she's found every opportunity to talk with me that could exist. A few examples:
  • I was getting off the couch and my arm went here between this cushion and that cushion.
  • Look (putting hand under armpit). Look at what I can do!
  • I was walking through the door and my arm brushed against the door.
  • I was reading this book and the book touched me on my wrist.
  • I was walking around in the basement and I stepped on a lego that was on the floor and it hurt.

And it goes on like this folks. Imagine, if you will, the most inane things in the world, encapsulate them in a 7 year old child's sentence structure, add a few years in the vocabulary, and you've got nearly every waking moment of my last five days.

I have to believe this is sickness induced, that her brain, addled with fever, lacks the ability to discriminate between "this is important" and "utter and asinine bullshit that will drive my mother insane." If it's not fever or sickness induced, Lilly's teacher has got to be a saint.

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