Disclaimer.

Wow. My blog suddenly lit up like…dare I say it?…a bunch of fireflies after atomic mama posted her way-too-kind link to over here. Very humbling. Does this mean I don’t get to flake out anymore? Probably what that means. No assinine posts about toe jam or what’s stuck to the bottom of my refridgerator drawers or what R. might have said to me last night during dinner…um, yeah. Too late. Because this is an assinine post about what R. said to me last night during dinner.

So, R. hasn’t looked at my blog in like six months. Basically not since the day I started it. He forgot the address, he says. But I happened to mention that I quoted him in my last post, and he basically freaked. He had to know what I said. And I wouldn’t tell him. I rarely get to wield this sort of power over anyone, let alone Mr. SBird, so I made the most of it. Heh.

Here’s how the dinner conversation went:

SBird: Did you find the blog?

R.: Yeah. You’ve written a lot more than I thought you had. (note of nervous tension in voice)

SB: Um, well, I’ve got some time on my hands…I’ve had writer’s block for six months now, remember?

R: I can’t say that I see the problem.

SB: Not bloggers-block, writer’s block. *Sniff.*

R: You made us look like unfit parents.

SB: (Silence…WTF?)

R: In that post about the snakes and the scorpions. Everyone’s going to think we live in the wild west. That we’re out to kill our kid.

SBird: We do sort of live in the wild west.

R: You’ll be lucky if the social worker doesn’t find it. Or the CCAA.

SBird: *Snort.* I thought you said that people have been raising children in the Southwest for thousands of years…hanging off the sides of cliff dwellings…running with the coyotes…whatever.

R: I wrote that in a book. *Sigh.* We clearly need to move.

SBird: I don’t think we need to move. At least, not yet. I’ll just put on the blog that we plan to keep little jars of kerosene under the legs of the baby’s crib so the scorpions can’t crawl in.*
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So, here, now, is my official disclaimer regarding the earlier post about the scorpion:
No children or animals will be hurt in the making of this family.

*Update: Johnny asked me to clarify about the jars of kerosene: one of the homespun desert remedies for keeping scorpions (and fire ants) out of baby’s crib–or parents’ bed–is to set each furniture leg into a glass jar and fill it part way with kerosene. Then the creepy-crawlies can’t get past the poison moat you’ve created. Yeah, um, so, that’s something that could be done. It might even be interesting to try to explain to the social worker at the post-placement visit why my newly-ambulatory daughter is playing on the floor of her bedroom with lighter fluid. Hmmmm.