The other night, my sister was feeding her kids lasagna for dinner.
The middle one will usually eat lasagna if she doesn't know it's lasagna, so when she asked what was for dinner earlier in the night my sister said noodles and sauce with cheese and meat.
And so she served them the lasagna and went back to the kitchen to get the milk and heard the three of them chatting quietly. And then all hell broke loose and the middle one started screaming and yelling.
MOM! You tricked me. This is VAGINA, not noodles and I TOLD YOU BEFORE THAT I WON'T EAT THIS VAGINA! You said we were having noodles and this is VAGINA! I'm not eating this vagina! No way. I HATE VAGINA! Take this vagina away!
And as my sister walked back into the room to calm the middle one down, the older one Alex, the7 year old boy, had this wonderful look of horror and disgust on his face.
Which sort of reminded me of Lulu's pig weiner story and Sam's getting puberty and some of the things that are so confusing when you're small.
Like when I was about seven or eight and I was hanging out with my grandparents one summer and we were gassing up the old Cadillac at the local gas and sip - before hitting the road to visit universal studios or Disneyland or something (they lived down in LA) like that.
We had all the windows down in the car and Poppa got out and started filling up. The gas smell was gross and I asked Nana if she would roll up the windows because it was so stinky. And I probably pretended that I was dying and suffocating.
She told me that I shouldn't be worrying about the gas smell, that I should just deal with it and besides it was good for me.
And so for a few years after that, every time we went to a gas station, I'd roll down my car window and sniff real hard to get all that yummy gas smell into my lungs. Until the day my dad asked me what the hell I was doing and when I told him, he mumbled about jesus christ and his goddamn mother in law.
And then he explained sarcasm to me.
Yet it was my dad who was the one who used to say to me - whenever I complained, to just be quiet and stop complaining, besides it's good for you and it'll put hair on your chest anyway.
And yes, for a time, I wished for a lot for hair on my chest so people would know I was tough.
And then there was that term play mate that really confused me. Sometimes mom would only let one play mate come over at a time - especially if she was cranky. And I just didn't get why SHE wanted play dough at our house. And why only one piece of play dough at a time?
What the hell was she talking about anyway.
She used to also tell me that if you blew all the pedals off of a daffodil, it would make you have to go to pee really bad. And so on the way home from school, I'd always watch my friends pick the daffodils and blow and know that in a few minutes they'd be running home as fast as they could so they wouldn't pee in their pants. Haha on them, I'd think.
It happened to David Atherton one time. I saw him blowing the pedals off on the way to school one day. And then he pee'd in his chair at school. I saw the puddle on the floor below his chair - which sucked, because I'd had a big second grade crush on him prior. And the peeing ruined it.
And then there was the thing about how flip flops would make your big toe spread crooked if you wore the flip flops too much. So at night, I'd tape my toes together so they'd move back while I slept.
And what IS the difference between vanilla and banana. They always sounded exactly the same to me and they're the same colors anyway.
And people wonder why I'm so silly.
