counting children

You may recall my recent blog account citing that a clearly FLAWED Facebook application told me that I was meant to have 4-7 children. While I still think that Facebook is a lying sack of shit with serious AI challenges, I am now nearly a veteran, or shall I say “victim” of surviving the company of so MANY MANY many petites. All of yesterday, and particularly last night, I survived a grueling ordeal that involved hundreds of thousands of millions of children literally tripping over my feet. And more seriously, causing me to spill my wine!!!

Yesterday started off with a GPS maze exhibit at the Pacific Science Center which brought out the under 4 feet tall crowd in droves. The maze was filled with dead ends, blind corners, the threat of land mines and even worse - massive numbers of very excitable and very screamy children. After I regained consciousness, I drew up a floor plan to systematically apologize to all the folks whose strollers I barreled over in my effort to escape, and collect the scattered infants, of course, which I believe I accomplished with a relatively high success rate. It was a close one, but we made it out alive and without the threat of a call to CPS.

After only having an hour to decompress, we headed off to our dear friend’s birthday party. Let it be known that our friend works for a daycare center and his daughter just started kindergarten so this party was in part, a grand experiment to merge the parent crowd with the heavy drinking, smack talking, hedonistic crowd. You know… the close circle of friends. I should preface this by telling you that the actual evite to this party specifically encouraged people to bring their children. And I am not at all joking when I state, under no uncertain terms that ALL the breeders took that statement quite literally because not only did the party goers bring all of their children, I am pretty sure they went out and adopted, borrowed, or otherwise immaculately conceived some more for this occasion.

Kelly greeted us at the door with an urgent, and all too appropriate “Have you been drinking? If not, you should start right now. and I mean, RIGHT NOW!!!.” That’s never a good sign. I was feeling a little socially drained from my morning / afternoon outing so I spent the next six hours quietly attempting to count the children. After I ran out of fingers and toes, I moved on to my friend’s fingers and toes but that proved difficult because they were all wildly gesticulating in dramatic intoxication. My efforts were further complicated by the fact that these children seemed to be multiplying by the nano-second, which was interesting given that none of them were of pubescent age yet. Not only were they increasing dramatically in number, my work was made even harder by the fact that they were racing around like Pac Man’s ghosts on crack cocaine. I obviously didn’t think through the matter when I thought it’d be a little humorous to spike their Capri Suns and juice boxes with speed balls and espresso beans. That it would have this impressive of an effect?... well, hind sight is 20/20 they say. My bad. I was thinking to myself that this task would be so much easier if I could just whip out my tranquilizer gun and tag each of their ears and then release them back into the wild, but I was worried I would miss and accidentally take out an adult, which I have a hunch would not have gone over well. I was multi-tasking quite impressively with counting the children, mainlining Chardonnay and feigning interest and participation in adult conversations, so my science was slightly imperfect after all.

In short, it was intense. And amusing as all get out. At the end of the night while Drake and I were lying in bed commenting on our war wounds inflicted from the knees down, Drake turned to me and said very sweetly… “honey, when we have a child, it will only be allowed to have one friend. Okay?” I emphatically agreed without any hesitation and added….”yes; and it would be even better if that friend was imaginary!”