3.01.2008

On the Chop Block

Here's a fact: there are more than 24 billion chickens in the world. (There are only around 6.5 billion humans....that's roughly three and a half chickens a piece...yum...)


Yesterday, we took our four children to dinner at a semi-nice family restaurant. Before you assume we are crazy and flip to the next random blogger, we had four adults (including two grandparents) so this should have been relatively easy: man-to-man coverage for our 5 year old son, 3 and 1.5 year old daughters and the newest addition, who just hit 1 month. The adult meals came out about the time our kids had finished eating and the baby began to vocalize, in no uncertain terms that "I MUST EAT NOW! NOW, NOW, NOW, NOOOOOOW!" As I stood there in the bathroom stall with one foot up on the toilet, simultaneously breastfeeding and changing an obviously well worn diaper, I felt a wave of super-mommy triumph. I might not be able to sit down to eat another normal meal for the next 18 or so years, but gosh darn it, I can change a diaper while preventing one more child from starving while surrounded by the sound of flushing toilets and screaming potty training kids! The only hiccup was when the toilet next door flushed and Liam's usually groggy-milk-drinking eyes bulged like a chicken on the chop block and he pulled as far back from my body as he could WITHOUT LETTING GO...ouch...and seriously, I had no idea that that particular body part of mine could stretch like that...but, to paraphrase a famous builder, "Yes, it can!" (thanks Bob), and like a rubber band it just snapped right back to me as if THAT were a normal part of its daily routine...if only the rest of us were so resilient.

 

1 comment:

  1. We went to a sit down restaurant precisely one time while the kids were between the ages of 0 & 3--for exactly that reason.

    Great imagery in this writing. I think you covered all five senses.

    ReplyDelete

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