Attack of the Pacifier


I’m delighted to tell you we don’t have any sibling rivalry going on yet. Baby Tucker is about 2 months old, and his Big Sissy A’Dell couldn’t be more proud of him. Lately, she’s been begging me to send her teacher pictures to show her classmates. And when we go anywhere she loves to help take care of him. She wants everyone to know that cute little smiling boy is her little brother.
She’s getting to be such a big girl; in fact she just turned another year older. Somehow she talked her tired old mommy into letting her have a high-pitched screaming Girls Sleepover Party again this year. We had 6 high-pitched little girl cousins running round and round until the wee hours of the night. Thankfully, we also had a great teenager cousin to keep up with them. Pauline to the rescue!
We gave them plenty of snacks and drinks, so eventually their sugar-high put them to sleep. Those all night parties are exhausting for moms, but the kids sure do say and do some funny stuff though. One little girl got up and got a drink of water, and her sassy little cousin behind her shrieked “You’re drinking water when your mom isn’t even here??? This is a sleepover! A sleepover! Do you hear me!!!???” She clearly had a sugar high. As they were winding down and watching a Rapunzel movie, I heard one of them sleepily say “Wait, shouldn’t that hurt when they climb up her hair?”
Good point children!
Long story short, I didn’t “sleep like a baby”, and a little incident the next night got my adrenaline pumping a little too fast to sleep well too. As I climbed out of bed to go get a drink, I shuddered when what felt like a rodent jumped and rolled over my arm. Terrible thoughts of cockroaches and mice filled my head thinking of all the critters it could be. My husband was too tired to be concerned, so while I turned on the lights and searched part of the bed, he just laid there.
Just when I was about to give up and go crawl in bed with my daughter instead, my husband suddenly flew out of the bed like a firecracker.
“I felt it too!” he said. He doesn’t see well at night, so I tore off all the rest of the blankets and scoured the sheets while he was on standby, ready to kill it. And finally, I found it! It was……a big, bad pacifier…an attack pacifier folks! Oh good grief! I was frustrated and relieved all at the same time!
Sure reminded me of our honeymoon when we went snorkeling on the beach in Key West. We were searching for seashells under the water, when we saw a little hammerhead shark. My eyes about popped out of my goggles, and we frantically waved our hands and arms around to each other trying to decide what to do. It’s funny how stunned you are when you see a shark in the ocean. Finally, after some scuba sign language, he decided to bash the little shark with a big sea shell we had picked up. He bashed it real good, and it was dead alright. Our silly terror quickly turned into laughter as we saw it bouncing up and down and realized it was just a little toy shark some kid must have lost in the surf.
I laughed more deeply than I ever have, and that silliness is and will always be one of my fondest memories.