I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep

Random Family Conversation #53

By 8:30 last night, I was ready for bed. I had turned off all the lights in the living room when Critter came out from the shower. She turned towards the dark with the intent of powering up some entertainment device. "Keep the TV and computers off," I warned. She groused a moment. "Well, you can go to bed and read or listen to music..." I climbed into bed and the Fuzzy Slug settled across my legs. "Or you can come inside and talk with me a bit."

"About what?" she called from the doorway.

I settled down under the blankets. "I don't care."

"Snot?"

I grinned, ready. "I don't care."

She flobbed on the bed and scritched the Fuzzy Slug. "How come snot is always green?"

"Sometimes it's white. And stringy."

"Ewwwwww!"

I laughed and prepared another topic. "What ride would you most want to take Annie on at Disneyland?"

She rolled her eyes. "Duh. Only the best one." A bit more coaxing confirmed it. "Splash Mountain, of course."

"Oh. I thought maybe you'd be vindicative and say Hollywood Tower of Terror!" She shook her wet head vehemently. "So once was enough?"

"Yeah. When we went to the Rose Parade we rode on the Chinese Roller Coaster in the little kids area and at one point, about half-way through, you go up really high and you can see over the wall and we saw this really old guy. He had his shirt off and you could see his grey hair on his chest. And he had this big old pot belly." She made Santa Claus bowl-full-of-jelly motions over her reindeer night shirt. "Like this big." She stood up and hiked up her Halloween sleeping shorts. "And he had these shorts on up to like here and he was runnin' and his legs were going all flabbidy-flab-flab. He was really old. I mean old. Old old. Really, really old. Like fifty."

I tried to keep a straight face.

"Annie saw that and she said she was scarred. For life." She readjusted her sleeping shorts and flobbed across the bed again to scritch the Fuzzy Slug. "Crack kills."

I kept my cool. "Yes, it does. Is it time to have another 'Don't do drugs. Don't do alcohol' conversation?"

She gave me a brief pitiful look and broke into laughter. Critter has several different laughs, as all kids do. This one, I'd not heard in a long, long time. This was the I'm-So-Glad-You-Didn't-Say-This-In-Front-Of-My-Friends-And-Embarass-Me laugh mixed with the You-Are-Completely-Clueless-But-In-A-Funny-Way-I'll-Still-Keep-You laugh. "I was referring to butt cracks! You say that when you see someone's butt crack showing!" She struck a serious pose. "Crack kills."

"Oh!" I smiled. "Well, thank you for sharing this bit of information. Next time I'll be three percent more hip."

"Uh, yeah. You just lost about three points for saying 'hip'."

"Well, at least I didn't say 'Groovey,'" I countered.

"Negative three points now."

I sighed dramatically. "Well, what am I supposed to say?"

"You're supposed to say 'Cool.'"

"Cool?" I tried it out. "Cool."

"Okay, negative one. It just doesn't sound right coming from you. You're a Mom!"