How can I embarrass thee?

Let me count the ways.

It's a good thing our two, childless, male dinner guests this weekend were not especially intent on Edith. If they had heard every one of her socially inappropriate remarks, I imagine they might be re-evaluating their own interest in children about now. Note: If there are colleagues by whom you want to be taken seriously, do not invite them over when your child is two.

I know my classmates caught her most blatant interruption: (1) "I'm poopy," announced into the silence that comes just as everyone is sitting down to a meal.

(2) I'm not sure if they caught the song she sang on the changing table immediately thereafter, an on-the-spot original. After observing, "Mommy, your armpits stink," she sang, "Oh, the mommies on the bus, they stink up the bus, stink up the bus, stink up the bus. The mommies on the bus, they stink up the bus, all through the town."

(3) Back at dinner she asked, "Mommy, will you burp for me?" Fortunately our guests were talking at the time, though one of them did ask what Edith had said. I covered.

(4) When she was growing bored with the grown-up chatter, she lifted my shirt and cried, "I want mommy milk!!" I knew from the startled expression of the shyer guest that he had caught perhaps more than he wanted to.

Two months into our partial weaning, Edith does continue to cry for mommy milk, not nearly as much as before, but often when she's tired or needing comfort. By the end of the day, she's usually clamoring to get in the rocking chair to get down to the permitted bedtime nursing session--if not to the bedtime itself.

(5) Sitting in the living room after dinner, Edith turned to me and exclaimed with a look of shock, "Mommy, 'scuse you!" I had not done anything that required excusing oneself, but Edith seemed to think I had, and so I suspect that our guests did, too.

A month ago, I might have seen all these comments as innocent. Now, I'm not so sure. Tom has expressed interest in writing the post about our recent parenting challenges, so I'll save the topic for him. Suffice it to say that I am beginning to see how Puritans entertained the belief that children were born evil and that parents' fearsome duty was to wrest their children's souls from the evil spirits to claim them for the narrow path of God and goodness. I always wondered how one could look at an innocent infant with such suspicious, fearful eyes. Surely it was clear that children were born essentially good, wanting to be good, and needing consistent, assured, but loving guidance to remain good.

Now I see how they might have come to think otherwise: They weren't looking at infants; they were considering two year olds.

But it has to do with far more than off-color dinner conversation. More to come when Tom next writes...