This Sunday, after attending Ben’s annual Open House at his Crunchy School, I demanded sweetly requested that The Daver take us out to one of my favorite haunts for a lunch/dinner (linner?). After much protesting, he agreed, and off we went.

Afterwards, in my quest to win the title of Most Annoying Wife ever, by rudely taking away valuable video game time, I insisted that we pop over to Target to grab some baby yogurt for the week.

As we walked in, Ben grabbed his kid’s cup and declared that he was going to throw it away inside, which was fine by me. Less crap in the car for me to throw out = happy Aunt Becky.

When we finally located a garbage can, Ben pulled the sticky straw from the cup and declared that he wanted to take it home to reuse it. Now, over the past couple of years, we at Casa de la Sausage have made quite the effort to become more Green, and I am all for any small thing we can do to accomplish that goal.

But I draw the line at bringing home straws, not because I don’t see the good in reusing them, but because a) we don’t use those straws at home, so he’s not saving anything by doing so and b) the last time he did that, the straw was left sitting on the kitchen floor for me to throw away.

(truth be told, he wanted the straw so that he could PLAY with it, which wouldn’t have bugged me in the slightest if he didn’t want to save every sticky gross thing he comes across.)

So when I rudely insisted that he toss the straw away with the rest of his sugar-drenched cup, he balked at it. I argued and he finally relented and angrily threw the straw into the garbage. It was then when he uttered the words that afforded him the Longest and Most Drawn Out Lecture From The Daver:

“FINE, Mom, if you want to KILL the EARTH!”

The words were dripping with such snot and disdain that a teenager may have been able to do it no better.

Ben: 1, Parents: 0.

———–

Although most of my house is fairly well baby-proofed, occasionally, we will construct a makeshift gate at the edge of the couch to keep the Beast That Is Alex out of his favorite places, namely the dog dish, the cat door and his personal favorite, the toilet.

The area that he is sometimes contained in doesn’t allow us to put up a usable gate, so we usually just shove two laundry baskets in the space and call it a day. Often he will howl at this injustice, but usually he is pretty content to play in this room.

Yesterday, because I have a bladder approximately the size and shape of a Froot Loop, I ran to the bathroom for the 47th time that hour and left him in his toy filled prison, but peed with the door open so that I could listen and make sure he wasn’t trying to dismember one of the cats.

As soon as I let that flow go, I heard a strange noise: it was the noise that a sliding plastic laundry basket makes on a wooden floor. After I did my business (that’s the dumbest phrase, isn’t it?), I came back out to see the most satisfied baby on the planet.

He had hoisted his considerable weight onto the basket and pushed it out of the way, and now he sat on the kitchen floor looking like I’d just handed him a wet nurse AND a new Corvette.

Alex: 1, Parents: 0

——————

If you want me, I’ll be in my walk-in closet popping Valium for the next 18 or so years.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always gotten headaches. They’re not the sort that leave me stranded in a dark room with an ice pack across my eyes OR seeing these delicious sounding auras, but they’re more an irritation, somewhat like a burn. You know, the sort that just always reminds you that “Hey, you have a headache, idiot, isn’t it fun?”

Unless you have a migraine, headaches aren’t something that tends to elicit much sympathy. I should know, as The Daver gets ’em as well. And despite his pleas for sympathy and possible BJ’s to “make them go away,” I never feel particularly sympathetic towards him. They tend to be more an irritation of the highest degree, a thorn in my side, and occasionally a fight-provoking ailment.

Mainly because he tends to get them (in my mind) in order to get out of completing annoying tasks. Am I being a bitch? You be the judge.

He has gotten headaches right before the following tasks (and subsequently having to lay down):

*Packing our loads of crap into boxes before the movers came

*Painting the walls before we put the condo on the market

*Packing our stuff AGAIN before the movers came

*Scooping for Cat Box Crunchies

*Familial birthday parties

*Cleaning before we had guests over

and my personal “you will never live this down so long as you live and I may put it on your grave stone, motherfucker:”

*While I was in labor with Alex.

It’s not that I don’t care that he has a headache, on the contrary, if he got them while we were just farting around the house trying to complete absolutely nothing whatsoever of any importance, I probably wouldn’t say a word. BUT, one’s sympathy dwindles after being in labor for a full 12 hours with the lights down low and the television set to an inaudible frequency WHILE having to worry that no one will hold your leg when you have to push.

That said, I obviously can’t expect to get much sympathy for the headaches I’ve been having with alarming regularity now that I am taking Vitamin Z. They’re not really bad enough to make me want to go to the doctor and demand a different SSRI, because really, the benefit outweighs the cost in terms of my mental health here.

But shit, I just wish I could make them go away for a day or two. The NSAID’s I have don’t touch them, and I don’t have the sort of life that would allow me to just rest and relax them away (I’m not certain it would help anyway).

What do YOU do when you have a headache? Any and all assvice would be highly appreciated.

Walking (er, STUMBLING) into motherhood for the second time, I knew that I had some extremely complicated feelings about nursing. Now, I’m not the sort of person who claims to know what is best for anyone else in regards to parenting and all of the choices that come along with it, to me, I still engage in the Whatever Gets You Through The Night (Or Day) school of parenting.

As such, I don’t find fault in the decisions of other parents that I know that are not the same as my own. Co-Sleeping? Whatever, not my personal cup ‘o’ joe, but if it works, go for it. Baby Wearing? Again, whateves.

Feeding evokes the exact same feelings of ‘meh’ in me.

Now, this isn’t to say that I didn’t spend the first 5 years of Ben’s life wondering what the fcuk was wrong with me that no matter what I tried, I couldn’t nurse him, because I did. I convinced myself that I had low milk supply, inverted nipples, and likely a nasty case of BO, and THESE were the reasons I never got to nurse him.

Until Alex was born with a latch to beat all latches and an appetite like a teenager, I was sure that I was at fault for being unable to nurse Ben. My milk supply was pathetic (according to the pump) and my dinner plate (hubcap) sized nipples would certainly have turned ME off, were I in his diaper.

It wasn’t until later when I realized that any issues I had with nursing Ben had nothing to do with me.

It was his own fault.

I am blaming all of his nursing issues squarely on him alone.

(anyone who has had issues nursing their own children can understand the magnitude of this statement. If you have not had issues, it would make very little sense as to why this would be a big deal. Just roll with me, baby. Or ignore me. It’s cool.)

My feelings about nursing are now not so complex. Alex is weaning himself, and down to about one nursing session a day (if that), and aside from once again being amazed at how quickly he’s grown up, I’m having a hard time pegging which emotion I feel about it (I need one of those ‘match the emotion with the proper face’ chart right about now).

On the one hand, the thought of him turning one is freaking me out a wee bit, mainly because I am pretty certain that this is our last baby, and therefore I should have savored some of the baby-ness a bit more. The late night nursing sessions were annoying, for sure, but as with even the good parts of having kids, they never go back to that kind of intimacy again. Pretty soon, he’ll be getting his own food from the cupboard and begging for Dino-Shaped fruit snacks and Cap’n Crunch (with Crunchberries, if he’s anything like his Momma–which is is.), and when I blink again, he’ll be chugging shitty beers with The Dudes (just like his Momma) with the same intensity that he went after the boobs.

On the flip side, being one is so much more interesting (and exasperating) than being an ickle baby, and I’ve always preferred kids that I can interact with to those who are a drooling mass of baby.

I guess the only real emotion that I can see right now is relief. Plain and simple relief.

I’m glad he’s weaning himself, I’m glad he’s turning one, and I’m glad those all nighters are gone for now (until he hits college. But by that time, I will be relaxing by the pool, and likely asleep while he’s drinking his braincells away). I’m glad that his favorite game to play right now is “ball” and I’m glad that I can feed him whatever I am eating (without teeth, to boot!), and I am glad that he is in my life.

Maybe my heart will always skip a beat when I see (or hear) that newborn cry or smell their special smell, but maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just be glad that my time is over and I can focus my time on enjoying my children, who, while they are not getting any younger, are two of the most enchanting people I have ever been fortunate enough to know.

And maybe I will just thank the powers that be that I was deemed fit enough to be the mother of these two fascinating souls.

I cannot wait to see what new-ness today will bring.

I fell into parenting in the same way I’ve fallen into everything else in my life: an opportunity presented itself to me, I made a choice, and have reaped the consequences ever since. I don’t pretend to be Type-A enough to have a five year plan unless it involves the phrase “Don’t Die” as it’s sole criteria, and this is fine by me.

Alex was a deliberately executed child, although the circumstances surrounding his conception were, of course, up in the air (the whole marriage thing didn’t matter to me as much as it did to The Daver), but even after having had one child, I was in no way prepared for having another.

I’ve always expected to write off the first year of a child’s life as not having much real joy in it, between the colic, the sleepless nights, and the formidable task of having to learn all about a new person without so much as a guidebook to consult. It seems easier to me to have the defeatist “everything about this is going to suck” attitude than to try to piss rainbows and sunshine about it and be disappointed when things don’t work out exactly as planned.

But today, after prying the Wii controllers out of the hands of the Elder Sausages and interrupting their Saturday morning Sitting On Our Asses Routine, I packed all three of The Sausages into the Meat Wagon and led the way to a local bakery to select a cake for Alex’s first birthday party (March 30th for those local and expecting an invite, which should be arriving this week sometime).

After carefully selecting a cake that is quite reminiscent of our wedding cake (see, I have a Cake Fetish. I don’t like to eat it because I am insane, but I require fancy-assed cakes for most occasions), and paying the approximate cost of a down payment on a house for it, I was overtaken by an emotion that I couldn’t quite place.

Suddenly, I felt light and buoyant, like a rather chubby balloon floating in the breeze. I could hear the birds singing (no small feat in the dead of winter here) and smell the teeniest hint of spring on the air. Alex’s babbling became the most adorable thing I’d ever heard, and Ben’s incessant monologuing suddenly seemed the perfect backdrop for the day. Hell, even Dave’s Rank Ass became more tolerable to my delicate girlish sense of smell.

For the first time in several years, I felt completely at ease with myself and the world around me. Life seemed to be more for living and less for surviving.

It’s really a glorious feeling, and it shocks me to think that normal people probably walk around like this all day, every day and take it completely for granted.

Life is sweet, baby. Just sweet.

This is not a new post, but a copy of a post that I wrote several weeks ago, that I am reposting for Cali’s Day to Remember. I don’t have it in me to come up with something good enough to say about my Stephie right now, except that I miss her terribly.

———

One of the last truly happy memories I have of my friend Steph was when we went together to see the Rolling Stones. I loved The Stones, but Steph was obsessed. Her bedroom walls were literally papered floor to ceiling with pictures of Mick and The Boys carefully cut from magazines, and she had a typical girlish crush (read: obsession) with Mick Jagger.

Saw you stretched out in room ten-o-nine
With a smile on your face
And a tear right in your eye

I can still see her in my mind’s eye, if I try hard enough, huge smile on her face as she belted out the lyrics to all of the songs (of which, I personally knew only a fraction) while taking drags off her Camel Wide Light.

Couldn’t seem to get a line on you
My sweet honey love

That was my friend.

The same friend who smelled like a garden with me, the same friend who threw my baby shower when I was pregnant with Ben. She (and Ashley) are the reason that for every party I throw, I must have a cutout Hula Girl thrown up somewhere (we found it along with every color of the rainbow baby dolls in our quest for the Tackiest Shower Decorations Ever). She was my introduction to flavored coffees and Opium perfume. I think I still have her copy of ‘œGoat’s Head Soup’ somewhere.

Well, you’re drunk in the alley, baby
With your clothes all torn
And your late night friends
Leave you in the cold gray dawn
Just seemed too many flies on you
I just can’t brush them off

Somewhere, probably up in Heaven, she is laughing at me right now. I can almost hear it’s distinctive peal tinkling over me as I write this. She’s sitting up in Heaven surrounded by stacks of every Rolling Stones record (even the unreleased B-Sides) ever recorded, drinking her ubiquitous cup of coffee, with a carton of Camel Wide Lights by her side, and she is laughing.

She had a beautiful laugh. It was the sort that made you smile no matter what mood you were in, the kind that made other people around you stop and look around for the source (but not because it was annoying or grating, but because it was so full of happiness). I always wished I’d had a laugh like that, and now I just wish I could hear her laugh again.

Tonight I bury my friend.

And the angels beating all their wings in time
With smiles on their faces
And a gleam right in their eyes
Thought I heard one sigh for you
Come on up, come on up, now
Come on up, now

(I am linking here so that you may go over and see what she looked like. I don’t have a scanner, so I cannot scan a picture in of her right this moment like I’d like to).

This week, I’ve been posting under titles ripped from Rolling Stones lyrics as a (pathetic) tribute to Steph, as I know she would have liked it. I don’t have any better way to commemorate her yet, so I will likely continue doing so from time to time. Maybe it’s not as permanent as a tattoo, but it’s something.

One of my own favorite Stones songs has always been ‘œShine a Light,’ but it always confused me until Steph died. The ebullient chorus coupled with the really depressing stanzas always seemed such a disconnect until I looked at them in this light. When I reread the lyrics, it made perfect sense.

Now, if this were anyone else, I’d have scoured The Internet looking for a poem or quote to dedicate, but Steph probably wouldn’t have appreciated that nearly as much. It just wasn’t the way she rolled.

And normally, I refrain from posting lyrics to songs because it makes no fucking sense and offers very little emotion without the music behind it, but today isn’t a normal day.

May the Good Lord shine a light on you
Make every song you sing your favorite tune
May the Good Lord shine a light on you
Warm like the evening sun.

The world is a colder place having lost Steph, although I am certain she is far happier where she is now. But I’m a selfish prick, and I want her back. I don’t want to be attending her funeral tonight. I don’t want to bury my friend.

I want her to come back and tell me that this was the ultimate prank. I want her to jump out from behind a door and yell ‘œPsych!’ and laugh uproariously at my stunned reaction. I want her to be who she was before the disease took her Shine away from her, and I want her to get her life back on track. I want to have coffee and play dates with her, I want our children to grow up together as good friends, I want to sit around and reminisce about the dumb shit we did when we were kids. I want to get old with her and start switching to decaf and vitamins, rather than coffee and cigarettes, I want to laugh with her again.

I don’t want to bury her tonight.

She was my friend and I loved her very much and I don’t want her to be dead.

In a winter that has lasted approximately 567 years (plus or minus) and chock full of disgusting ickle viruses, I am once again sick. For the eleventy-hundredth time.

Rather than solidify my state as a Geriatric Whiner and bore you in my quest to become the Most Boring Blogger Ever, and prattle on about the headaches that I medicate with Excedrin Migraine, which makes my guts decidedly unhappy, so I have to chug Pepto-Bismol in order to stave off the barfing, I will leave you with a question:

The eternal question.

If, for some odd reason, I feel compelled to purchase a pair of gogo boots, and am neither a hooker nor a dominatrix, which would you choose?

The white, black or pink (pink being my favorite color) ones?

And, if I am a self-respecting 27-year old who isn’t planning to use these for Halloween, do I have any business wearing them?

It seems as though over the past 11 months, we have created a monster. A 30 inch tall, 20+ pound monster, who drools, craps his pants (regularly!), and enjoys nothing more than tormenting his surroundings.

Now, even with the colic (and thanks in part to his sensory issues and subsequent autistic spectrum diagnosis) and dislike of human interaction, Ben was a remarkably easy toddler. Once he started trundling along and obsessing about either the planets or the pendulum on the grandfather clock, he was a fairly enjoyable guy.

Sure, he still wasn’t the kid you wanted to take out and do stuff with as he’d get overwhelmed in places like Target (the same way, I presume, that I feel about Best Buy) and fall apart, but as far as behavior issues went, Ben was easy-peasy (until aged 3, when all hell broke loose).

When Alex was born, and my glorious doctor was rooting around in my uterus for retained placenta (it sounds as fun as it felt), I swear on The Baby Jesus that had I not immediately thrust him to the boob, he’d have found a way to levitate there on his own (for comparison’s sake only, I will tell you that when I did the same with Ben, about 5 minutes old–although not only was the not-so-glorious doctor rooting around for placenta fragments, he was ALSO stitching up my 4th! degree! tears!– he not only raised his head away from my gigantic nipple, he arched his back and screamed so loudly I looked around to see what had poked him. Little did I know that this was to be The Way It Was for another year).

Alex is the same child who vibrates with pleasure upon being introduced to brand-new foods, like you were handing him the keys to a Lotus Elise, and eats as much (likely more, if I measured) than his 6 year old brother, AND enjoys the occasional snuggle.

Nope, no Aspy-ness there.

On the other hand, whereas Ben is a complete Follower (much to my dismay) and will do whatever it is that someone, anyone around him is doing (lemming much?), Alex wants things his way. Right now. Bitch.

Along with the mischief making of being 11 months old, I swear again on The Baby Jesus that he has started throwing tantrums. If I dare to give him water when he OBVIOUSLY WANTS JUICE (Mom, you ignorant slut!), he shrieks so loudly that my neighbors may actually be assuming that I’m practicing human sacrifice in my family room.

If, in the form of an “Alex, NO” I tell him gently that tearing magazines apart is not such a good way to spend the afternoon (Mom, you ignorant SLUT!), he screams bloody murder WITHOUT ME SO MUCH AS TOUCHING HIM.

(before you think ill of my child-proofing techniques, I promise that I don’t have much around at his level that he can get into–aside from the occasional dime, of course–and therefore be yelled at for touching. I got rid of my Ming Vases at a garage sale along with my sanity many years ago.)

It’s not as though I have issue with telling kids “No”–which, along with no longer using Red Ink on school papers, is the new wave of brat-making, erm parenting– I just don’t think that he needs to hear it every other word while he’s exploring the house and kicking up dust hyenas.

On the one hand, it’s pretty damn hysterical to see an 11 month old who cannot even walk (yet) get so angry about not getting what he wants AT THE PRECISE MOMENT HE SO DESIRES IT, but on the other, more practical hand, it bodes ill for my future AND my eardrums. Because, primarily, I am the Most Stubborn Human Being On The Face (27 years and counting!) on the planet, and it appears that he is about to try to usurp my title, flailing his chubby wrists at my plight.

It should be an interesting year decade ahead of us.

Wow! I never expected my search terms to turn up so many new people! Hi Lurkers! Thanks for showing your face! Stick around, I’m just getting started here.

(Having Lurkers de-Lurk is thus far the highlight of my day. Stupid snow making life annoyingly annoying.)

I did notice, however, that none of my fabulously sexy Lurkers confessed to finding me through searching for cheeseburger crotch, which makes me believe that there must be more of you out there.

My dear friend Stef tagged me for a meme, the only one I usually do, but anyone who has read me for any length of time knows that I’ve done this one before. Thankfully, being freak of the week, I have a seemingly endless supply of Odd Crap About Me.

Without further adieu, I present to you the Six Odd-er-er things about me (what I should call this is Why Becky Is A Freak):

1. When I was 14, my dreams of becoming an opera singer were promptly dashed by the removal of my tonsils (to be clear, I couldn’t sing before I had them out either. Well, I could sing, but it was and still is a frightening experience) and adenoids. While not having my tonsils has proven to be a Very Good Thing for the state of my health (they were necrotic), it has left me with a most irritating side effect.

I cannot drink from a water fountain without the water coming straight out of my nose. This means that when I blow chunks, it always comes out my nose as well. AND lastly (and sadly for my poor The Daver), it makes the gentle art of a blow job nearly impossible. I promise that having The Spooge come out of your nose is at least as unpleasant as it sounds.

Maybe more so.

2. After years of handling scalding hot plates as a waitress, I have very little sensation for warmth on my hands. Overall, this isn’t that bad until it comes time to give one of the kids a bath, and I have to use different parts of my body (like my elbee-bone) to test the temperature. Because to me, it can be nearly boiling and I would not be able to tell. And I don’t wish to cook my kids in their bathwater (they wouldn’t be very tasty).

3. I have only been tasked with mowed a lawn once in my life, and even then, I bribed my Metal Heads to do it for me. It’s not like I’m phobic about it or anything, and it isn’t even that we don’t have a lawn to mow (we do, oh laws yes, we do), it’s just never been my job. Hell, it’s not really The Daver’s job either (don’t let him fool you) as I pay the neighbor kid to do it.

$20 is so worth it (although I might get a service this year IF IT EVER FREAKING STOPS SNOWING LONG ENOUGH).

4. Despite calling myself “Aunt Becky” on the Internet, I absolutely hate people who assume familiarity (although, possibly even weirder, this doesn’t apply to my blog. Shit, tell me about your fetish for breast milk, it’s cool. And heeeyyy, want to buy some?) in real life. Friendliness is one thing (and I like it), but I if I don’t know you, don’t act like I want to stand in the aisle at Target and listen to your boring life story because I assure you that I want nothing more than to bean you in the head with cleaning products and run away shrieking.

5. Although I do have an abiding love for tomato-based products (mmmm…ketchup…mmm), the very act of looking at a raw tomato makes my stomach heave and threaten to blow. And getting me to touch one would have to be under strict bribery with a brand new purse or something. Damn, even writing about this made me a little queasy.

(shudder, shudder)

Sounds like *I* need some Occupational Therapy, eh?

6. When I was about three, I decided that I no longer wanted to be “Becky” but was going to change my name to “Smurfette.” And even when I tried, no one would call me by that name which inflamed me to no end. I guess my schitzophrenic tendencies showed up early, huh?

Little did I know that when I got older, I *would* be a lone female among a sea of males, just like my idol.

As per usual, I am refusing to tag people for this meme because if I’ve done this one three times, the rest of the Internet has done it approximately 5,478 times, and I believe that not every one is as full of weird traits as I am.

So, I tag YOU, Lovely Internet, Oh Light of my Life, to leave me a comment with an odd fact about you. What’s that you say? You’re trying to tell me that you’ve already DONE THAT BEFORE THE LAST TIME I DID THIS MEME?

Well, Sweetheart, me too.

*air smootches*

…google “cheeseburger crotch not pregnant,” apparently this brings you to my doorstep. While I normally am thrilled to pieces to have new visitors and virtually meet new people, I’m not sure this would be the place you’d want to look for such a thing.

Color me stupid, but I have no idea what a cheeseburger crotch (pregnant or not) is (but this is a highly trafficked term here at Casa de la Sausage).

And I don’t want to.

(okay, maybe I do. But I’m kinda sicked out now.)

How did YOU get here?

(Confidential to the person who found me searching for “i m just living for my kids i have nothing to offer my husband,” that may be the most depressing search term I’ve ever heard.)

I suppose that there must come a time in every parents life when they look at their offspring and wonder not-so-secretly if they are intelligent enough to care for this young life until they leave the home (by DCFS or not). I’ve often mused that people who want to become parents should really take an IQ test prior to trying to make the babies.

Sighs.

(This coming from the person whose children BOTH had a deep and abiding love for Diet Coke and all of it’s battery acid goodness. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, people).

Well, my Moment of Truth (to borrow the phrase from that new lame TV show. Seriously, I had high hopes for the entertainment value of that show. Hopes that were immediately dashed.) came this Saturday morning, when Dave burst in, Alex in tow, interrupting my sleep and a fantastic dream in which I was sleeping on a bed of cake frosting AND EATING IT (my dreams are always bizarre as hell), and not-so-gently urged me awake.

“Alex swallowed a dime,” was the phrase The Daver used to nudge me awake.

“Mmmmm….pink frosting with sprinkles,” I replied, “Oooohhhh, how I love you.”

“Becky, wake up!” Dave pleaded, “Alex ate a dime.”

Well, if there is anything in the world that can rip me indelicately away from beautiful dreams of frosting mountains, that would probably be it.

Because I am non-alarmist AND a health care professional, I wasn’t too worried. I mean, I could have rushed him to the ER, had a full set of X-rays done, so the doctor could inform me that my son had ingested a dime, and that I would simply have to wait and make sure it passed. THEN, I would have gotten a lecture about proper childproofing, like my home was just riddled with loose change strewn about on the floor, and THEN he might tell me that I should probably remove the Lye and Rat Poison from it’s storage space on the kitchen floor, and THEN where will I be?

So, The Great Poop Watch of 2008 begins with a bang. I’ve threatened to make Dave stay home until the elusive dime is passed, rooting around in our son’s diaper like a dog, searching for gold (well, cadmium and nickel), as this did happen on HIS watch (which I remind him of approximately every 2.5 minutes), but I don’t think he’ll do it.

And have no fear, if that nasty dime doesn’t pass in a couple of days, I’ll take him to the doctor for X-rays and a lecture on proper childproofing habits (to be completely fair to us both, Ben never got into a damn thing in his life. He was–and still is– the least adventuresome child on the planet.).

The question is, what do I DO with this dime once it passes? Do I leave it in my wallet to gleefully give to the nastiest cashier that I encounter? Or do I just toss it in the garbage and figure that there isn’t much I would spend a dime on, after all, now that I’m not 5 or 6.

What would you do with a dime that had passed through your child’s digestive tract?