My head was in the hammock-sling. The magnet-tile anesthetic chocolate shop had been built and stocked with raisins. The surgeon had lined up five different-sized vice grips, a large rubber mallet, and a paint roller, and had invented and constructed a venom vacuum. The anesthetic chocolate shop owner declared herself go-flight, and the surgeon said, “Great! Now all I need is a book about surgery.”
To be fair, the only reason my children were performing surgery on me, other than my proneness to being prone, was that I myself had suggested it in order to redirect them from a slightly too-interesting discussion about an imaginary chicken-killing operation: “I just used this clamp on it, Mama, and made it dead, and it didn’t need its body anymore, and I made a delicious soup out of its meat.”
Well well well, look at those hasty & aspirationally ethical explanation chickens come home to roost. Hence my suggesting a game that involved a slightly less permanent form of bodily alteration (plus they love watching the “dog surgery” episode from All Creatures Great and Small, which has been handy in helping us all periodically recall the dangers of putting marbles and rocks in our mouths before/while running).
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My choices when it comes to the pharmacy aren’t great: 1) bring two agile four-year-olds with extremely healthy senses of desire and curiosity into an open-shelving system store that contains drugs, incontinence products, and candy, or 2) leave them in the locked and climate-controlled car in my line of sight with an audiobook for twenty-six seconds and risk getting the cops called on me for negligent parenting again.