How I Was Baptized In Motherhood Sunday

Splenda pulled a tooth Sunday.

By herself. IN CHURCH.

All weekend long she'd been driving us bananas with "I! have! a! loose! tooth!" and "Is this the right one? The loose one? Is it a baby tooth or an adult tooth? I don't want to lose an adult tooth!" and stopping Mr Lemon every approximately 6.3 seconds to make sure she was wiggling the right loose tooth. Come to find out she had two loose teeth right next to each other. ALMOST MORE THAN SHE COULD BEAR.

So Sunday night, in our crowded church service in which there were two visiting ministers, one of them preaching the house down, Mr Lemon and I were sitting towards the back, and Splenda was sitting up in the second row with her new step-best-friend-forever Ashley. She kept turning around and pointing to her mouth, with her big eyes opened wide, exaggerating her words so that we could not possibly understand what she was trying to say. Mr Lemon kept giving her the "Dad STARE OF DEATH."

(I recognize the "Dad STARE OF DEATH" from my own childhood, when Daddy would produce such a stare when Sica and I would talk or otherwise misbehave while the choir was singing. Somehow we thought if Dad and Mom were up in the choir in front of the whole church and GOD AND EVERYBODY that they would not discipline us. We were sadly, sadly mistaken. Sica used to weep pitifully when she would be taken out of church for a (ahem) discussion, "PRAY, CHURCH! PRAY!")

(I digress.)

All at once Splenda jumped up, turned around with her hand out, and promptly marched out of her pew, into the middle aisle, ACROSS THE FRONT, and showed the 2nd non-preaching visiting minister her tooth!

She came back to our pew "Dad! Dad! Take it! There's BLOOD EVERYWHERE!"

You have to know ... Splenda is diabetic. She gets her fingers pricked 5-7 times a day. She remarks nonchalantly that there's not enough blood there, try again ... but the three little dots of blood that came from her mouth was just too much to handle.

Through his gritted teeth, he instructed her to get in the bathroom, and I followed her in.
How I managed to calm her down and get her hands washed is all a blur, but somehow I was able to do it without throwing my head back and HOWLING with laughter.

So there you have it.

I love my new life.