I think the word she’s looking for is “leech”

Overheard: Child watching a cartoon mouse attempt to cook and eat the Pink Panther.

“That bloodthirsty little lech!”

If I never fold another pair of socks, it will be too soon

In fact, I think I will just stop folding them altogether. I mean, our family devotes an entire laundry basket to unmatched socks anyway. Why not just have that be the permanent home for ALL socks? The kids can go fishing every morning. I don’t even care whether they match. My girls go around looking like Punky Brewster half the time anyway.

(Speaking of what not to wear.)

And speaking of speaking of, speaking of Punky Brewster—oh, wait, never mind. I’m getting my former child stars confused. I was going to write about how cool it is that Soleil Moon Frye (aka Punky B) has a blog now, but the person I’m really thinking of is Quinn Cummings. She blogs at The QC Report and has a line of (I love her for this) baby carriers.

It’s a bit stupid of me to confuse them; they’re a decade apart. Quinn is about a year older than I am. I wonder if we had babies around the same time. I tried a bunch of different baby carriers with my first child…a Guatemalan rebozo, a Baby Bjorn, a hip-carrier thingie with plastic buckles and a strap that cut deep into my shoulder the one and only time I ventured out with it. Unfortunately I was seven subway stops from home before my cruelly strained shoulder muscles began to scream. They screamed so loud the rats were running off the train, not that any of my fellow (human) subway riders noticed, enshrined as they were in their protective New Yorker force fields.

Then I tried a homemade contraption called a “Baby Bundler,” which turned out to be the most idiotic concept in the history of textiles. You take several yards of fabric—I think I recall it was supposed to be something with a bit of stretch to it, but natural fibers only, of course—and cut them into wide strips and sew them together into one very very long wide strip which you then wrap around yourself in a specific and complicated manner, like if you were trussing a turkey with flannel stockings instead of twine. The baby gets wrapped up in the middle of this procedure, a little Cornish game hen strapped to the turkey. She is positioned facing out, her back against your front, all snug and comfy and subconsciously absorbing contentment vibes through the warmth of your body and the beating of your heart.

Then you take a step, and you discover that the baby’s itty bitty widdle tootsies are perfectly positioned in front of your thighs so as to jiggle and thunk against them when you walk.

Before you reach the end of the block, you will have matches bruises on those thighs. Turns out those widdle bitty snookie-wookie baby heels are made of LEAD.

When you hobble back home, you will spend ten minutes trying to untruss yourself from the infant with the brass knuckles in her booties. Thus your first encounter with the Baby Bundler shall be your last. Make sure you are very fond of the fabric you choose when making this nightmarish contraption, because you’ll wind up turning it into throw pillows and baby blankets and sarongs and dinner napkins and Lord knows what else.

After that fiasco, I finally found my way to a plain old baby sling, the kind with padding and an adustable plastic ring on the shoulder, otherwise known as my BFF. Together we have toted five babies all over the doggone country. My sling knows I would never betray it, so that is why I am comfortable saying that IF I had occasion to need a new baby-carrier (which I DON’T, my darling), I would totally give Quinn Cummings’s version a shot. I mean, come on, it comes in toile.

But I don’t need one. I’m good to go. As soon as I go dig some socks out of the laundry basket and put on my trendy jacket made from recycled Baby Bundler.