CHILDREN!!!!!!

A few years back, my dear, dear friend, who I'll call Natalie, announced she was pregnant. This was tremendously exciting. I love Natalie and I love her husband, who we'll call Logan and I was very excited that they were joining forces to create an awesome new person.

Another extremely dear friend, who I'll call Jo, and I decided we needed to throw Natalie a baby shower. Of course, we couldn't have a regular old baby shower, with a bunch of women and tea and blah blah blah. No. The first decision we made was that it had to be male friendly. The second decision was that "baby shower" was not the best name and renamed it "Natalie and Logan's Procreation Party."

Then we started thinking about the games to play. We did the obvious "freezing cupcake topper babies in ice cubes and seeing whose ice baby was 'born' first" game. We did a feed the piggy bank game where if you said somebody's real name instead of an assigned goofy name, you had to drop change into a piggy bank. So we had the games. Now we needed to come up with the prizes.

We considered doing the normal prize-y things, but then thought the better of it. Jo and I decided it was far more wise to buy a bunch of toys from the dollar store for prizes. We got some fantastic dollar store toys for our adult friends. A ball-in-a-cup. A little water/pinball game. A "feather" boa. Then we found the hats. There was a whole host of hilarious foam hats shaped like various animals. Our favorites were the shark and the T-Rex. The T-Rex hat just showed the top of the T-Rex head, down to the top jaw. So basically, it looked like whoever was wearing the hat had their inside of a dinosaur's mouth. The shark hat was a foam visor with a 3-D shark face. Jo and I loved these hats. There's a photo out there of us posing in the dollar store wearing them. The problem was, we couldn't decide which one to go with. I made the joke that if only there was a small child in the store, we could have that child pick which hat was better. What better way to determine the best gift for 25-35 year olds?

We looked around the store and found no children, something I had never witnessed in this dollar store before. So we resumed our shopping, still wearing the hats, of course! We got out decorations, we got our other prizes, etc., etc. Then something magical happened. The door to the store opened, and in walked a woman...with two children. A boy and a girl. In my inability to guess age, I'd say they were both around seven.

Jo saw the opportunity and became delighted. I knew exactly what was going on in her head, but the way it was expressed was simultaneously the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed and the funniest.

A huge grin on her face, Jo screamed, "LITTLE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and ran towards the kids. The terrifying part? Their mother had no problem with this. Strange adult running towards your kids, screaming "Hooray! Children!"? Sure, nothing wrong with that. The woman basically pushed her children forward towards us, encouraging them to talk to these strange adults.

They chose the shark.