Unreal Life

Today I’m taking a bit of a break from my Perl series over on my Other Blog, on account of The Mother is gone this weekend and I’ve been chasing 3 kids around the house for 3 days.  A trinity of trinities, I suppose, although the perfection implied is looking more like perfect exhaustion at this point.  Said 3 kids are now (almost) 15.5, 8, and 2.  There are many interesting bits of fallout from having kids spaced out like that, but the one I’ve been pondering lately is that I’ve now been watching children’s television pretty much continuously for 15 years.  I’ve written about this phenomenon before, although I really only scratched the surface.

Eventually, all that stuff starts to run together in your brain, and it becomes one giant, colorful, frenetic, singing, vocabulary-spouting, Spanish-speaking whirlwhind melange of light, sound, and giggles.  And, you know, you start to wonder what your life would be like if you lived in a children’s show.

You don’t?  Well, maybe it’s just me.

But, anyway, here’s my Letterman-style top 10 things that would be different about our family if we were children’s television stars.  Enjoy it just for the surreality, or see if you can figure out which specific shows I’m referring to in each item.^*

10. We’d all fall over backwards when we laughed at something.

9. We would turn invisible when frightened.

8. Our youngest would keep a screwdriver in her diaper for tricky escapes.

7. Our potatoes would be moonlighting as detectives.

6. We would live in constant fear of our personal possessions being stolen by a fox.

5. We could take the train to visit our distant ancestors, but not our grandparents.

4. Our guinea pig could play the trumpet.

3. No one could find the snails.

2. We’d have a pet chair.

1. If we were unsure what lesson to draw from events, we could consult the Wheel of Morality.

* Tip: If you need help with the answers, the period at the end of each item is a link.