Scrapbooking can be hazardous

We narrowly averted some drama on Wednesday. I knew when I made the scrapbook page several years ago that it was risky. I felt like the story should be told though. The whole family knew it already but I wanted it preserved somewhere for historical purposes just in case I got hit by a bus.

I thought maybe I should hide the page away somewhere until Amanda was a bit older because my hope was that she’d be flipping through her books and reading these stories whenever she felt like it and I was already picturing the exact embarassing scenario that almost happened this week.

But knowing how un-sentimental my husband is, if I did actually get hit by a bus, any pages not permanently affixed to the scrapbook would certainly be lost in the Everything Must Go! sale that would be held while the funeral home was still trying to figure out how to disguise the tire marks on my forehead.

So I made the page and put it in her scrapbook and from time to time Amanda pulls the book off the shelf and asks me to read her the stories. I thought I’d only given her the very PG edited version of this particular story, but apparently she knew the specific detail I didn’t want her to know.

So as we were getting ready for school I suddenly remembered, “Oh, today’s your sharing day. Do you have something to share?” They called it show-and-tell when I was a kid, now it’s just “Sharing.” And before they reveal the item they give three clues about it and let their classmates guess what it might be.

Amanda pulled the hot pink stuffed frog out of her backpack to show me and said, “Yeah, I’m taking this and I already know my clues!”

I was only slightly nervous when I said, “Okay, let’s hear ‘em.”

She said, "Okay, 1) It’s pink. 2) It’s really soft. And 3) When I was little I couldn’t say its name right so I really embarrassed my mom in the middle of the store because I yelled out,
“Fok, Fok, FOKKKKKKKKK!!!”

"Umm, we're going to have to rethink that third one. Your principal seems like a nice guy but I don't really want to get a phone call from him today."

Crisis averted this time but there are years worth of opportunities for humiliation ahead of us. I don’t think it would have been as bad as the time the son of a distant relative announced to his classmates during show-and-tell that, “My mommy was wounded in battle!” and then pulled out a pair of his mommy’s bloody panties as evidence.

(In case you missed it, the original fokking story can be found toward the bottom of this post.)