Last night was our night to eat crappy food and catch up on our 'Desperate Housewives' addiction, so while the critter was quietly sitting on the floor putting together her Winnie the Pooh puzzles for the millionth time, we settled in for an hour of "Oh-my-god-what-a-f'd-up-neighborhood" action. The Critter's vocabulary has grown exponentially in the past few months. She's taken up a habit of repeating random comments she hears, kind of like she's trying on new words for size before springing them on her nursery school peers. Earlier in the evening, I had been watching a BBC program which featured the leaders of the three major British parties, answering audience questions. (Incidentally, British politics - which normally makes US politics look about as exciting as the roundtable discussion at last year's annual Omaha International Paint & Wallpaper Convention - has taken a decided turn for the dull. Besides the one guy in the audience who likened the Tory party leader to a "modern day Hitler" for his stance on asylum seekers [no way - you can't have serious evil dictator aspirations and still wear this kind of bowtie], the whole evening was one long "my party doesn't suck as bad as his party" event. American McPolitics has leeched across the pond for good, I'm afraid.) The critter was puttering around repeating quotes at random - "I have great hopes for us all," "My father came to this country," "Tony Blair smells of lilacs." (I'm not sure what she was trying to say because I had tuned out for a bit, but Charles Kennedy was on the screen at the time. He's Scottish and kind of cuddly, so he may have actually said something about his fondness for the Prime Minister's perfume for all I know.) Fast forward a couple of hours to the end of 'Desperate Housewives', when one of the characters yells at the end of a bad date "You're not going to get any!" From across the room, my beautiful little angel of a not-quite-three year old echoes "going to get any!" ...pause... Critter: "Get any what, daddy?" My Bride: ...giggle... Me: desperately looking around for a way to save this "Um.." Ah! the dinner plate! what was on the plate? "Get any hotdog!"Oh crap, that's not better. Critter: "Not get any hotdog? She doesn't like hotdog?" My Bride: ...giggle harder... I am so not ready for this conversation, so, like any mature & responsible father, I grounded her for a month and sent her to bed immediately.

In the childhood homes of both myself and my bride, reading at the dinner table was stricly verboten. Something about it being contrary to the accepted laws of society to bury your face in a book while eating. Even if you were at a really, really good part. I never understood it: these were the same people (my father, the surgeon & my mother, the nurse) who thought it acceptable to sandwich their blow-by-blow on today's tricky colonostomy around their requests to pass the stroganoff. Today, my bride and I delight in using the fruit of our loins as the centerpiece in our revenge against our parents. That's pretty much the reason you have kids, after all. See this, Mom? *We* taught her to do this! And contrary to all of your warnings, civilization as we know it did not crumble. Ha! Note: that's really her book. There're no pictures in it, but she loves carrying it around and looking at it. Unless she's been hiding a copy of Hooked on Phonics, I'm pretty sure she's not actually reading it. But that's not what we tell the other parents at her nursery school.