My head is throbbing due to far too much time spent surrounded by other people�s yelling children this morning. I took AJ to story-time at the library. This is the first Tuesday I�ve been home since it began, so I had not yet borne witness to the melee that is involved in organizing 20 or more three year olds sans parents into a single and mostly sedentary in a place that is supposed to be fairly quiet. That part wasn�t the headache-inducing portion of my day, however, as once they shut the door, I could no longer hear the chaos (those running the story hour might have something else to say about the dosages of Advil, aspirin, or valium required for survival). But shortly after the door closed, the little siblings of the three-year-olds, draped over their tired looking mothers, started wailing and shrieking, egging each other on until the frenzy caused me to dig out the ear plugs from my bag and repair with my laptop to the nether-regions of the reading room under the assumption (correct, as it happened) that there would be no place I could go where I would not hear the exiting of the three year olds.

Following regular story-time, a special event was taking place today. The fire department had sent a couple of fire men and a truck over to talk about fire safety. Every little boy in the place (and a few girls) lined up to try on the boots and gas mask, to climb into the fire truck, to shriek with mock terror at the sound of the siren, to ooh and aah over the pole that folded out into a ladder. They soberly recited 9-1-1 in unison and practiced stop-drop-and-roll. AJ, in what may have been an attempt to win style points, accomplished his safety training with a half-handspring between �drop� and �roll.�

Teaching fire safety to a bunch of three-year-olds is kind of a doomed process, because in order to teach them what they need to know, you need to introduce them to some scary concepts that probably had never occurred to them. At the beginning of the stop-drop-and-roll tutorial, fireman Adam said to the kids, �Okay, pretend your clothes are on fire.� The kids stared at each other, not knowing what to do. Then one kid began to wiggle and the rest of them followed. Encouraged, the kid started shrieking, �Help! Help!� and soon the air was filled with the shrill voices of preschoolers, half of whom were hamming it up and the other half of whom were terrified and on the verge of tears. AJ appeared to fall into the former category. However, when he came back to sit down, he asked me, �Mommy, why are my clothes on fire?�

Last Saturday evening it was raining steadily as we cleaned up the kitchen after dinner. AJ was driving his cars around a pile of sofa cushions in the family room. All of a sudden there was a loud noise and a flash from the top of a utility pole on the back edge of our property. Almost simultaneously, a shimmering blue arc shot across the kitchen and vanished, as the power cut out. A minute or two later, the power returned and it was business as usual, but AJ was ashen faced and trembling. Every morning since then, when he wakes up he asks me, �Mommy what was that loud bang?� He seems to be reliving this event nightly, despite our reassurances that the power company has come out to fix it (and they did too, in the pouring rain at nearly 10 p.m. on a Saturday night).

It�s hard to make the decision to scare your kid, even when you know that it is better for him to have the information in case he needs to know how to react. But this kind of protection feels counter-intuitive to my maternal instincts. Still, I can already see that AJ, like myself, tends to feel better when armed with knowledge. He knows 9-1-1. He knows stop-drop-and-roll. They are more like superstitions, incantations of protection, to him now than actual solutions to a potential problem he can�t yet get his head around.

Look, Ma! No segue!

Yesterday was a veritable googlefest here at spynotes, and I feel obliged to share some of my favorite hits of the day:

What do you do at a red light?
Harri3tspy husband
Seven league boots
Words that rhyme with AJ
Diary of an insomniac
Orphans shaved
Darnton incident analysis
Ladybug cakes
Bumping into Mr. Ravioli
Mary Richards violin
Mt. Saint Helen erupted
The lovely bones crib notes
Hermaneutics
Trafe

I myself would be intrigued to know what words rhyme with AJ. Reggae? Faye Wray? May Day? Perhaps I will start an all-AJ poetry festival.

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