Stitchpop

I cleaned my bathrooms for the new year, and then (in what I believe to be a direct correlation) a tornado warning swept through our neighborhood at 5 a.m.

Never again, I say. Mildew-free tubs are not worth the suffering of millions. I will not be held responsible. For all I know, vaccuuming my basement was what caused Hurricane Katrina.

I've never had to usher the kids downstairs in response to a siren in the middle of the night before. Poor drowsy Matilda dutifully wrapped herself in a blanket, shuffled down the steps into the yarn room, and then curled up on the floor. But little Gert was a different matter. She was already in our bed because of a bad dream. She already had expressed a fear of tornados. And fires, and monsters*, and the basement, and loud noises, and many other things. She sat wrapped in a blanket on my lap, literally trembling for the entire fifteen minutes we were downstairs. But considering that this little kid was being confonted with several of her biggest fears in the middle of the night, I was surprised at how calm she was. She just nuzzled up in the blanket and kept asking if there was a tornado. No, we told her, the sirens just mean there might be.

I really hope that's the most excitement we can expect from 2006. But at least now we know two things: it's fortunate that I'm married to a paranoid man, because I would have slept right through anything short of a tornado tapping on my window and asking to borrow a cup of sugar. And watching a 12-hour binge of the Twilight Zone is a surefire way to make anything that strange seem plausible.

*Sidenote: for Christmas, Gert's grandpa gave Gary a laser pointer (aka laser-guided monster destroyer) and that has greatly reduced the number of monsters.