“Ummm… Could you please remove your small child from my leg?”

My friend looks at me and laughs.

“Ummm… no seriously. She’s got like something coming out of her…. Oh God… These pants are so going to the drycleaners.”

My friend finally gets the hint and reaches for the offending item.

“Oh, thanks a bunch”

What is it about kids? I swear they can sense newly dry-cleaned clothes, and this kid, well, she’s particularly evil. I think she collects her snot all day long- just drinks gallon after gallon of water- all in preparation for seeing her “favorite” “Aunt”. It must actually be a well-timed operation, because she really has to kind of start accumulating it at the base of her nose right before reaching my newly pressed pants. If she does it too soon, her mother’s going to be able to intercept it with the Kleenex. If she does it too late, well she’s just going to get a dry sweep across my leg, and well, what’s the fun in that? Of course, I guess she can always just kind of hang on to my leg, until she gets a nice booger going. Wouldn’t want to leave that leg dry now, would we?

Hell, if they were my kids and I saw anything coming out of their noses, I’d set them on the nearest unsuspecting victim: “Sweetie, why don’t you go give that homeless guy a hug. Make sure it’s a good long one…”

This is of course a hypothetical situation cause well, frankly, there’s no way in hell I’m having children. Kids are just never going to meet my standards of cleanliness. They’ve always got some sticky little fingers or they’ve just eaten a bug or a can of paint or something…

I can see it now. I’ll be a mature woman of forty-five, driving around in my Jaguar (I plan to be insanely rich by then), and in the back seat will be my little, precious toddler. Well, two minutes later, I’ll glance in the mirror, only to see a big wad of slobber descending from my bundle of joy’s mouth. That slobber will be in mid-air, gliding towards my $100,000 leather seats, and it won’t even have a chance to hit the seat, before I’m on the phone with the adoption agency, announcing that I’d like to make a deposit. Then, I’ll have to drive clear across town, with that slobber soaking into my $100,000 leather seat and drop the kid off at the agency- all before I can go and buy some overpriced leather cleaner.

Yep, no kids for me. I’m sticking with my mechanical fish. You turn ‘em on, you watch ‘em. You get sick of ‘em, you turn ‘em off. They swim around their 2” diameter bowl, and dammit, they’re perfectly happy. No cleaning. No feeding. No car keys when they turn sixteen. All they need is 2 AA batteries every year or so. Now, my fish are way better than kids… Although, I will say that recently, I’ve been concerned that my fish might be trying to consummate their relationship. I flick the switch on and the orange fish immediate sticks his nose in the red fish’s ass… It’s not pretty. I may have to separate them, before I end up with lots of little mechanical fish…