Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies Part 3
If only she'd had an egg to practice on. . .
Chapter 11
Mal and Dawn at the Pikes. Oh, joy. Dawn’s handwriting is slightly smaller than usual because the designer is screwing with my head. Dawn says the Pikes liked her egg, and Mal “says,” darkly, “Lucky for him.” Also, lucky the Pike parents are “tolerant” and don’t mind their kids wasting a dozen eggs. That’s one word for it.
Mary Anne tells us the Pike parents are at SES parents night (in the spring? Shouldn’t that be in the fall when you meet the teachers?) and they have to stay ALL NIGHT because they have so many kids. On the other hand, don’t they probably know all the teachers by now? Whatever.
Dawn’s egg makes his first ever appearance, and I’d kind of like to know what’s up with that. It’s one thing for Claud’s egg to be conveniently with his “dad” since we’ve actually only seen her once in this whole damn book, but there’s been a lot of Dawn. Maybe she shouldn’t whine so much about her “husband,” since he appears to be doing all the work. Said husband is named Aaron Albright, and all we learn is that Dawn, for some reason, doesn’t like him, and has acted out her resentment by housing their child in a Kleenex box lined with paper towels. First off, way to be green, Dawn, you flaming hypocrite. Secondly, much as I mocked Izzy Thomas-Gray (EGG)’s “environment,” a kleenex box has to be about the stupidest way to carry an egg around, since an egg actually could fall out of that. (I assume it’s the rectangle kind with a big scoop over the top and sides, not the pop-up tissue kind you would have to drop an egg in.) Thirdly, I love the implication that Dawn neglects her egg because she hates her “husband.” Also, said husband named the egg “Skip,” which Dawn spends a great deal of time complaining about and making clear she had nothing to do with. On the one hand, I agree Skip is a pretty weak name, and Douglas is better; on the other hand, if Aaron Albright is doing practically the whole project himself, he should be able to name the damn thing Skip or Bacon or High-Fructose Corn Syrup or Fuck This Project, as far as I’m concerned.
At the Pikes’, poor Mal is trying to make the triplets help her clean up the kitchen, because why should their parents insist that they do any chores when they have Mal-erella around? Adam insists washing dishes is girls’ work, and Mal correctly calls him out on this bullshit, but “luckily” Dawn comes in with her egg and Adam is saved from the emasculating prospect of losing the argument and having to help wash dishes. Ann’s “feminism” is so fucked-up. (Also, Mal "wins" by pointing out she can do everything Adam cited as boys’ work, including mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and cleaning gutters, which makes me think in the Pike household there is really just “ Mallory’s work.")
Dawn explains about Modern Living and the Pike kids are so fascinated they barely notice when the parents leave. How is that different from any other job at the Pike house? They ask if they have to call her Mrs. Albright, and Dawn soapboxes a bit about how she will never change her name, which is fine and all, but really awkwardly and ham-fistedly stuck in. (LOL, do you think Dawn would be offended by “ham-fisted”? GOOD.)
Byron points out the baby is naked, and this somehow leads to all the Pike kids pairing off as husbands and wives to raise young'uns.
Adam refuses, leaving the pairs as Byron/Vanessa, Jordan/Margo, and Nicky/Claire, and they run off to “adopt babies” from refrigerator. Byron wheedles Mal into letting each couple have two egg babies, with one left over.
Margo says snobbishly that HER children will not live in a Kleenex box (burn on Dawn) and takes them to her dollhouse. Nicky and Claire put their eggs in egg cups shaped like cross-legged clown feet, which is something I would not want to see at the breakfast table.
Vanessa tries to color clothes on her egg and breaks it, and gets very upset when Dawn and Mal are more preoccupied with cleaning up the egg yolk. They badger Mal into giving up the last remaining egg (Dawn is useless) and Nicky invites them to a “restaurant” where the specials all are egg dishes. “The Pike kids could make anything fun.” Including cannibalism and incest, I guess.
This chapter didn’t do much for the throbbing pain I have behind my left eye, though,
Chapter 12
“I want a divorce.” Ann, stop trying to begin chapters with misleading dialogue. You don’t have the wacky Lerangis flair to pull it off.
Of course, we are back in Modern Living class, and Mary Anne muses just how wild and crazy this class is. “What was typical about a class in which students had to get married and care for egg-babies?” If that wasn’t wacky enough, Mrs. Boyden is (gasp!) wearing jeans and sitting ON her desk, not behind it! Will the madness ever end?
She invites the kids to tell her how they are doing as couples, which is a) creepy, b) a disaster in the making and c) makes me wonder what they’ve actually been doing in class the last three weeks. Anyway, it’s Shawna who wants a divorce from her “husband” Miles, because “it’s just not working out.” The kids in the class laugh because this sounds like “lines from a soap opera.” Even the soap operas in Stoneybrook suck, I guess. It’s not like she said she wanted a divorce because she found out he was sleeping with her twin sister as part of a plot to embezzle from her father’s company.
Of course, Mary Anne and Logan don’t laugh; they stare at each other in pained recognition. “If something was wrong between Shawna and Miles, I could understand it. Things happened.” For fucks sake.
Mrs. Boyden solemnly asks what the problem is, and Shawna complains that she’s the one doing all the work, carrying “the e--our baby.” Mary Anne quietly judges them for not naming their “child.” I twitch because while I spent most of my childhood doing the bulk of group project work, I still don’t see what is so labor-intensive here as to cause all this angst. You carry a basket. Big whoop.
Mrs. Boyden creepily locks eyes with Shawna and demands to know whether she asked Miles for help or "just expected him to.” Miles yells out that Shawna expects him to be a mind-reader who is supposed to know everything she thinks or wants, so now we get the inappropriate faux-marital therapy part of the class, I guess.
Mrs. Boyden tells Miles to be quiet until Shawna is done speaking. Shawna says she shouldn’t have to ask Miles to do everything, and Mrs. Boyden asks if he’s ever taken care of a baby before.
Or, for FUCK’S sake. I don’t even know where to begin. With the point that taking care of a living human infant is pretty irrelevant to dragging around an egg? With the sexist assumption that a thirteen-year-old girl is either more likely to have experience with an infant, or be more willing/able/socially mandated to suck it up and do the work anyway? With the point that forcing adult romantic relationship conventions on thirteen-year-olds is inappropriate and gross? Because this might be a thing that happens in real life, where it’s often considered socially acceptable and God help us, cute, for men to be incompetent at childcare and other domestic activities, it has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING IN THIS CLASS, and acting like poor Miles is a victim because Shawna isn’t spelling out that some days he should carry around the fucking egg is sexist, obnoxious, and enraging. Of course, considering Ann’s “feminism” thinks men deserve applause for paying child support and deigning to watch their own children one day a year, if that, why am I surprised?
(The Newsroom just came on, a show I keep watching because it makes me angry with rage. It’s like I’m Kristy with cafeteria food with this show. So if I get particularly ranting, it might be static from that.)
Shawna says that regardless of Miles’s lack of experience and precious masculine fee-fees, she’s still stuck dragging around the egg and missed half of gym keeping it out of the sun. And while I’m with her in theory, I would have loved to miss half of gym, and seriously, how much does the sun move during a class period?
(hey, in the first 30 seconds of The Newsroom we already have a shitty joke using misogyny for laughs. What fun!)
Miles gets his turn to speak, and Mary Anne tunes him to muse judgmentally about how Miles and Shawna don’t love their egg, haven’t named it, and consider it a pain in the neck. But when Shawna forgot it that morning, she went back for it, which to MA proves that she and her classmates do actually feel married and like parents. Um, no. It proves Shawna didn’t want to fail the class by showing up with no egg. And it proves, once again, you are a self-aggrandizing moron. Which is probably why Mrs. Boyden is turning out to one of MA’s “favorite teachers”; she’s feeding the BSC ego. Also, perhaps instead of fake marriage and parenting, we could work on vocabulary, since neither MA nor Ann know that “disinterested” is not the same as “uninterested.”
Miles says he doesn’t really have time for this project, but he wouldn’t, “you know, abandon a kid,” and he would take the egg if Shawna gave it to him.
Shawna “explodes” into tears and asks why he hasn’t ever asked for the egg, and the kids who thought “it’s just not working out,” was hilarious are stunned into silence. Miles mumbles he doesn’t know and Shawna turns her head away in disgust.
Gentle Logan pokes sensitive Mary Anne, who turns, expecting her “husband” to have something catty to say about Shawna. Instead he points to two kids, Kevin and Angela in the back of the room who are holding hands, and Angela is crying. Mrs. Boyden hands Angela a box of Kleenex, and MA tells us dramatically that she was completely unprepared for Angela’s Surprising Announcement; she thought Angela was just crying because of the heartbreak of seeing Miles and Shawna’s “marriage” unravel. Instead, Angela announces they lost their baby.
Mary Anne claims she “nearly died.” Shut up, Mary Anne. Apparently Kevin and Angela took their egg to the park in a cookie tin, and it escaped. No, I don’t know. Except possibly the demon parasites decided the students of SMS were too stupid to serve as slave labor and cut their losses. Angela cries and blames herself for being irresponsible, and seriously, this class gives me the creeps.
The class is quiet and Mary Anne gives a melodramatic speech about how they are all thinking the same thing in the blink of an eye, anything can happen to a child, and these things happen all the time. I hope a few of them at least are thinking about lunch, or whether their moms will let them dye their hair blue, or how stupid this whole class is.
Mrs. Boyden asks if they are worried about their grade, which MA deems insensitive, even though Kevin admits he’s a little concerned, you know, because men aren’t as naturally nurturing or some bullshit. Mrs. Boyden says ambiguously that they still owe her a paper and “some aspects” of the assignment will now change. If she’s going to make them write a paper about the five steps of grieving their egg baby, that’s disgusting, and frankly kind of offensive.
(So, in my ninth grade biology class, for reasons that pass understanding, we had to do a whole project about anencephaly, culminating in a roleplay in which they brought in senior members of the drama club to play parents who were about to be told by two of us, elected by the class, playing OB/GYNs informing them their unborn child was anencephalic. To this day I have no idea what the hell the point of this was, except that I learned how deeply and viciously judgy my classmates were about even the possibility of aborting a non-viable pregnancy. I got elected to be one of the doctors (apparently I have a very soothing voice) and to this day I feel gross about participating in it. And honestly, I wonder if that teacher still does that unit, and if eventually she’s going to run slap bang into a family who has actually gone through this and get her ass handed to her.)
Mrs. Boyden attempts to illicit more awkward emotional outburst, and Mary Anne, who recently can’t even discuss a book she loves with classmates she doesn’t know, is totally ready to spill all the dirt about her problems with her real life boyfriend, and how they, too, almost lost their baby when Sammie the Egg tried to escape in the movie theater. Instead, some kid with the suspiciously-ethnic name “Tarik,” says he can’t finish the project; he plays two sports and has an after-school job (Stoneybrook, land of child labor) and his parents are getting divorced and his mom needs help, and that’s legitimately a lot of crap for a thirteen-year-old without this asinine assignment. Mrs. Boyden asks if he’s saying he isn’t capable of taking care of a child at this time in his life, and if I were in the class, shy mouse alula would have had trouble not yelling out “Well, DUH!” Mrs. Boyden says there are no “right or wrong” answers and they’ll work something out.
After class, Logan and Mary Anne look at Sammie in her basket and say they aren’t the only ones having problems. MA says most parents probably argue about how to raise their children, and Logan says parents fight about other things, too, and reports his parents had a “loud talk” about money at 2 a.m. But after this touching confidence, he scoops up the basket again and refuses to give it to Mary Anne, who cries and says accidents happen, and uses Kevin and Angela as an experience, and then runs out of the room, telling us she and Logan have a long way to go to reconcile their differences. There’s probably a way I could care less about this, but I’m hard-pressed to name it.
Chapter 13
Mary Anne is back at the Salems, with Sammie still in Logan’s clutches. She comments to Kristy that it will be a piece of cake to only have two babies to care for, and the girls takes the opportunity to slag on Jackie Rodowsky as being way harder to sit for. That schadenfreude is going to taste sweet.
Mary Anne rings the doorbell, which for whatever reasons does not wake the babies, and is greeted by Mrs. Salem looking red-eyed and saggy. Mrs. Salem says she’s exhausted, but she absolutely must go to this meeting of the Small Animal Rescue League. My parents have served on a lot of charitable boards, and none of them regularly met in the mid-afternoon; if they were mostly SAHMs, they met in the morning when school-age kids were in school, or else in the evening. Maybe K. Ron has paid off all the local organizations to have their meetings at the most inconvenient times to keep the calls rolling in.
Mary Anne dithers over whether she should ask if Mrs. Salem is okay, because it’s one thing for a kid to privately judge a mother of infant twins for being tired, but it might be rude to ASK about it. But she does, and Mrs. Salem says the twins are “changing their schedule,” not sleeping though the night anymore, and she never knows what to expect. Well, Mrs. Salem, you might expect TEETHING.
Also, as one from a line of difficult-but-charming babies, I’m always a little amazed by any baby that follows a reliable schedule. Anyway, she says the babies went down for their naps later than usual, so Mary Anne will have some time to do homework, probably, and zips off for Small Animal Rescue Time.
Mary Anne settles in with juice and a bran muffin and her English homework, reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” despite the fact that there’s a whole book way way down the pike based on her studying Poe. Also, she says it’s super scary, and I’ve always thought that was one of the least scary Poe stories, as it doesn’t involve incest, immurement, necrophilia, or letting rats crawl all over your body. Also, it’s part of a pretty boss Lisa-centric episode of The Simpsons.
Anyway, she reads and hears a “squeak,” which causes her to spill the juice and yell “Darn it!” as she mops up without checking on the squeak or remembering the babies until Ricky wails from upstairs, causing her to throw her book into a bowl of fruit. Babies crying as the Good Lord intended are not at fault for you being a basket case, MA. Also, she claims to be able to tell Ricky’s cries from Rose, which I am skeptical of. (I mean, not that their parents couldn’t tell them apart, but a sitter who finds their crying to be so shocking and appalling.)
Six-month-old Ricky is sitting up by himself in his crib, crying, and MA picks him up and asks what’s wrong before realizing he might wake Rose, so she carries him to the kitchen. Diaper is dry, he doesn’t want a bottle, he cries and DROOLS, because he is teething.
She thinks she hears Rose whimpering and goes up to check, but Ricky gets louder, so she runs back downstairs. She realizes Ricky quiets down to whimpering as long as she keeps moving, but screams if she stops. Yup, they’ll do that. Mary Anne figures he needs a walk in the stroller, but she can’t leave Rose; she can’t even check on Rose with Ricky because he’ll wake her, and “if I left him strapped in his high chair or his infant seat, he’d begin the awful, ear-shattering, choking screaming.” Damn right.
Mary Anne says, and I quote:
I was desperate.
I phoned my sister.
Hahahaha. She begs Dawn to come over, saying she has never heard such screaming, or seen such drooling, and FINALLY Dawn suggests Ricky might be teething and tells MA to look for one of those “hard crackers.”
Mary Anne finds a biscuit in the cupboard and gives it to him, and he starts gumming it madly. Wouldn’t a teething ring make a lot more sense for being mobile? Whatever. They agree that Dawn should take Ricky in case Mrs. Salem gets home early, and Mary Anne does laps until Dawn brings the stroller to the stoop and they pop him in, and Dawn sets off without strapping him in or anything. Considering he can lean out far enough to pick flowers, that seems unwise.
Mary Anne plops down in an armchair when Rose starts to cry, and MA actually has the nerve to say “Oh, no. Not again.” She then realizes that she has no stroller and when she looks outside, Dawn and Ricky are out of sight. “Double darn.” Because by crying in pain as sharp teeth push through her inflamed guns, Rose has ceded her right to be called by name, Mary Anne grumbles about having to walk around carrying “Crying Baby Number Two,” until Dawn gets back and then they walk them both in the stroller until Mrs. Salem comes home. Mary Anne whines she’d rather not write about this in the notebook. Wah, wah, wah. I guarantee the babies were unhappier than you. Try walking laps like that all day AND all night for a few days and maybe I’ll have some sympathy for you, you self-righteous, selfish twit.
Chapter 14
Everyone at Ye Olde Haunted Farmhouse is exhausted, Richard and Sharon from actual work and Dawn and Mary Anne from their “taxing” afternoon. The phone rings and they all yell for someone else to answer it, and no one does, and then Dawn whines it could have been important, like maybe they inherited an island or something, so when it rings again a few minutes later, they all run for it. But it’s just Logan.
Logan says he’s calling because Sammie just took her first steps, but luckily he caught it all on videotape, and instead of worrying about this further break from reality, MA interprets this as a gesture of reconciliation. Of course, if we were in the mode of the rest of the book, shouldn’t she be outraged that Logan kept their “child” from her so long it became mobile, than called to rub it in?
He asks about the twins and she says she couldn’t have handled Sammie that day; as it was she had to call Dawn and Logan is shocked! to hear her say she couldn’t handle a sitting job, and she says sagely it’s different when babies are involved. A LESSON IS BEING LEARNED, GUYS.
Logan apologizes for “arguing,” although not for being a controlling, self-righteous dick, and Mary Anne says it’s because Mrs. Boyden is asking them to do something really difficult. She says she’s glad Mrs. Boyden didn’t give them “real” babies, and I wonder seriously if she thinks that was a possibility. This class really is a cult. Logan says he and his siblings are expensive, citing Hunter’s latest bill for a check-up and tests. Mary Anne says she never thought about “stuff like what to do if you can’t find a baby-sitter. Or if you and your husband couldn’t agree on how to raise a baby.” Good to see your priorities are as wacked as ever, MA.
Logan says it’s probably easier when you are older, MA points out all the people they know with divorced parents. and Logan says it still must be easier if you wait at least until “after college or something” and says they couldn’t get married now. No shit.
Mary Anne agrees, squeaking she wants to enjoy being thirteen and not worrying about all those things she’ll have time to worry about when she’s “twenty-two” or something. I’m still having, like, a third-life crisis from my birthday earlier this month, so I don’t know whether to laugh bitterly or cry that I’m THIRTY-TWO and have no husband or baby or satisfying career.
Anyway. Mary Anne says she likes Logan, but she’s not ready to be a wife, and this is treated like a brilliant epiphany and not, you know basic common fucking sense. They talk stiltedly about what to write in their paper about what they learned about themselves as individuals and as parts of couples blah blah and then Logan says he’ll actually miss Sammie. I’m sure your mom would give you an egg to carry around, Logan. Although it might make your dad get going on that boarding school plan. They ponder what Mrs. Boyden will do with the eggs and decide it’s better not to do and say “love you,” before hanging up. Hmmm.
Mary Anne goes to Dawn’s room and as a symbol of her growth, tells Dawn to throw out the Kumbel catalog, since spending the afternoon with a teething baby has made them rethink nagging their parents to spawn so they can buy cute nursery furniture. Because they are asshats, they spin it as realizing their parents are too old and weak and decrepit to deal with teething and toilet-training and night-time feedings and taking a kid to Disney World in ten years, when Dawn and Mary Anne will be far too adult to help. Whatever, if it shuts them up.
They wonder what their imaginary Schafer-Spier sibling would have looked like, but agree it wasn’t meant to be. Deep.
Chapter 15
The last day of Modern Living! Next week they start health class, which sounds boring, but Miles “tries to look on the bright side” by asking if that includes sex education. Logan laughs, MA blushes, I still wonder why you would do the ”baby” course before the “how is babby formed” course.
(The highlight of my sex ed class was a video built entirely on the premise that premarital sex is like a sketchy carnival. It LOOKS really shiny and cool and exciting, but underneath is a steaming cesspool of creepy clowns, unsafe rides manned by stoned teenagers, rigged games, and unsanitary food prep. It definitely makes me see Kristy and the Mother’s Day Surprise in a new light.)
Logan and Mary Anne wrote a fucking 32-page, single-spaced paper for this class. Jesus Christ. You couldn’t pay me to read that. Seriously, if I got that as part of an editing gig, I would send it right back. My master’s thesis wasn’t ALLOWED to be that long, for God’s sake.
Mrs. Boyden tells them they all “survived” as married couples, and congratulates them on their honesty in discussing “heavy issues” and “personal feelings.” Indeed, arguably inappropriately and manipulatively. Also, when I was doing my aforementioned masters’, I took a class dealing with memoirs, and we had an in-class agreement about keeping work discussed in class confidential because of those “heavy issues.” It’s kind of horrifying to force kids into that kind of situation without any similar strictures.
She also congratulates them on their ability to “suspend disbelief,” because by all means, learning to act delusionally, irrationally, and in contrived circumstances with no regard for reality is the best preparation for adulthood. I actually don’t even know how much of that is me being bitter.
Anyway. They have to write a short in-class essay saying good-bye to their eggs, who are now 21 years old, “finished with their schooling,” and ready to lead lives of their own. Mary Anne feels fucking tearful over her EGG not needing them anymore. She will be a truly terrifying mother.
There’s more creepy ambiguity about how they will leave their eggs behind, and Mrs. Boyden will do. . .something with them the students can’t bear to think about. They’ve been unrefrigerated for a month, I’d point out. Disgusting.
They send Sammie off to NYC, of course, to work as an editorial assistant, and I laugh even more bitterly that Sammie has a job I used to want. Logan whines about letting their “baby” move to dangerous NYC, and Mary Anne shows her spine, I guess, by insisting. Logan tells Sammie she’s been a real good egg, and Mary Anne chalks this up to men having trouble expressing their emotions.
Later, at the BSC meeting, the sitters celebrate their freedom from egg-parenthood, especially Stacey. Someone named “Jessie” runs in, and Kristy is too distraught over her child growing up to have this trespasser forcibly ejected. Anyway, they explain the denouement of Modern Living to Mal and this Jessie-person (her name is spelled wrong this whole section--I guess Sammie got started early). Stacey’s egg Bobby is teaching high school history, Dawn’s is in medical school, Claudia’s is becoming a famous artist “naturally,” (can I squeeze in an egg tempera joke at the last minute?) and Izzy Thomas-Gray is a mechanic in Stamford who has to visit his mother every Sunday. Kristy will be an even more terrifying mother.
Mary Anne says she COULD raise a baby right now if she absolutely had to; she just doesn’t want to. Um, not based on your jobs for the Salems, when you threw a fit over babies being fussy for a few hours. Stacey jokes Richard isn’t ready to be a grandfather, and good God, it might kill him. Mary Anne gets all offended that Stacey isn’t taking her revelation seriously, and Mary Anne demands they admit they couldn’t be a parent right now, despite the fact that she JUST SAID SHE COULD. Was Sammie drunk when she edited this? Mary Anne says she could only raise a baby if Richard and Sharon and Dawn helped her, so what the hell was this conversation about?
They all agree they do want kids some day, like when they are 25 or 30 or even 40, which causes Mary Anne to wrinkle her nose and say that’s too old; she wants her babies when she’s 25. Best-laid plans, Mary Anne. (My teeth start grinding because I’m terrified my window is closing, like, by the minute.) Mal wants eight children, like her mother, (o rly?) and Stacey says wisely it’s probably best she can’t have them all at once in case she changes her mind. The mysterious Jessie says she wants a daughter named Mary Rose, which is Rosie Wilder’s real name, oddly. And then the phone rings and the eggs are never spoken of again.
At home, Dawn and Mary Anne start fixing dinner, and wonder if they’ll ever be able to eat eggs again. Mary Anne has recovered at least enough to eat french toast by her next book, iirc, if only in the cause of passive-aggressively bugging Dawn. They congratulate themselves on failing to convince their parents to procreate before they learned the Valuable Lessons of Modern Living, because what a wacky mishap that would be if Sharon got knocked up and then they changed their minds!
Richard and Sharon come in and Richard’s fine-tuned lawyer ears hear the word “pregnant” and he suspiciously asks who’s having a baby. Mary Anne says no one, “thank goodness,” and they sit down in the dining room to an odd sounding meal consisting of salad, brown bread, a Chinese vegetable dish, and vegetable patties.
Sharon says that she and Richard have been thinking about the girls’ wish for a baby, and Dawn and Mary Anne both freak out, fretting about why their parents LISTEN to them, GAWD. But because Sharon and Richard are marginally less moronic than much of Stoneybrook, they haven’t made a major life decision on the whims of two bratty teenagers. Instead, they are offering a second pet.
But Dawn hates animals, and Mary Anne couldn’t devote herself fully to two cats, so they decline. Richard is surprised, and Mary Anne says they might have jumped at another pet if not for Modern Living. Richard asks “Modern Living?” and seriously, you guys, I just gave you points for being moderately competent parents. You didn’t ask once what the hell was up with the eggs?
But really, it’s all just a set up for Mary Anne to send us out on a sitcom-esque quip, “Yeah, Dad, you have no idea how hard it is to be a parent!” Cue laugh track, cue Richard not pointing out that isn’t so much cute as fucking rude, cue me smacking her through the book.
And that’s it! I hope we all learned some valuable lessons. Are you ready for the final exam?
- True or False. Eggs are babies.
- The most important part of caring for infants is: a) supervising them at all times, b) maintaining age-appropriate expectations, c) dressing them up like little dollies
- If you take an egg to the movies and discover halfway through the show it has disappeared from its basket, you should a) panic and scream loudly, b) consider your life and your choices, c) call Buffy, because clearly your egg is a demon parasite
- The central theme of this book was a) babies are hard work, b) Mary Anne is a self-absorbed twit, c) Ann is batshit insane, d) all of the above
- True or False. Eggs are babies.