“How’s New Baby Life?”
I was at home making dinner for Master Pravus. He was going to be home from the pharmacy any minute, and then we were going to run out and go in search of that viral ghost rug everyone’s looking for. We thought it might be a little bit of a fun distraction with all the crazy house stuff going on. There haven’t been many trips for anything exciting in months. We would have to pack the rug immediately for our new house, but our last “frivolous excursion” was literally almost a month ago!
It didn’t really seem too frivolous either, because we have to tear out all our carpet for the house showing, so at least if we found it we’d have a carpet for the new place, we reasoned. (Gosh excursions are hard to come by right this very moment!)
On the way back from the pharmacy, Master Pravus called me on the phone because he was bursting to tell me about the interaction he had just had with one of the neighbors.
One of the neighbors who lives somewhat near us, (we’ll call him Pops) is someone Master Pravus gets along with really well. Actually, he’s the only person from that particular house that Master Pravus and me really get along with, and if we see him out in public or if we’re on our porch and he’s out on his, we’ll have a conversation while shouting porch-to-porch. It’s not a terribly long conversation generally.. Because COVID.. But. We’re jovial.
He’s always outside smoking and gardening and he’s really spruced up his lawn a lot. Actually, we were lamenting the fact that we weren’t able to run our garden this year, because I have black rose and black sunflower seeds that I’ve been DYING to plant, and he literally planted a shitfuckle of giant sunflowers, and we would have been the perfect opposite houses. But anyway, that’s a little bit of a digression. NEXT YEAR I AM MAKING THE BEST BLACK GARDEN YOU EVER SAW! (Or else I’mma try and wind up with a pile of weeds. Hahaha).
So anyways while Master Pravus was in line at the pharmacy, he swears he sees Pops standing in line to get his COVID shot (good for him!) and didn’t wanna disturb him or anything because it’s two separate lines. One for vaccines, and one for prescriptions. He was in a hurry too because it took him over an hour to reach the pharmacy and ordinarily it’s a twenty minute ride down, that’s kind of ludicrous.
Blame the traffic though because there was an accident. Ugh. So he goes back to paying attention to the lines, you know. Trying to get in and out so we can go on our fun little spontaneous outing. After all, we almost never do anything fun lately, and least of all during the week! He also wasn’t totally 100% sure it was Pops. He was pretty sure, but he didn’t want to be wrong, call out Pops’ name and then be wrong in the middle of a busy pharmacy where they were both obviously waiting in separate lines.
So Master Pravus goes back to waiting for the prescriptions and suddenly he hears someone we don’t get along with as well as Pops. We’re going to call her Marigold. Marigold yells in her typically obnoxious voice (she’s so loud we can hear her yelling all day long from inside her own house!):
“HEY NEIGHBOR! HOW’S NEW BABY LIFE TREATING YOU?”
At that point he knew it had to have been Pops in the line after all since he lives with Marigold, and Master Pravus whips his head around so fast he could have gotten whiplash. >.<
“Imsorrywhat?!”
“My kids told me you have a new baby! Congratulations to you and your wife whatablessingfromthelord!”
And he started laughing his ass off at this point in the phone call, explaining this to me. I was so confused. I mean. What? Just. How? Children don’t come anywhere near our house.
“But I’m CHILDFREE! HAPPILY! For my entire existence! >.<“
“I know! I know!”
Then he goes:
“Marigold said that her kids said she saw us both with a kid over at our place!”
And I was just flabbergasted! What? When! How? And I thought about it for a second, and I realized that since most of the stuffed animals are packed for the move, I had been favoring Griswald on our outings to the store and such. The thing is though- Griswald is tiny. He’s a pluffie.. He’s only a little bigger than a hand. But he’s in a little suit kind of like a baby, I guess! Oh my gosh! The ten year old next door saw him, and somehow thought that he was a child?! He literally wears bee antenna! Bahaha, and he’s tiny and soft. Monstrous, with black sparkly wings. I mean:
Master Pravus in the store hadn’t figured it out yet- and he looked back at Marigold confused as heck. Apparently she thought we were making room for Baby because she kept seeing us giving away furniture and things that she had thought would be dangerous if you had a child. (We had to give away my special sand turtle! I still love it, but travelling with it across the continent didn’t make a lot of sense. Sorry, Magical Sand Turtle. I’ll have to get another one after the move!) Master Pravus reiterated that uh.. Sorry. We don’t have any children. Not now, not later. Not ever. And Marigold playfully said she’d be murdering her child later for making her look stupid. Ha. >.<
We’re friendly with Pops, but we hadn’t told him we’re moving yet. Just given him a couple things like the fire pit and they’ve seen us put out a couple bookshelf and things. So watching us thin out the house and not asking us why (and us not really volunteering, because we’re really not the type to talk about ourselves in person much) it was really awkward!
We finished laughing about the absurdity of thinking that one of my little pluffie stuffies was a real human being baby and we hung up the phone while I finished getting ready to go out. Master Pravus came home, and we left the house. We did a little bit of a shuffle at the door (as we usually do) because I had to ask Master Pravus to hold Griswald for a minute while I was adjusting my phone, tea and my feeding tube backpack for my walk to the car. I though about it for a minute. Then he handed Griswald back to me and I said:
“Maybe it’s because sometimes YOU carry him too!”
Master Pravus laughed. We both shrugged. The next door child looked over at us like:
“That’s a baby though! I saw them with the baby again, didn’t I?!”
Maybe it wasn’t so much that I carry around a stuffed animal everywhere I go, and that this little monstrous bundle of joy looks kind of like the world’s smallest preemie. I guess seeing Master Pravus with him could be a little confusing to a child, if that child’s father wasn’t secure enough in his manhood to hold a toy for five seconds on the way to the car, or something.
We didn’t manage to find the spooky rug. But look at these (xxx) ghost socks I got! I never wanna take them off:
*Neighbor’s name randomly chosen from a name randomizer. Not neighbor’s real name. For obvious reasons.
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