My kids

With the birth of two new babies amongst my Starbucks coworkers, we began a little photo display on the front of one of our registers. Customers love it. Over time, many customers inquired which kid was mine. Some, when they heard my reply, would follow it with, "Well, when's your turn?" It's not that this little exchange irritated me, as much as I realized I had a creative solution to it. So I began posting pictures of my own kids...

I recently took a trip to visit my kids at the farm. Well, by kids I mean adopted kids, Bert and Ernie, twin Alpine dairy goats. Unfortunately, I cannot take these kids home to Ballard, because for one, the farm would not look kindly on kid-napping, and two, they would eat the inside of my apartment to smithereens. Kids will do that, or so I hear. So, I brought Mom with me on this particular visit, because she, like any good grandma, wants to bond with her grandkids. We were both anticipating the visit, but when we arrived, the kids were out to pasture and didn't pay us much attention. We waved and hollered, cajoled and whistled and waited; still, the kids ignored us. It appeared we'd come at an inconvenient time.

Bert and Ernie dismissed us, but in their absence, another kid whose name I don't know, came shuffling quietly over to us beside the fence. [On a side note, visiting the kids does have a bit of a prison visit feel to it, with the wire fence and all between us, but I try to overlook that.] This kid had fairer hair and squinty green eyes that wouldn't look directly at us. Kind of a nervous kid, I'd say. I called to the kid and reached my fingers just far enough to scratch the kid's side. I continued scratching the nervous kid's tummy, and when I commenced with the petting, the kid took one nonchalant step closer to the fence. Now I could reach the kid's nose. So I scratched and petted him on his nose and behind his ears and atop his head, without him so much blinking one of his beady little eyes. And when I paused an extra long pause - he scooted even closer to the fence. We continued this little dance until said kid was pressed against the fence. This kid, so quiet and sad and socially awkward, with each "meehhh"-less movement closer to the fence seemed to be shouting, "pick me, pick me!" What could I do? I melted.

So while I didn't exactly get to see my kids up close this visit, I did adopt another kid, and that made me very happy. Very happy, indeed. After all, as the saying goes, "no goat, no glory."