Thank God, I'm Not the Only One...

To wrap up the first week of Birthdaypalooza Month here at SNOTW, we have a wonderful guest post from Janet! Janet usually makes her home over at From the Planet of Janet, but she was nice enough to agree to relive some birthday memories with us today.

Janet is an awesome mom to five kids, the youngest is her daughter Roo who is in high school now. I love Janet's blog partially because she writes a lot about the everyday things that make her laugh and cry, and the things you want to remember about being a parent. And sometimes, some you'd rather forget. But, c'est la vie, right? Also, it makes me feel better about my life that I am not the only one whose family dinner conversations inevitibly turn to poop, snot or other completely inappropriate topics!

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Rachael is having a baby.

Um. Duh.

So I have traveled here from my usual digs at From the Planet of Janet to help her celebrate the month of May -- a month of births and birthdays.

Birthdays are a little bit of a weirdness in my house. With five kids (Drummer Man, 29; Drama King, 26; Z-man, 20; J-bear, 19; and the Roo-girl, 15), there seems to ALWAYS be someone blowing out a candle and getting another year older.

And since they are mostly adults (or maybe just adultish), our traditional celebratory birthday dinner conversations are a little *blink blink* interesting.

The topics can range from tentacle porn to butt babies (they never survive) to stories of -- well -- poo.

And you must never ever EVER talk to me about vagina dentata. And although I admit that was not a birthday dinner, it WAS Mother's Day. Which makes it all kinds of wrong.

So it seemed only fitting to recount for Rachael's readers the moment that Planet birthday dinner posts were born.

The corn story.

Observe:

My birthday dinner in December of 2007 was at a local barbecue place that I am particularly fond of. The food was delicious, and the kids were ... well, reasonably well-behaved.

Until ...

The Drama King had a full ear of corn. He took a foil-wrapped pat of butter, opened the foil ... and proceeded to rhythmically rub it on the cob.

His older brother promptly fell on the floor in hysterics. Then that same older brother carefully pulled back the remaining husk on HIS ear of corn and began to systematically gnaw on it.

"Oh, really," the Drama King snorted. "Don't you think you should buy it dinner first?"

I don't think I have ever ever ever been able to look at an ear of corn again.

Nor could I go back to that restaurant after spewing barbecue sauce out of my nose.

We're classy like that.