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My Superpower

Today Amanda was reading at the restaurant where we ate lunch.  I told her it was time to go and she looked around for a bookmark.  She picked up the ketchup packet and placed it delicately between the pages of her book...

Immediately I was besieged by visions of books with ketchup stains all over the pages, goopy ketchup all over Amanda's face and hands, napkins failing to contain all the mess... "No no no no no!" I said, and then (and only then) Amanda saw what the problem was. 

I always feel like Cassandra standing at the gates of Troy before the Trojan War, foretelling doom and gloom.  I am constantly warning children that if they don't eat they will be hungry during errands, if they don't drink they will get migraines, if they don't put away their shoes they will not be able to find them later, if they carry that down the stairs that way they will fall, and so on.  

It is interesting, because biologically speaking their fore brains are not as well developed as they will be in 15-20 years.   Compared with them I really do have a superpower. Some things I have experienced, for example, I know not to put the cookie cooling racks over the stove burners (too many crumbs, too hard to clean up).  Some things, like the ketchup, I can only imagine (although I seem to remember that Henry Reed used an earthworm as a bookmark one time).  But I really do have the power to see detailed visions of the disasters following from the actions of my children.  Now, if only they were more useful.

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