The Insider's guide to pregnancy

This post is going to be a little bit indelicate, so be sure to hide the women and children. Also, don't tell anyone where you've hidden them because that person could go and find them and you'd have ruined what really could have been a pretty good game of hide and go seek. Unless the women and children enjoy reading, then maybe it's best to keep an eye on them and maybe read them some choice passages that they might enjoy despite their age or gender.

Look, I had a recent incident in which a person stood in front of a large group of people and said something along the lines of, "Hide the women and children and also grandparents and other folks who are easily offended," and then proceeded to read something that was fairly offensive to me even though I am not a woman or a child or a grandparent. The passage was about a fairly graphic encounter of the sort that you'd really only want to read or hear if you were by yourself and even then you might start looking around your house and trying to scope out some good spots, like behind the bookshelf, or inside the old chest, to hide women and children in in case they were around while you were reading this passage. Then again, maybe you should just let them find their own hiding spots. At least the women, that is. Because in my experience, children are sometimes not as good at hiding themselves and should probably just hide with the women.

Question? Are you absolved of anything you read/say if you offer up that sort of caveat at the beginning? Or should you having to give that sort of caveat, hide the women and children, be a good indication that you probably shouldn't read/say what you thought you were going to. And that maybe it wasn't even worth it to make all those kids go looking for hiding places under folding chairs and making all the women, who are just hot and busy and tired and like worried about a grocery list and paying bills, find hiding places. Maybe you just shouldn't say it?

Question? Have you ever read Tristram Shandy? This is only slightly related to what this blog post is eventually going to be about, and it has very little to do with women and children. Mainly because women and children probably wouldn't enjoy a book like Tristram Shandy because it has so many digressions that they'd probably start wondering about places where they could hide themselves if someone was ever walking around and asking them to read Tristram Shandy.

Anyhow, the annoying part about Trirstram Shandy is that Laurence Sterne, who is neither a woman nor a child, and to my knowledge not an expert at hiding, never gets to the expressed point of the novel, which is really annoying, you just wish he'd get to this big moment that you've been promised. He just keeps going backwards, telling you story after story, digression after digression, kind of like a child sometimes does, where you just keep hoping that they'd get the point and stop meandering around wasting your time with this dumb story and that really it would probably just be better if they were hiding somewhere, perhaps with women, who probably could give them something to shut them up and stop that useless story.

Honestly, I was just giving you all that time in the previous paragraphs to hide your women and children. I was afraid that if I didn't write all these paragraphs that your women and children might not be in good spots, or they'd still be attempting to hide, which sometimes happens when kids play hide and go seek because they often cheat and turn around too early.

This brings to mind another thing: dids are always cheating at things. And sometimes you have to teach them a lesson by cheating yourself, and that is the lesson that cheating doesn't make you happier, but it does make you a winner. That's the sort of lesson that some people might say you might want to hide the women and children from, but I think that's just the sort of lesson that they need to learn.

I hope little Geoff found a good spot. He was sort of wedged between the book case and the wall, but he was only a foot or two away from me, and I could see him right away. And I said, "Hey buddy, can you find a better spot? Because I can see you from right here while I'm typing."

Patience is a virtue.

I'm not sure it's the same kind of virtue as say, hiding women and children from vikings, but it might be. Anyhow, the really exciting thing that....