Laundry Day

I know I'm the song lady (could it be the suppressed bard in me? ;) but I had another musical moment tonight. In a coda to my laundry post, we've now had a second opinion on our loud, dirty washer and the gentleman, in a charmingly thick Eastern European accent of indeterminate origin, said (and I'm paraphrasing here): "I could take your money, and a lot of it, but do yourself a favor and get a new machine."

So, our picaresque journey led us (not for the first time) tonight to Sear's, and a young man named Romeo, who was all alone on his balcony (I know, wrong way around) waiting for us to appear in the moonlight. David and I tag-teamed between Jarrah and negotiating the details of the water bill rebate on our environmentally-friendly, Consumer Reports-approved new Kenmore front-loader.

Jarrah was in rare form. She made me open 14 ovens (I counted) while repeating the same phrase: "Mmmm, what's for dinner?" When I showed her a catalog for garbage disposals and said "Wanna read a good book?" she nodded briskly, turned her face away, and began to back her bum in my general direction--the signal for "Sit your ass down, little mama, because I plan to enjoy this story in comfort." She moonwalked and break danced (as my former hip-hop teacher used to say, she "went to the floor") and brought me several armloads of plastic napkin rings from an undisclosed location. She also brought me a stack of folded Levi's, and a Tow Mater engineer's cap.

While I was replacing the purloined goods, I decided to show Jarrah how funny it is when Mommy runs backward, and then suddenly runs forward, the better to grab a hysterical little monkey and squeeze her, my, what big teeth we have. I was smothering her and roaring like a dinosaur at one point when I tuned in to a snippet of Whitney Houston song:

I get so emotional, baby
Every time I think of you
I get so emotional, baby
Ain't it shocking what love can do?

I sang a bit of this to Jarrah with some practically professional Paula Abdul-style choreography circa 1988, but my voice broke a little bit on "shocking." Which is surprising, see, because Whitney is right in my range. ;)