The stork is paying a visit to a Strevel home soon!

I have only just been authorized to announce to the world, (at least, the part of the world that hasn't already heard, which isn't a large part,) that my big brother, Joseph, and his wife, Andrea, are expecting their second baby. Yay! So, look out for Mr. Stork winging his way to New Albany, MS in about eight months.

Speaking of which, has that ever bothered anyone else? Those pictures of the gangly, awkward birds with the strings on which the babies' lives depend carelessly twisted 'round their beaks, transporting delicate infants whose toes and hands and sometimes very heads can be seen peeking from the swing? Yeah. That bothers me. Who on earth came up with that idea? Storks? How random can you get? And how unsafe? Also, you know how in the movies and books the storks often fly the baby to the wrong house? And look at a map while they're flying with the baby? Good grief! Oh, yeah, let's feed that to our innocent kids.

Small child: "How did I get here, Mommy?"

Ridiculous Mommy: "Oh, a clumsy white bird who has problems following directions brought you here in a loose sheet he held in his beak."

I guess I can understand not needing to go into a lot of detail about birth to small children, but how on this good green earth did storks get saddled with the delivery? You could at least pick a reliable bird without super long legs, (which just have to mess with the bird's flight pattern,) and give your kids the assurance that they arrived with little danger. Or, you could just not lie at all. Why bring storks into it?

You may be rolling your eyes at me, but someone, somewhere, sometime, had to have started that erroneous tale. Was she an inmate of an insane asylum? Someone with a really, really twisted sense of humour? I'm curious. Maybe I'll look it up on Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia is always reliable.



Anyway... Joseph, Andrea, and dearest Charlie: I am so, so excited about the baby! I can't wait to hold her, (or him, of course, but I'm just going to call it "her" for convenience,) and kiss and cuddle and love her. Actually, I already love her. Very much.

Congratulations.



p.s. If you want, go here to see where my stork misgivings began. Do you see how they just toss the bundles out of their beaks a looong way from the ground and leave them to the mercies of parachutes? Dude, those parachutes malfunction sometimes!