When you just can't let something go

We had fettuccine Alfredo with spinach for dinner tonight. It is so good. It is sooo rich... complete with three sticks of butter and four cups of cream, not to mention the 8+ ounces of grated Romano. Did I mention how good it was? We add spinach because that seems to help balance out the artery-clogging properties a bit. ... Maybe? Probably not, but it sure tastes good. 

At the end of dinner, as L. was finishing a large portion of seconds, she announced, "This dinner makes me feel tired and sluggish." No one disagreed with her. It tastes good, but eat too much and you definitely feel a bit of regret. As she asked to be excused from the table after dinner, 'accused' accidentally came out instead of 'excused'. G. pounced on it immediately and there was some funny word play between them for a moment or two. 

All of this brought me immediately back to that study which was purported to prove that younger children of large families would suffer and that this was shown most clearly in their impaired vocabulary. Yes, I am still harping on this. Ask my family, I harp on it a lot more to them than I do here. Count your blessings. 

I guess the real question is why I continue to feel the need to harp on it. My children are clearly not suffering from any deficit of vocabulary. In full disclosure though, if anyone tries to quiz them on their vocabularies, they will become mute and proceed the incinerate the questioner with death glares. If that was your only interaction with them, you might be questioning a lot more than just their vocabularies. (The moral of this little story is just don't quiz children.)

I had started to write out why this still bothers me, because it obviously does. When I went back and found past posts on this (yes, plural), I realized I had covered it quite nicely, so I'll link to those at the end. But I also think it's because still, even now with half my children grown that I get pretty remarkable reactions to the number of children that I have. It does make one feel a bit like a freak show when this happens too often in one week. I think when you feel you are a walking and talking oddity, you tend to react more strongly to things which imply negative outcomes to your oddness. 


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