“Awww pickles!” Kicked out of mom’s room for the second time that day, I was at a loss of activities to occupy myself. I had colored in all of my coloring books (a little on the wall, too), hosted a tea party for my guests Rex the Dinosaur, Jo-Jo the Polar Bear, and Tina the Goldfish, and towel-skated across the wet kitchen linoleum until it was sparkling dry. Now my tummy rumbled.

Since there wasn’t actually any real food at the tea party, I scampered over into the kitchen, climbed onto the counter, and pawed the cabinets in search of something to substitute the imaginary grub in my system. I found nothing. I checked the pantry for Fruity Pebbles ™ in hopes of some better luck, and discovered the box was empty other than a few straggling colorful cereal pieces at the bottom. As a last resort, I slugged toward the deep hum of the refrigerator expecting to find nothing more than lettuce and lunch meat. But alas! My eyes zoomed in on the rest of a chocolate cake from the bakery…and it wasn’t even my birthday!

As you can imagine, I had no trouble getting my hands on the chocolate goodness that inhabited my fridge. Before I even realized it, the only cake that remained was smeared all over my face. I was super thirsty after the day’s adventure and found a fruity looking beverage on the side with about half of its contents remaining. It took me a minute to get it open because the make of the top was foreign to me, but eventually I had chugged down the tangy drink and removed all evidence of my presence.

I returned to my room to create invitations for tomorrow’s tea party when I began to feel a bit…woozy. I went to my mommy’s room to tell her that I felt weird, but when I tried to speak, a surprising fit of giggles escaped from my mouth. My mom looked so funny. She had this crazy look on her face and she was saying all these words that maybe I hadn’t learned yet. I just had to run and tell Rex and Jo-Jo and Tina how crazy mom looked and how strange she sounded. I was pretty sure that they were marching right behind me when I returned to mom’s room, where she had an even crazier look on her face. I just could not handle the situation. I fell out on the floor, rolling around in hysterics because everything was just so gosh darn hilarious! I saw my mother walking toward me and I knew she was going to try and get me, so I ran to her first, tapped her leg, and shouted “TAG YOU’RE IT” from the top of my lungs as best as I could while simultaneously trying to get all those giggles out.

Running down the hallway, hopping over forgotten toys, crawling under obstacles, I felt completely invincible. Completely invincible, that is, until my mom scooped me up from behind. Where did she even come from? She threw me over her shoulder and hauled me back to her room as I coughed up even more laughter because everything looked sooooo funny upside down. I bounced about three times when she tossed me on her bed and climbed in next to me. She reached over the side and shoved the empty glass bottle with the hard-to-open top in my face. “Did you drink this?” she asked me, waving it back and forth. “Yes mommy, yes I did it and was sooooo yummy,” I replied. The stern look on her face slowly transformed into a smirk. By the end of those next few minutes, she had let out even more laughter than I had. “My daughter is drunk,” she said while wiping tears of humored disbelief from her eyes. “My four-year-old daughter is drunk.”