I love my mothers-in-law. Truly. Both of them. They're lovely ladies, in their absolutely different ways. But MIL #1 has earned an undying hairy eyeball from me, because of the critter at the top of this post. (The pic is, by the way, cribbed from someone else, whose blog is now defunct. Boohoo! It seemed like it might be a good blog. Update! Check out Mommy With An Attitude! She just moved to a new URL. Not only is she a good source for dancing chicken pictures, she's funny!) Y'see, this...this...thing arrived at Eastertime in the midst of a box of goodies for the dotter. This...this...evil creation will crow like a rooster, play the Chicken Dance, and dance around like a little Golem, a rickety mechanical critter that lurches from one side to the other, with its beak vibrating as it crows (loudly), "C'mon, dance with me!" OmegaDotter thinks it's hilarious. Shortly after it arrived, it was sequestered, hidden away surreptitiously by the Omega Parental Units, who were united in a desperate need to STOP THE MADNESS after OmegaDotter squeezed its paw (?) for the umpteenth time. It has resurfaced. Kind of like that eBay auction that was trying to get rid of the Evil Doll? You hide it away, and it slyly sneaks back out, beady little red eyes gleaming in the darkness as you enter the living room in the middle of the night? Okay, I exaggerate a bit. No beady red eyes. Just a determined dotter, who located it in a heap of toys Soon To Be Distributed To Needy Children, pulled it out, and has been squeezing its damned paw over and over again to get it to dance. She brought it in to the office this evening as I was staring at the computer, wondering what on earth I was going to blog about. She placed it on my knee. She squeezed its paw. It crowed and began to dance. Then it urged all within a 50-mile radius (i.e., loudly), "C'mon, dance with me!" And OmegaDotter began to bounce from foot to foot, bobbing her head in time to the music, grinning like a maniac, and demanded that I dance with her. Too cute. Just too cute. Now, there's a special level of Dante's Hells reserved for people who purchase loud, obnoxious, plastic, battery-operated toys of any sort for the children of other people. This I believe. If there's anything to this God business, and God is just, people who buy such toys will be condemned to spending an eternity with a few choice obnoxious plastic critters that urge, beseech, and implore whoever is listening to "Dance with me!" or "Let's play!" or crank out a tinny rendition of "Three Blind Mice" until the batteries start to die, and the perky "Let's play!" degenerates into "Leeeeeeettttt'sssssss pllllllaaaaaaa...." in a freaky, slurgy, battery-dying kind of way. And then, if God is good, the batteries will be Magically Recharged and the cycle will begin again. But every once in a while, even cranky OmegaMom gets sucked into the vortex. It doesn't happen very often. Mark your calendars.