(Note: Song choice does not indicate my mood or the quality of my day.)

I have an annoying thing to do tomorrow.  Have I talked about this yet?  I hope not.  My son has an egg allergy.  And apparently, with little kids, egg allergies are a thing that frequently just goes away as the child ages.  We are doing a thing called the Baked Egg Challenge with him tomorrow at the doctor’s office.  (Hospital?  Maybe it’s at the hospital.)

Here is what the Baked Egg Challenge is:  tonight, my wife will make precisely 24 cupcakes using a commercial cupcake mix.  She will, however, alter the recipe by using precisely three eggs. Tomorrow we will take precisely four of those precisely twenty-four cupcakes (which, by the way, are to remain un-iced) and take them to the doctor’s office with us.  Or maybe to the hospital.  My son will eat two of the four cupcakes; the other cupcakes are either for the doctors to analyze to make sure we really put eggs in them like we said we would or they are a tax for the nurses; I’m not sure.

If you feel like I overused the word “precisely” in that paragraph, it’s because that’s how the instructions worked.  They’re really concerned that we might accidentally make 25 cupcakes or bring six of them with us.  I want to know what to do with the extras.  I require instructions!

We will then watch him for four hours, and hope he doesn’t die. If he starts to die there will be nurses right there with epinephrine and so he will quickly stop doing that.  I’m picturing a situation where every time the kid has a cough we freak out, and where every time we see a teeny little blotch on his skin we start debating whether he’s breaking out or whether that’s just because it’s hot in the room we’re waiting in.  Was that little bump there when we got here?  WHO KNOWS.

(Simple fact is, there’s no way that the kid hasn’t eaten some sort of baked good somewhere that had some eggs in it, and he’s never had an alarming allergic reaction to anything anywhere.  If he does have an allergic reaction, we’re literally in the best place in town for that to happen, and he’ll be fine.  It’s not going to be scary, precisely, but it’s going to be nerve-wracking.)

(Spends five minutes researching “nerve-wracking” vs. “nerve-racking,” discovers the Internet has decided they are functionally identical.)

Anyway, I may or may not be especially active around here tomorrow, especially if the boy’s not feeling well when we get back from the doctor’s.  I am trying to write a piece about something that happened at work yesterday, but it’s challenging.  I’m not writing it if I can’t make it funny, and to write it– there is no way around this– I need to use the word rape about 45 times.  So… yeah.   It’s gonna be a dilly of a pickle, is what I’m saying.