Mrs. Scatter takes her ever-loving Mom Job seriously, constantly looking for opportunities to impart valuable life lessons on the Large Smelly Boys. They are still at a tender age when they’re vulnerable and impressionable, so she takes great care in modeling supreme mature behavior. She takes this job so seriously, in fact, that she doesn’t even allow commas between adjectives.

This is why during a recent family game of Scrabble she felt it was important to say, “Who messed up my udders? I had perfectly good udders on the board and someone had to put an R in front of them!”

This is also why she put the game on pause for a teachable moment when her sweet innocent pre-teen said, “The last turn, if I had a P, I could have had ‘specimen.'”

Actually at first she took several teachable moments to laugh into her beer while both LSBs looked at her in wonder. Apparently neither of them has ever carried a communicable disease or been pregnant for any length of time, and their idea of a specimen is a pin through a dead bug. As their Very Attentive Mother, Mrs. Scatter was surprised to learn this. The dead bug part, that is, and she set out immediately to correct their deficient understanding. She’s sorry. To expand their worldly knowledge. She started by holding up her glass of beer.

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Illustration: You can buy 25 of these for $3.45 at Amazon. It holds 4 ounces.