The other night we were having dinner at Noodles & Company and this three-year-old girl was running wild, screaming and hanging off of the metal railing above us (dining area was split-level with some tables on a level about 2 feet above the others). Her parents were sitting at their table doing nothing about her for at least 20 minutes, until finally her mom collected her and took her to look out the window. Meanwhile baby rampy was sitting in her baby seat quietly, smiling at us and playing with her hands.

Of course it is easy to raise other people's children, but we were both like, "GAH, we will NEVER let baby rampy act like that." I defintely plan to be hands on about keeping her occupied and quiet when in public, and if she was this wound up and loud I would totally take her outside until she calmed down.

That said, she's got some crazy, rambunctious genes coming her way courtesy of my side of the family. Both my mother and I were superactive babies, and I wasn't the best-controlled child at all times. For one, there was the time I got my head stuck between the rails of a fence while waiting in line for a ride at Opryland, but that was at least quiet mischief (and I was less than two when that happened).

The problem was that I had both a vivid imagination and a posse of younger siblings for whom I was supposed to set a good example, but who more often served as my willing troupe of traveling players. Our crowning moment of glory came in a local mall during our annual back-to-school shopping trip. My mother left us in a play area outside of Waldenbooks while she went in to get something. I guess she thought the four of us would be more disruptive inside the tiny bookstore, but we quickly proved her wrong.

At the time, this mall had several of these play areas, each carpeted and surrounded by wooden benches, and each containing several metal statues of animals. This particular area had a three toothy crocodiles. So naturally (and led by me) we were soon hunting the crocodiles and being loudly attacked by them, a process which boiled down to standing on one foot on a crocodile's snout and then falling off sideways while screaming, "OH, NOOOOO, THE CROCODILE'S GOT ME!"

Mind you, I had to be at least 9 or 10 when this happened.

Soon we'd sucked another little girl and her brother into the game, so there were now six of us screaming, our voices echoing through the somewhat empty mall. Around this time I realized just how loud we were being, and I switched to trying to calm everybody down. Unfortunately that ship had sailed, pursued by a swampload of crocodiles.

Meanwhile my mom was in the checkout line at Waldenbooks listening to her fellow patrons tsk-tsk about the misbehaving children outside. I assume she knew it was us, because she had to have recognized our voices. On a sidebar, when flying back home after Thanksgiving, I left baby rampy with mr rampy while I ducked into a store to get a magazine, and I could totally tell it was her crying while I waited impatiently to be checked out. But our story ended sweetly because she stopped as soon as I came back out and held her, and all the bystanders were like "Aw, mommy magic."

So back at the mall, I'm frantically trying to get everyone to stop being eaten by crocodiles, physically grabbing siblings and seating them on the benches, but the ones I'd seated kept popping back up the minute I turned around to grab the others, so it was a somewhat Sisyphean task, and then this large adult hand fell heavily on my shoulder, and I was turned around by the manager of the Waldenbooks.

"If you kids don't shut up," he said quietly--and it was all the scarier that he wasn't yelling-- "I'm calling the cops."

Surely he meant mall cops rather than actual policemen, but still, fun. He stormed back into the book store and I shakily pinned my last few siblings to a bench (the other two kids had been collected and led away by their doddering old woman caretaker who had been smiling at us during our whole display and who may very well have thought we'd just been on an actual crocodile hunt). And then our mom came out of the store (never more embarassed by us, had had to admit those loud children were hers, blah blah blah) and the next thing we knew we were all driving home.

At the time this was such an excruciatingly embarassing experience that I was still mortified the next year when we went back for that year's school clothes and, in fact, was completely unable to walk past the Waldenbooks. But here I am now, around 20 years later, the mall rennovated beyond recognition and the animal statues long gone, and the whole thing seems pretty funny.

Clearly if baby rampy turns out true to form, she won't be all prunes and prisms, but if she has to misbehave, I hope she does it with this kind of flair, and maybe I'll be down in the carpeted pit fighting crocodiles alongside her.