What's worse?

Remember when you were little and just starting school and one of the most embarrassing things you could imagine was calling your teacher "mom?"

I don't think I ever did that; at least, I don't recall ever doing that. Andrew does. He was rather embarrassed about it at the time. I don't know if the following story has more, less, or the same embarrassment quota attached to it.

We had some friends over on Friday night because we missed their wedding receptions. Michelle, who was a missionary in Voronezh when I lived there, got married last December. I was having a rather sick pregnancy day and didn't feel like making the car ride. Nathan, one of Andrew's mission buddies, had his reception on August 31st. Instead of going to that one we spent the evening in the hospital waiting for my dad to get out of open heart surgery. Fun times.

So, because we didn't make it to their receptions, we invited them over for dinner. We made pirogies and they were good. I was going to have them all prepared before hand, but Rachel slows things down for me (I can't really put my finger on why that is) and I couldn't open our big flour bin so had to wait for Andrew to come home. We ended up making a little assembly line with our guests, rolling dough, cutting out circles, putting the filling in, pinching the dough closed, mashing the edges with a fork and then frying them. I realize it isn't really good taste to have your guests help make dinner, but it ended up being kind of fun.

Omar, Michelle's husband who is actually Hispanic and was named after his mom's secret crush, Omar Sharif, prepared a nice black bean salad to go along with our meal.

We played Mad Gab, and had a lot of fun in spite of my making the company fix their own food.

In the midst of our revelings, Michelle called out to Omar, "Will you get me a drink, mom?"

She promptly turned red and started laughing. A few seconds later her statement registered with everyone else and we all started laughing. Omar, who had not heard what she called him but got her the drink anyway, asked why we were all laughing.

Michelle could hardly choke out the words, "I just called you mom!"

That was definitely one of my highlights of the evening.

And I think I've decided that calling your teacher 'mom' is more embarrassing than calling your husband 'mom.' Andrew is such a good friend to me that if I did something embarrassing in front of him (as I do everyday), we'd both be able to laugh about it and I wouldn't be embarrassed every time I looked at him for the rest of the school year.

Then again, it was kind of strange when we started calling each other 'mama' and 'dada' for the sake of Rachel's vocabulary. I always knew that I wanted children but never really imagined myself calling Andrew 'dada,' 'daddy,' or any equivalent there of. I suppose one day I'll get used to it. Come to think, referring to myself as 'mom' is a little strange. I don't think I could call Andrew 'mom.'