Best Mom Tip #134: Know your weaknesses

Osama bin Laden is dead. I will pause while you dance.

**PAUSE**

Now that we have all stopped celebrating, I will admit to feeling a bit bloodthirsty since the news broke. I want pictures. I want details.

I suddenly thought that putting a head on a pike is not barbaric, but rather a good way of warning others not to mess with us. Maybe it could go on top of the Washington Monument.

Or maybe each state could get a piece of the body and decide what they want to do with it. Vermont could use theirs to grow organic syrup. Texas could deep fry theirs. The possibilities are endless.

All of my gruesome posturing is just bravado, though. I am really a wuss.

I know this because today I found a 3-4 foot snake in my garage and I freaked out. Badly.

I got home, opened the garage, and parked inside. I got out, walked around the car to get the baby out and took him inside and put him in his highchair for lunch. I walked back to the garage and there, right where I had been standing on the driver's side, was a really big snake.

I froze, yelled "Holy Shit!" (which is pretty funny because I don't think I've ever said that in my life), and tried to figure out what to do. My 2-year-old was still asleep in the car and was being held hostage by the evil snake lurking next to the car.

I managed to herd the snake out of the garage using a tree limb lopper, but it escaped under the porch.

Oddly, at this moment a police officer drove by and asked me if everything was alright. I explained that there was a snake under my porch. He gallantly got out, pulled the thing out from under the porch, chopped it to pieces, and threw the pieces in the sewer.

I think I would have gotten around to killing it eventually, but in the 10 minutes or so between my getting home and the officer's arrival I said "shit" about 10 times, my adrenaline was going crazy to the point that I was shaking, and I was only able to speak in an hysterical voice similar to Mickey Mouse on cocaine.

I am a wuss.

So whether you are the Special Forces men who killed bin Laden to make my world safer, or the guy who butchers cows so I can eat hamburgers, or the officer who destroys horrifically vicious snakes so that I can continue to enter and leave my house at will, THANK YOU.

I am really grateful that you guys kill things so that I don't have to.