Your mission, if you choose to accept it

My friend Megan called today to say she'd been visiting Joan and Paul and their twins, now a couple of months old. She wanted to give me the heads-up that she'd offered to put together a team of people to come babysit both babies so Joan and Paul can go out for an afternoon or evening together. Megan figures each team will need to be comprised of three people, one of whom has a documented, successful track record of parenting a child beyond infancy. "It won't work without a team," she said, "and those guys say you're pretty good with the babies, so even though you don't have the parenting credentials, I definitely want you for the team."

This crack unit's mission: Keep two tiny humans - collectively weighing less than 30 pounds - sleeping, eating and pooping for four hours. Hey, I'm not minimizing it, don't get me wrong. Team Twins, only the best need apply. Will we get pep talks and schwag? Secret agent names, like the black ops people on Alias?

Meanwhile, Team Get the Rats the Hell Outta My House has gone into action, testing materials and conducting trial maneuvers on the trickier aspects of the mission, like gutter removal. Turns out that this, our Tenth Anniversary, is the Tin/Aluminum anniversary, according to the traditional list, and the Leather anniversary on the modernized list. So, it's just perfect that we are buying ourselves a fifty-foot roll of hazardously sharp aluminum, and some leather workgloves to keep from shredding our hands on it. Isn't that just too romantic?