Vomit pro rapid-fires milk CURDS in church

Warning: this email is gross.

As we pulled into church, ‘Licity (or “Lissie” or “Felicity” or “Hey, HEY, Noo! STop! TAKE THAT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!!”) started to choke.

Then she spit up a curd of goat milk. Yes, liquid milk entered her body via bottle… then through the magic of science, curds began to form… and propel themselves UP.

🎵The curdle did hurdle🎵

We cleaned her off as best we could. And inside our place of worship she went, smelling like a goat.

A breeze rustled the fake leaf of a fake plant at the front of the sanctuary. A hush fell over the churchgoers. We watched it from our pew transfixed in slow motion. We watched the silence.

Then ‘Lissie started up. Rapid-fire curds spluttered out of her like bullet casings from a belt-fed machine gun.

MomBrain snatched her up quick as a wink and retreated out the doors.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a slick maneuver in church. There ‘Lissie was spitting up but Hannah was so quick that most people didn’t even know anything had happened.

“A goat milk allergy is highly rare,” MomBrain told me later.

Of course we don’t know for sure. It could have been ‘Lissie’s insistence on grabbing the milk carton and drinking the entire quart.

Another thing we don’t know…

DadFace Directive

How to go from nonproductive dry heaving to vomiting a stream of words onto the page.

I‘m preaching to myself this Sunday.

Last week I had 98% of the story for this email written — but no writing tip. All week I waited for a tip that matched my story, but it never came.

Of course, I could have used the thoughts I was having about writing… how I’m putting together a online workshop to help expand some ideas I have for a book on writing, for example. But no, I wanted some actionable tip that would help you.

Something you could put to work right away to give you results.

Here it is — an idea from the nonfiction author John McPhee:

If you get stuck, write a letter to your grandmother about the article you’re working on and what you’re trying to do with it and all the problems it’s giving you.

Once you’re done with this personal letter, edit out “Dear Grandmother.” And BAMMO! You just wrote your first draft.

Baby ‘Lissie is alternating between crumpling, pinning down with her body, and deliberately eating a page of notes I made about the wording used for a short advertisement for a Zippo lighter included in some magazine of old.

I guess that’s my cute… er, “cue”. Sometimes autocorrect is deep.

Later, but not too late,

—DadFace

P.S. - Little ‘Lissie crawled into my lap as I was finishing typing this letter and now — three seconds later — is fast asleep.