Poison berries and bad dogs and wasps, oh my!

There's something I need to confess right here, right now from the beginning.

I am a paranoid parent.

I don't really mean to be. When I was younger and hipper and childless, I totally knew I wouldn't be. But I am.

My friend Guinevere and her family are moving into a house (I know!), and I said I would watch her son and my son while she unpacked a couple of boxes this afternoon. The weather is so amazingly beautiful today that the boys and I just had to go outside in the yard and play.

Guinevere's backyard has such a nice, blue, leafless pool and such a nice, green, weedless lawn that I almost want to hate her. But anyway, the boys were playing in the yard (and YES there is a fence around the pool) when the neighbor's dog started barking.

My son, the dog magnet, had to investigate.

The boys toddled over to the chain-link fence and squealed their delight at seeing what truly could be mistaken for a small black bear. I tried not to freak out as images of dog-mauled children and headlines about certain breeds of dogs that shall go nameless (you know the ones) flashed through my mind.

But then I noticed my son had something red in his hand, and I noticed it was a small berry. The perfect size for choking. I looked around and noticed the neighbors with the dog had a red-berry-producing hedge planted on their side of the fence, and several berries were scattered along the ground. Now, I know a lot of plants, but I don't know this one, and so of course I assumed it was poisonous.

So I have a small bear barking on one side of the fence and two rambunctious one-year-old boys picking up berries while giggling at the dog. And then they wanted to put their fingers through the fence to touch the dog (the nerve!), and I imagined fingers being viciously bitten off. I tried to gently pull the boys back from the fence, although I'm sure a bystander would have seen me throwing myself on top of them as if protecting them from shrapnel.

The boys were on the move, running back and forth along the length of the fence, which the dog bear thought was great fun. That clever bear found a perfect spot for viewing the boys where the poison-berry hedge was thin.

And then he stood up on his hind legs. And looked me in the eye.

Right about then, my son found some kind of electrical-stick-in-the-ground thingy and knocked the cover off, causing a swarm of wasps living inside to start buzzing around.

And even though I haven't worked out in months, I picked up one boy in one arm, and the other boy in the other, and I carried 60 pounds of wriggling toddlers back inside the house.

A beautiful day outside, ruined by my paranoia.

I'll probably find out the bear is a therapy dog, and the poison berries are an exotic South American fruit the neighbors make jam out of, and the wasps don't sting. Or something.

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I am working on a cool design, so no one has to put up with this blandness anymore....