Parker paused in his ironing and looked up at me expectantly.
The cool thing about videos, though, was that you could edit them, so I decided to ramble with the idea that I could edit this part out if I needed to. Or maybe play music over the video of Parker’s careful ironing.
“Well, I used to have a blog, but blogs aren’t as much of a thing anymore. I just like to tell stories and make people laugh, maybe help them learn something new—like, say, hemming a dress.”
“Really? What’s it called?” He turned his attention back to his ironing. There was something really fascinating about his large fingers confidently and carefully moving the dress, lining up the fabric with the chalk line, and carefully ironing the adhesive. It was like he’d been born to craft.
“It’s called the Mom Scouts.”
He chuckled as he shifted the fabric and added more hem tape. “And what do the Mom Scouts do?”
Remember the elevator pitch, Vivian—the Mom Scouts credo, if you will.
“You know how sometimes adulting is just a pain in the ass?”
Parker grinned. “You mean like right now?”
“Yeah. I started the Mom Scouts videos because ‘sometimes you deserve a glass of wine. Or a badge. Or a badge and a glass of wine.’”
“Which do I get?”
“Bragging rights and a hemmed dress?”
He made a face. “What are some other badges I could earn?”
“Oh, anything and everything. Sometimes it’s something we have to do. Sometimes it’s something we want to do. Last week I made a video about earning my Hiking Badge. I’d lived here for twenty years and never hiked Kennesaw Mountain.”
“I haven’t done that yet, either,” he said. The iron hissed, and he shifted the fabric.
“The best was two weeks ago when I earned my Animal Control Badge,” I said with a laugh. “Rachel had a lizard loose in her house, and we managed to catch it in a shoebox and release it into the wild. You should’ve seen the histrionics.”
He looked up at me with a smile. “From you?”
“Moi? I am a bona fide country girl and have no trouble with lizards.” I waited a beat. “But I may have screamed the one time when only its head was visible and I thought it was a snake.”
He laughed out loud.
“After that, I did the cursing, I’ll have you know. Rachel was in charge of screaming. But the lizard was captured, unharmed, and released into the wild. Then we earned our Finger of Bourbon Badge.”
He chuckled as he shifted the fabric and ironed and shifted and ironed. It truly was mesmerizing. I hadn’t had the outsider’s view the other day, when I’d done this same thing for my living room curtains.
“So do I get a badge for this?” he asked.
“Absolutely. You get the Sewing Hack Badge,” I said as I picked up the fabric we’d cut from the bottom of the dress and draped it over my shoulder. “I’ve been making little clip-art badges, but I suppose we could look into real ones.”
“Cool. I think I deserve the Best Dad Ever Badge.”
“Dad!” Cassidy yelled from upstairs.
“He’s right, you know,” I called up the stairs. A sigh of the long suffering was my only response.
“And done!” he exclaimed. “I think.”
I inspected his work. “I believe we have a dress. With a hem.”
“Cassidy!” he called. “Come try this on, please.”
In a few minutes she bounded down the steps. She threw the dress on over the tank top and shorts she was wearing. “Oh, to have that young blood,” as my grandmother would’ve said.
