Won't you take me to Yodertown?

My friend Brooke always has these ideas, like:

and I'm always like, "Ehhhhhhh, let's just go to McDonald's, no, wait, I'm tired. They're so tired and I'm loud. No, that's not it, hang on." And we both have a lot of kids, relatively speaking, and she's fearless and full of ideas. So anyway, she cooked up this trip to an Amish town or village and so we went. It took 2 hours to get there, and Toby passed the time by driving Brynn to the end of her fuse, which is a really short trip. Coincidentally, he arrived at the end of my fuse about the same time, and I pray that time will ease his pain.

We arrived in Yoderville, aka, Jamesport and I had my doubts. I have a hangup about fundamentalist types with calm children, they intimidate me greatly. I don't want to wear a bun and call my husband "Mister Clark" or anything, but sometimes I think those really extreme Southern Baptists and Mennonite and Amish are on to something with parenting. Somehow, and I don't understand it, their kids are capable of being quiet. It's like a Christmas miracle, all the time. My kids aren't even quiet when they're asleep.

And they were loud. For the most part no one gave us a second glance, because they are schooled in looking calm and kind, I suspect. In reality, my kids were probably pretty good, but because of my wannabe-fundamentalist-neurosis, I felt like the before portion of a commercial for ADD medication. I was playing the role of the harried soccermom in a snot-streaked hoodie. They played the youth of America, and they played it flawlessly.

In the grocery market, I kept making eye contact with delicate Amishwomen who were probably somewhere near my age, and they seemed fascinated with my kids, which could have been for a number of reasons. 1) Jamesport is evidently a hotspot among the senior citizen set, and the only kids anywhere were mine and Brooke's. 2) they were all in the basket, like those 8 year olds in the stroller. You know what I mean. There's a time to get the kid out of the stroller. 3) they were being hellacious, trying to reach an agreement on which bag of "Traditional Amish Candy"* to buy while Tristan worked his snatch-n-grab magic on, well, everything and then screamed his grief to the skies when he was thwarted. By the end, I think I was sweating. I'm starting to think I might have an equal intimidation factor when it comes to dour senior citizens.

I enjoyed the scenery and the shops and the food, but next time I might do my homeschool field trip sans homeschoolers. I guess they had a good time, though. On the way home Toby weighed the pros and cons of being Amish and decided to remain Englisch, because of electricity and whatnot.

Side tangent: I think, if I was Amish and I decided to go rogue, I'd do all kinds of robberies and carjackings and whatnot, because no one would suspect an Amish gal. In fact, even if someone said, "I was carjacked by a woman in a kapp! She had a black dress and sensible shoes!", people would assume that it was somebody masquerading as an Amishwoman, or they'd just go combing the countryside for women in that outfit, and I think you get where I'm going here... The trick would be using my carjacking profits in some discreet way, like some kind of offshore bank account that I handled online, through an internet connection I scored somewhere. I can tell myself from experience that this is a unlikely scenario, because I couldn't even get the Edge network out there in God's country, which was devastating, since I had things I needed to Instagram.

*candy corn. not Amish. or traditional.