Badge Magic

This year Matthew moved up from Bear Cub to Webelo (pronounced "we blow"; Patrick found the irony of that name as it relates to cub scouts quite amusing).

For the past three years his Cub Scout uniform included a dark blue shirt covered with badges. This year he came home with a new tan shirt and informed me that I needed to take all the badges off the old shirt and sew them on the new shirt, along with several new ones. The easy part was removing the badges from the old shirt--Matthew was amazed at my domesticity as I ripped the stitches out. He is very appreciative of any June Cleaver thing I do and praises me highly for the slightest thing, such as removing badges from a shirt.

As soon as I removed the badges he started hounding me about when I was going to sew them on the new shirt. I told him I had to buy a sewing kit then I'd sew them.

That night I went to a Cabi party at a friend's house (suddenly I have a weirdly suburban mom social life, complete with a dozen or more new friends....I'm not sure what caused this sudden popularity after 11 years of never being invited to stuff like Bunko or girls night or whatever. I guess my new status of divorced then remarried to a hot man who cooks, cleans, landscapes his yard and adores me has some kind of mysterious allure) (Oh, and Cabi is an outrageously expensive line of clothing available only at home shows, the apparent cornerstone of suburban mom socialization. But who am I to cut because there I was with a glass of Sangria in one hand and my checkbook in the other?) and was talking to another mom and mentioned something about the imminent badge sewing.

She looked at me like I was crazy--"haven't you heard of Badge Magic?" Was she kidding? No I hadn't heard of Badge Magic--could it be that such a thing existed? Why hadn't I invented it? She went on and on, saying NOBODY sews badges on anymore--then another girl chimed in--"Sew badges? Are you crazy?" The whole gathering launched into a collective sales pitch about the wonders of Badge Magic and how now way can you even sew on those badges without butchering your fingers.

The next day I said to Matthew "Guess what? They sell this stuff called Badge Magic so I won't have to sew all the badges on!" He looked crestfallen and said that Badge Magic doesn't work, that the badges fall off after one time, that it's terrible, I CAN'T use it. But all the moms use it, I insisted, telling him about my conversation the previous night. No, he insisted--it didn't work, all those moms were wrong, you HAVE to sew the badges on.

So I bought the sewing kit and spent an hour last night sewing two of the badges on. My finger was raw and I had to stop after just those two--I still have four more to go. But Matthew was so excited, exclaiming about how I was the best mom in the world, what a great sewer I am, how I had sewn the badges in exactly the right spots.

I guess Badge Magic is for moms who don't have divorce guilt; I need to invest in a thimble.