William's first phone call

William caused a minor stir last night by calling his grandparents from his mother's cell phone. Unfortunately, his vocabulary isn't quite good enough for him to convey that hey, everything's cool, just wanted to say hi, back atcha later.

I was trying to keep him quiet while I participated in a meeting. I'm a member of the Officer Spouses' Club Scholarship committee, and we were making our final decision on scholarship recipients last night. I had to take William with me because David was on call. Everyone was really nice about it, but it was pretty distracting, having a baby crawling all over the place and pulling up on everyone's legs (and grabbing their papers and trying to tip over the lamps, etc). The toys weren't having much of an effect, so in a last ditch effort, I handed my cell phone to William.

Somehow he managed to scroll through the speed-dial contacts, select the one marked "Dad" (for Dad and Mama) and hit Send. (He's not even one! Is my kid a genius or what?) This was all without my knowledge.

Daddy said that the phone rang, and he answered it. He saw my phone number pop up on the Caller ID, but he didn't hear my voice. Instead, he heard a baby talking and fussing a bit. This went on for about a minute, and Daddy kept waiting for me to come on the phone, but I didn't. (Of course I didn't. I was busy discussing the problem of the lack of a GPA for one of our scholarship candidates and if we could reasonably award money to her without any idea what her grades were.)

So Mom pulled out her cell phone and called my cell. I heard the phone ring from across the room where William was clutching the phone. I grabbed it from him and said, "Mom?" She said, "Jen? Are you okay?" Confused, I said, "Yes. Wait, did William just call you?" And she replied that he had and that she was worried that something had happened. I told her I was in a meeting and would call her back.

But somehow in the interim, she had called and left a voicemail at home, saying they had gotten a mysterious call from my phone and was I okay? When David got that message, then HE panicked and called me on my cell. Which I had turned off for a few minutes to prevent William from calling Tokyo or someplace. Which made David panic even more. When we finally wrapped up the meeting, I called David at home and he read me the riot act on how he was worried and was about to start looking in ditches for us.

We were fine! Everything was fine! I reassured him. William was just getting into mischief. I was just trying to keep him occupied so we could finish the meeting, I explained. But everything was fine. David settled down, relieved. All was right with the world again.

Except that I stopped by the drive-through line at Kentucky Fried Chicken to get some dinner...and they were out of chicken. Again.