The Amazing Amanda List

Attorney Amanda J. List has been working with us at The Wald Law Group since February, so I see her five days a week. My sons, on the other hand, have yet to meet her. Still, in our house, she is now known as "the amazing Amanda List." Why, you ask? Well, for starters she's a very good and dedicated lawyer. That pleases and impresses me, as her boss. However, it really doesn't do much for my sons. But add in her amazing sports connections, and you start to make an impression on them. On top of that, there appears to be almost no practical problem for which Amanda doesn't have a quick and easy solution. Some examples: Last week, my younger son spilled a can of soda in his lap while he was home alone. (Don't report me to CPS. He's 13 years old, so I'm allowed to leave him at home alone for reasonable periods of time -- not a week, not even overnight, but a few hours here or there. But I digress....) He decided to take matters into his own hands, changed into clean clothes, and put the sticky ones into the washing machine. Very ambitious -- especially for a 13-year-old boy. The only problem was, part way into the wash cycle he realized that both his cell phone and his IPod were in the pockets of the shorts he was washing. Oops!! No problem, says Amanda -- just put the cell phone in a plastic bag of rice. The rice will absorb the water, and the cell phone will almost certainly be fine. And then there is my older son's insomnia. I was kvetching to my office mates about my older son waking me up at night because of his insomnia. No problem, says Amanda -- try MidNite, an herbal remedy for insomnia specifically designed to be taken in the middle of the night if you wake up and can't go back to sleep. She swears it doesn't cause grogginess. And the best part is the tablets melt in the mouth, so you don't even have to keep a glass of water by your bed. Oh, and then there was the time that our girl puppy woke us up in the middle of the night, barking and barking and barking, and when I finally dragged myself out of bed and went into the kitchen (where we keep them shut in at night), I discovered she was barking because her brother had gotten into our Heartguard stash and eaten approximately 18 Heartguard tablets (he's supposed to get one per month) -- and she was mad because he wasn't sharing. Needless to say, I panicked at the massive overdose of medicine he had just ingested, and raced to the phone to call All Animals Emergency Hospital. "Oh, you should have called me!" says Amanda the next morning when I report the night's adventure. Yup, you've got it -- Amanda knew exactly what to do because her beloved father was a vet. According to Papa List, the recipe on such occasions is to pour a cup of hydrogen peroxide down the puppy's throat, hold its mouth shut, and shake it gently -- "not like a cocktail!" -- and voila, the puppy will throw up whatever it ingested that it shouldn't have. Okay, that's drowned cell phones, insomnia, and poisoned puppies. Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder what Amanda doesn't know!