My friend Elyse wrote an interesting blog this week at The Jacobson Journey on how her expectations for having kids often turned out to be different from the reality of having kids.
I thought . . . well . . . I don't really have a lot of expectations for my future children . . . I mean, for a long time, I wasn't even sure I'd have kids. And when I met Kevin, he told me early on that having low expectations would mean I'd be less likely to be disappointed with him (such a romantic!), so the same would probably be true for having kids.
But in church this morning, I realized that maybe I subconsciously have BIG expectations for those phantom children. Here's the situation. For the children's sermon, the leader held up a jar of money and asked the kids what they'd like to buy with it.
The kids shouted out typical things like, "Toys!" and "Cars!"
Then she asked, "What do you think God would like you to buy with money?"
There were a lot of blank stares and furrowed brows as kids tried to decipher the right answer. With a little prompting, she helped them figure out that maybe God would be happy if we bought food for people who were hungry.
That got a little guy thinking, and he raised his hand and said, "Blankets for people who have to sleep outside." Good answer.
MY kid, I thought smugly, would raise his hand and say, "Mosquito nets to help prevent malaria in third world countries!"
What? Expecting too much?
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Poor Cherry Cherry :(
Cherry Cherry has been violated.
I am sickened. Angry. Disgusted. Distraught. A plethora of negative verbs!
(Cherry Cherry is my car, by the way. She's the sweet little 2007 Toyota Corolla that carried me across the country with nary a flat tire or engine hiccup. She's my girl. So the fact that something bad has happened to her makes me feel awful.)
I first sensed trouble on Sunday. When we packed up to leave the cabin, I saw shredded kleenex on the back seat floor. That's where I keep the tissue box . . . and something small had definitely been clawing at it.
When Kevin came out, I gave him a big hug.
"If we die a fiery death on the way home, I want you to know that I love you," I said. He pulled back and gave me a strange look.
"It appears a small creature has been inside my car," I explained, "and if, by chance, it's still in there and runs up my leg while I'm driving, there's a good chance I'll run off the road and into a billboard post or a bridge underpass or something."
"Did we leave a door open?" he asked.
"Well, I didn't," I replied, leaving the insinuation hanging between us. He just rolled his eyes.
More than once, growing up on the farm, I heard the story about Grandma Sump putting on her overalls, going out to do chores, and making it halfway across the yard before feeling something crawling up the inside of her pants leg. Living in the country with no one around has its perks, like when you suddenly rip your pants off outside the privacy of your own home. We were taught at a young age to shake out our boots, pants, etc., before putting them on, just in case. I wasn't sure trying to rip my pants off while driving could end well.
We made it home uneventfully, though, and I didn't think anything of it 'til I was out running errands the next day. I came out of B.A. Burritos (my first visit -- definitely not as good as Chipotle, Qdoba, or Pancheros -- quite disappointing, actually, but that's another blog on another day) and saw something flutter across the passenger side floor. At first I thought maybe a piece of gray paper was being blown by the wind, but leaning in for a closer look, I saw four legs and a tail.
Ughuhuhuhuh.
I kept calm. I walked over to the passenger door, opened it up, and tried using a newspaper to shoo the little mouse out the door and back into nature. Instead, the little bugger scurried up behind the dashboard.
Dang it! Where was my killer instinct?! I should have rolled up the paper and swatted the thing to death when I had the chance!
Now I wasn't so calm. There was a mouse -- an alive, scampering mouse -- inside the car. I had to drive the car to get anywhere other than the strip-mall parking lot, which I definitely couldn't just hang around in all day, waiting for the mouse to kindly take its leave.
I cringingly slid into Cherry Cherry and drove around the backside of the building to the grocery store parking lot, next stop on my list. I envied the days when tight-rolled jeans were all the rage, because I was now seriously afraid that a mouse would crawl up my pant leg while I was driving, causing me to freak out, lose control of my car, and careen into one of the hundreds of other vehicles in this parking lot.
I parked without incident, jumped out of my car, and did what any girl would do. I called my dad.
"Dad! It's Tiffany!" I said when he answered. Long silence.
"What?"
"It's Tiffany!" I shouted. I understand why he was confused. He rarely uses his cell phone, and the only people who call him on it are people he works with out at the farm. I skipped the small talk and cut to the chase.
"Dad, I need help! There's a mouse in my car!" He chuckled.
"Have you seen it?"
"Yeah, I saw it! I tried to shoo it out but it ran up behind the dashboard."
"Oh, no."
"And it shredded a bunch of Kleenex in the back," I continued.
"Sounds like it's building a nest. Probably a mama about to have babies."
My heebie-jeebie factor skyrocketed. A whole family of mice taking up residence in my beloved Cherry Cherry??
"What do I do? If I put out rat poison, won't it die somewhere in my car and stink the whole thing up?"
"Well," my dad calmly said, "I think you'll want to use glue traps so you can throw them out once you catch them."
My dad's a freakin' genius!
Without further ado, I went inside to get my groceries and my mouse traps. Unfortunately, they didn't have mousetraps in the grocery store. Also unfortunately, it had started raining pretty hard while I was buying food, and because I'd pretty much catapulted myself out of my car once I parked it, I wandered around the lot for a while trying to find my poor mouse-infested Cherry Cherry, getting soaked but also rather dreading getting inside once I found it.
There's a K-Mart right across the street from the grocery store, but the two minutes it took to get there seemed like forever, wondering when the mouse was going to crawl up my pant leg. If it weren't pouring rain, I probably would have walked over to save myself the freak out.
The store had a fine selection of mouse traps, including two- and four-packs of glue traps. I went for the four, just in case there was an entire mouse colony settling in for the winter. You never know.
I ran through the rain back out to the car and ripped open the box. I put two on the passenger-side floor, where I'd seen the pesky invader, and one under each seat. Then, in preparation for what would be the longest fifteen-minute ride home of my life, I pulled my pant legs up over my knees. The thought of careening off the bridge and into the Mississippi River after a mouse crawled up my pants seemed like a very real possibility. I wasn't taking any chances.
I made it home without trauma and sent Kevin to check the traps when he got home from work a few hours later.
"If there's something trapped but it's still alive, kill it. That's the humane thing to do," I said. I was a lot more sensitive to the feelings of the mouse when I was nowhere near it.
Pretty soon there was a tap on the window. I could see Kevin holding something up in the semi-darkness, but I didn't look. I was cooking dinner, and I have a very sensitive gag reflex.
"Two!" he announced. Shiver. Gross.
This morning? Another freaking mouse in another glue trap. And Kevin had already gone to work, so I had to get rid of it myself.
Next time we're taking his car to the cabin.
I am sickened. Angry. Disgusted. Distraught. A plethora of negative verbs!
(Cherry Cherry is my car, by the way. She's the sweet little 2007 Toyota Corolla that carried me across the country with nary a flat tire or engine hiccup. She's my girl. So the fact that something bad has happened to her makes me feel awful.)
I first sensed trouble on Sunday. When we packed up to leave the cabin, I saw shredded kleenex on the back seat floor. That's where I keep the tissue box . . . and something small had definitely been clawing at it.
When Kevin came out, I gave him a big hug.
"If we die a fiery death on the way home, I want you to know that I love you," I said. He pulled back and gave me a strange look.
"It appears a small creature has been inside my car," I explained, "and if, by chance, it's still in there and runs up my leg while I'm driving, there's a good chance I'll run off the road and into a billboard post or a bridge underpass or something."
"Did we leave a door open?" he asked.
"Well, I didn't," I replied, leaving the insinuation hanging between us. He just rolled his eyes.
More than once, growing up on the farm, I heard the story about Grandma Sump putting on her overalls, going out to do chores, and making it halfway across the yard before feeling something crawling up the inside of her pants leg. Living in the country with no one around has its perks, like when you suddenly rip your pants off outside the privacy of your own home. We were taught at a young age to shake out our boots, pants, etc., before putting them on, just in case. I wasn't sure trying to rip my pants off while driving could end well.
We made it home uneventfully, though, and I didn't think anything of it 'til I was out running errands the next day. I came out of B.A. Burritos (my first visit -- definitely not as good as Chipotle, Qdoba, or Pancheros -- quite disappointing, actually, but that's another blog on another day) and saw something flutter across the passenger side floor. At first I thought maybe a piece of gray paper was being blown by the wind, but leaning in for a closer look, I saw four legs and a tail.
Ughuhuhuhuh.
I kept calm. I walked over to the passenger door, opened it up, and tried using a newspaper to shoo the little mouse out the door and back into nature. Instead, the little bugger scurried up behind the dashboard.
Dang it! Where was my killer instinct?! I should have rolled up the paper and swatted the thing to death when I had the chance!
Now I wasn't so calm. There was a mouse -- an alive, scampering mouse -- inside the car. I had to drive the car to get anywhere other than the strip-mall parking lot, which I definitely couldn't just hang around in all day, waiting for the mouse to kindly take its leave.
I cringingly slid into Cherry Cherry and drove around the backside of the building to the grocery store parking lot, next stop on my list. I envied the days when tight-rolled jeans were all the rage, because I was now seriously afraid that a mouse would crawl up my pant leg while I was driving, causing me to freak out, lose control of my car, and careen into one of the hundreds of other vehicles in this parking lot.
I parked without incident, jumped out of my car, and did what any girl would do. I called my dad.
"Dad! It's Tiffany!" I said when he answered. Long silence.
"What?"
"It's Tiffany!" I shouted. I understand why he was confused. He rarely uses his cell phone, and the only people who call him on it are people he works with out at the farm. I skipped the small talk and cut to the chase.
"Dad, I need help! There's a mouse in my car!" He chuckled.
"Have you seen it?"
"Yeah, I saw it! I tried to shoo it out but it ran up behind the dashboard."
"Oh, no."
"And it shredded a bunch of Kleenex in the back," I continued.
"Sounds like it's building a nest. Probably a mama about to have babies."
My heebie-jeebie factor skyrocketed. A whole family of mice taking up residence in my beloved Cherry Cherry??
"What do I do? If I put out rat poison, won't it die somewhere in my car and stink the whole thing up?"
"Well," my dad calmly said, "I think you'll want to use glue traps so you can throw them out once you catch them."
My dad's a freakin' genius!
Without further ado, I went inside to get my groceries and my mouse traps. Unfortunately, they didn't have mousetraps in the grocery store. Also unfortunately, it had started raining pretty hard while I was buying food, and because I'd pretty much catapulted myself out of my car once I parked it, I wandered around the lot for a while trying to find my poor mouse-infested Cherry Cherry, getting soaked but also rather dreading getting inside once I found it.
There's a K-Mart right across the street from the grocery store, but the two minutes it took to get there seemed like forever, wondering when the mouse was going to crawl up my pant leg. If it weren't pouring rain, I probably would have walked over to save myself the freak out.
The store had a fine selection of mouse traps, including two- and four-packs of glue traps. I went for the four, just in case there was an entire mouse colony settling in for the winter. You never know.
 | |
| Taken at a stoplight . . . |
I made it home without trauma and sent Kevin to check the traps when he got home from work a few hours later.
"If there's something trapped but it's still alive, kill it. That's the humane thing to do," I said. I was a lot more sensitive to the feelings of the mouse when I was nowhere near it.
Pretty soon there was a tap on the window. I could see Kevin holding something up in the semi-darkness, but I didn't look. I was cooking dinner, and I have a very sensitive gag reflex.
"Two!" he announced. Shiver. Gross.
This morning? Another freaking mouse in another glue trap. And Kevin had already gone to work, so I had to get rid of it myself.
Next time we're taking his car to the cabin.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Hello, I'm Tiffany and I'm a Talker . . .
I'm kind of a social person.
Not a shocker, you say?
Yeah, I know . . . but a few things happened this week that made me realize how isolated I felt this summer.
First, I had to go to the doctor's office. I didn't actually see a doctor, just played twenty questions with the nurse. As new patients, Kevin took his turn a few weeks back and I went in this week. Between answering her bazillion questions about everything from any history of seizures, blood clots, etc., to family health history as far back as my grandparents, I was talking the poor woman's ear off.
Even more evidence that I'm a fan of gabbing? She had a college student shadowing her for the day. You can take the youth director out of the church, but . . . well, let's just say I engaged in caring conversation with this young person. I asked about her nursing program, what she's liked about rotations so far, and twenty other things that I'm sure drove the nurse trying to put together a file for me absolutely insane. Somewhere in the middle of my story about how I wanted to be a brain surgeon when I was in sixth grade, but then almost fainted during the movie about the human heart, seeing all that blood . . . well, I realized that there were probably other patients waiting to be seen and I should maybe shut up and stick to the matter at hand.
Yep. It was like I'd been living in a cabin in the woods for three months.
We also had couch surfers this week, which I LOVE. If you've got a spare couch or a guest room and you love to meet people, I highly recommend signing up at couchsurfing.org. I used the site to find places to sleep as I made my way across America, and now that I'm settled with a spare bed, I'm loving that I finally get to pay it forward. The couple we hosted Thursday night were a cute pair of sixty-somethings from New Mexico. They retired this spring and are meandering from Minneapolis (where her brother lives) to Muscatine (where an old college friend lives) on a tandem bike. How cool is that? I made dinner, we heard about their adventures, and then we wandered down by the river for a while. As they pedaled away the next morning, I realized these were people I never would have met had it not been for this crazy people-connecting website. I love it!
But probably the biggest, most exciting thing of last week -- I went back to school. I've got a long-term sub job lined up for a woman going on maternity leave any day now. I shadowed her for two days last week, and it was so refreshing . . . to be in the classroom again, to have conversations over lunch in the teachers' lounge, and, frankly, just to get out of our apartment.
I guess overall it really hit me last week how lonely and isolated I'd felt this summer. Poor Kevin has had to endure my needy side who couldn't wait for someone to talk to at the end of every day.
It's hard to make friends as grown ups, don't you think? I read a book recently that said most adults feel that way. If you don't keep your college friends close, you pretty much have to wait 'til you have kids so you can elbow your way into a Mommy-and-Me group and make some new ones. We're not there yet, so that won't work for me.
And here's the thing that worries me: Kevin's leaving for Asia in a couple of weeks. He's going to be recruiting in several countries and gone for six weeks. SIX WEEKS. If I went a bit batty with only him for company this summer, what am I going to be like when left completely alone in this town where I know hardly anyone?
So here's the advice I need, friends: how do I pull on my big girl panties and make some new local buddies? What has worked for you? It seems so awkward at this age. I'd love to know how you've stepped out, taken a chance, or just fallen into a friendship if you were lucky. Give me tips or at least give me hope!
Maybe I should bring cupcakes to the teachers' lounge. That might be a start. ;)
Not a shocker, you say?
Yeah, I know . . . but a few things happened this week that made me realize how isolated I felt this summer.
First, I had to go to the doctor's office. I didn't actually see a doctor, just played twenty questions with the nurse. As new patients, Kevin took his turn a few weeks back and I went in this week. Between answering her bazillion questions about everything from any history of seizures, blood clots, etc., to family health history as far back as my grandparents, I was talking the poor woman's ear off.
Even more evidence that I'm a fan of gabbing? She had a college student shadowing her for the day. You can take the youth director out of the church, but . . . well, let's just say I engaged in caring conversation with this young person. I asked about her nursing program, what she's liked about rotations so far, and twenty other things that I'm sure drove the nurse trying to put together a file for me absolutely insane. Somewhere in the middle of my story about how I wanted to be a brain surgeon when I was in sixth grade, but then almost fainted during the movie about the human heart, seeing all that blood . . . well, I realized that there were probably other patients waiting to be seen and I should maybe shut up and stick to the matter at hand.
Yep. It was like I'd been living in a cabin in the woods for three months.
But probably the biggest, most exciting thing of last week -- I went back to school. I've got a long-term sub job lined up for a woman going on maternity leave any day now. I shadowed her for two days last week, and it was so refreshing . . . to be in the classroom again, to have conversations over lunch in the teachers' lounge, and, frankly, just to get out of our apartment.
I guess overall it really hit me last week how lonely and isolated I'd felt this summer. Poor Kevin has had to endure my needy side who couldn't wait for someone to talk to at the end of every day.
It's hard to make friends as grown ups, don't you think? I read a book recently that said most adults feel that way. If you don't keep your college friends close, you pretty much have to wait 'til you have kids so you can elbow your way into a Mommy-and-Me group and make some new ones. We're not there yet, so that won't work for me.
And here's the thing that worries me: Kevin's leaving for Asia in a couple of weeks. He's going to be recruiting in several countries and gone for six weeks. SIX WEEKS. If I went a bit batty with only him for company this summer, what am I going to be like when left completely alone in this town where I know hardly anyone?
So here's the advice I need, friends: how do I pull on my big girl panties and make some new local buddies? What has worked for you? It seems so awkward at this age. I'd love to know how you've stepped out, taken a chance, or just fallen into a friendship if you were lucky. Give me tips or at least give me hope!
Maybe I should bring cupcakes to the teachers' lounge. That might be a start. ;)
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