7 Quirky things about me

I've been tagged by Amy (my sister-in-law) to blog about 7 quirky things about me...we'll see what I can come up with. My friend Jen's is pretty funny too if you want to check it out.

1. I have a phobia of wet hair (not attached to someone's head). I HATE if I get a hair stuck to me in the shower or worse between my toes. Only recently have I EVER in my life been able to walk around after a shower without flip flops on. And i still definitely prefer not to. Wet feet touching the ground could totally pick up a hair and then I would totally freak out and probably feel ill.

2. Speaking of feeling ill, my emotions show themselves through my stomach. The whole weekend before Chris and I started to talk about dating, I threw up, a lot. Same thing the week before I graduated from college. And my whole pregnancy...oh wait, that was different.

3. I like washing dishes. It feels a little dangerous to admit it because I don't really want to wash everyone's dishes but I love the satisfaction of a disaster and then 20 minutes later, shining counter tops and an empty sink. Ahhhh...my daily joy.

4. My only (I think) nervous habit is picking at the skin on the inside of my thumb with my pointer finger. I know it's gross. Chris and Holly have chastised me for years but it's involuntary. It's kind of shame though because they often end up bleeding because I pick at it so much if I'm stressed. If you want to know how I'm doing emotionally-check out my thumbs :)

5. The one most people know and tease me about is my intense disgust with bones in food. I NEVER eat chicken wings, ribs, fried chicken....anything with bones. I also tend to be easily grossed out by meat inconsistencies like gristle or veins-if I see or suspect anything weird, I will be a vegetarian for that meal. Weird, I know.

6. Even if I'm totally exhausted, I have to read before I go to sleep. Even if it's only a couple pages, it's part of my routine and I HAVE to do it. Also have to wash my face before sleeping-can't sleep unless I do.

7. I have an irrational amount of fear of being outside in the dark. I always have. I had to get something out of my car the other night and Chris was out (or I would have asked him to do it-he's a good enabler!). I did it, but I put it off for hours and had slight heart palpitations for the 30 seconds it took me to run outside, grab what I needed, and walk back. This is progress though.

Well, 7 quirks were easier to come up with than I thought! I tag Holly , and Ellen :-) Your turn ladies!

Mabel

Because I'm in a Pastoral Counseling Program, the spiritual aspect of mental health care is very important. Because of that, in most of my classes students share a devotional/reflection/prayer at the beginning of each class. Tomorrow is my turn in one of my classes and I'm sharing this story. It's kinda long but worth it. It's from John Ortberg's The Life You've Always Wanted. I hope it blesses you as it has me.

Mabel’s Story

“The state-run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place. It is large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless and lonely people who are waiting to die. On the brightest of days it seems dark inside and it smell of sickness and stale urine. I went there once or twice a week for four years, but never wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief. It is not the kind of place one gets used to.

On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.

As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisor would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight they could stand anything in the building. I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been here, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years. This was Mabel.

I don’t know why I spoke to her-she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, ‘Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother’s Day.’ She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, ‘Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.’

I said, ‘Of course,’ and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, ‘Here, this is from Jesus.’

That was when it began to dawn on me that his was not an ordinary human being. Later I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history. She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to the convalescent hospital. For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches, and stomachaches, and then the cancer came too. Her three roommates were all human vegetables who screamed occasionally but never talked. They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was understaffed, especially on Sundays when I usually visited, the stench was often overpowering.

Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed. Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word. On other days I would take a book of hymns and sing with her, and she would know all the words of the old songs. For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory. She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns.

It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder, and I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say …

During one hectic week of final exams I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me “What does Mabel have to think about – hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night? So I went to her and asked, ‘Mabel, what do you think about when you lay here?’

And she said, ‘I think about my Jesus.’

I sat there, and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, ‘What do you think about Jesus?’ She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote …:

‘I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know.… I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. … Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think. Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.’

And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go,
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad He makes me glad.
He’s my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know. I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening – and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it?

The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there in the bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power.

As Mabel said 'He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know.… I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied....Jesus is all the world to me.’ "

In REAL time!

So, any of you who are actually involved in my day to day life know that I've been a blogging cheater. I have been way behind in blogging so I've been writing a bunch at once and scheduling posts days ahead so it's not overwhelming for those of you who actually track this blog. Well, it's confusing because I get comments about things that happened two weeks ago and I'm confused and I feel like I'm lying to people. I know that's a little dramatic but somehow scheduling posts has felt more stressful than just posting what's actually going on when it happens. And if I miss a day (or 10) that's ok.

So, this post is REAL LIFE, REAL TIME. This happened TODAY! October 28, 2008! Welcome back to my actual life, as it happens :-)

Ella and I went to Michael's after I picked her up from preschool and bought some beads and had quite a crafty afternoon :-)


She made the pink necklace she's wearing and then after showing loyalty to her favorite color, was willing to move on to mixing colors for her second project (a necklace that is about 3 feet long!).

I made this bracelet and the necklace you can see on the floor-we really enjoyed it!


Then...Ella had rest time in her bed for an hour. I had the monitor on the whole time and it sounded like everything was fine. However, when I went in to get her, she had 1)ripped apart an entire, hardback, pop-up book AND 2)peed in her bed. WHAT THE HECK??? Both of these things are very frustrating because she's really old enough to not do them AT ALL. SO frustrating.


Then...

I find her snuggled up in a chair reading my Bible. How can you stay frustrated with a kid who sits and quietly "reads" a Bible being extremely careful with the super-thin pages. She pointed out numbers she recognized and she sat there for 25 minutes. How do you go from destructive to angelic in literally 2 minutes??

Soon after that, Chris got home and we got to the pre-dinner event for today-Pumpkin Carving!


Ella loves saying "Woo-Woo!!" and cheering when things go her way. This time she popped an eye out of the pumpkin all by herself.


Our Finished Products!

Good Day :-)

Duckpins

Stacy had the great idea to take the kids duckpin bowling and it ended up being a lot of fun. All 3 cousins could do it with varying degrees of success. Ella's balls often took 5 minutes (literally) to make it down the lane (or stopped midway) but she improved with time. Christopher (almost 4) was a pretty impressive bowler and Hannah also did pretty well. The adults had a good time getting to throw the tiny ball reallllly hard (with mixed results). Good times!


Ella getting a lesson from Daddy

Stacy leading the kids in a rousing round of "Go Mommy Go!"

Ella's flourish after basically dropping the ball while we watched it inch down the alley

Amy is an intense bowler (not really but this picture cracks me up!)

Christopher actually took this picture of Chris! I love it! Leave it to a 3 year old to capture Chris' essence :-)

Apple and Pumpkin Picking!

Ella was quite industrious about picking apples-even though her friends were there and I thought she'd just play. This is her coming out from under a tree where she'd picked some saying "I got some good ones Mom!!"

All of the kids got a turn getting hoisted up by super-tall uncle Chris (aka daddy)



I love this one of Stacy, Christopher, and Ella. We had a great time (even though we lost Ella's hearing aid while we were there-oh well, it's bound to happen sometimes-that's why God provides insurance!)

Ella's favorite things

These days Ella's favorite things are:

Painting
Dress up
Milk
Being read to or "reading" by herself
Ni-Hao Kai-Lan (She LOVES this show, and has learned some Chinese from it!)
The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Soundtrack
Jumping off of everything
Peanut butter and honey sandwiches
Play-doh
The Color Pink (she's been able to articulate for a few months now that it is her favorite and
requests everything possible in pink)
Here are some recent pictures of some such activities :-)

Plumbing and Pumpkin Cookies

Last week while Chris was gone we made pumpkin shaped cookies and recorded each step so we could show him-we had so much fun. That's the good part of what happened that morning. The bad part is that the day before I made an apple pie for my sister's birthday and put ALL of the apple peels and cores down the garbage disposal. I tend to be rather liberal with what I trust the disposal can handle (obviously). Well this time, it was a bridge too far and the sink would no longer drain. So, soon after we made cookies, I attempted to fix our clogged garbage disposal by dismantling the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Ella and I watched how-to videos on you-tube and she seemed fascinated but then when i said "that's what mommy's going to do!" she promptly asked to go watch TV. So, I spent an hour under the sink, got covered in all kinds of nasty liquids and it didn't work. Not, on cookie making day anyway.

However, I tried again a couple days later (all the while never mentioning to Chris that our dishwasher was now full of water and flooding the kitchen or that I had to wash dishes in the bathroom). On this second try, when I really dismantled EVERY SINGLE pipe, tube, and connector thingy under the sink, it worked!!! Problem fixed and just in time. Chris came home the next day and only heard the happy ending not the-"ummm....so while you were gone..." confession I thought I was going to have to make. Yay! I'm a plumber!!! Oh yeah, so here are the cookie pictures :-)


Yes we used pre-made cookie dough-don't judge-we're working with a 2 year old's attention span here.

rolling

cutting

ready to bake!

ready to decorate (I got these cool food-coloring markers, too bad they only worked for the first few)

The final product :-)

Abuela's Birthday!

My Mom turned 65! Her party was unusual and a lot of fun. Thanks mom for such a fun day and evening! And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

First we went to a "bra-stretching" Breast Cancer awareness event where the 10 of us my mom invited brought bras and joined a ton of other women in hooking them together and stretching them almost a mile! It was a cool event and there were a lot of survivors (including 2 in our group!) with great stories.


My grandmother was there-she's a 14 year Breast Cancer Survivor!

Next we went across the street to one of the nicest spas I've ever been to and everyone spent almost 3 hours there getting pampered! It was soooo nice. I must go back...(hint, hint Chris)

Afterwards we had a catered dinner at my parents house, cake, and dancing to live music from my father-in-law's band! Ella stayed up until 11pm and did really well-she cried when we left and I'm sure I was more tired than she was (she napped for 4 hours that afternoon in preparation!) Great party :-)

Jazz & Wine Festival

This weekend we went to a Jazz & Wine Festival about 30 minutes from here and had a lot of fun and took a lot of pictures! Here are some of the good ones :-)


Grandpa, Aunt Stacy and 2 of the cousins


Ella spent most of the time running and dancing to the live jazz band

She spent some of the time doing this because the music was too loud (or bad)

chillin' post-running around like a wild girl

Christopher, my nephew, posing with a fish flag-he kept calling people over and saying "Whoa! Look in it's mouth!!! There's fish guts!"

Ella and Aunt Stacy relaxing

Headed home a couple hours later. The kids were not very cooperative so it soon looked like...

this :-)

And finally a family pic before we left.

Just for comparison, this is us exactly two years ago at the same festival!