Save Your Marriage and Keep the Wrinkles at Bay!!

Lately I have not been around my little blog world much, and for good reason. I have been working on my newest anti-wrinkling scheme.

Just last week I was doing some research for my always informative, well maybe not always informative, beauty column at Takerootandwrite.com and I stumbled upon a little article about how it could be true that if you "make that face long enough, it could stay that way."

So I started thinking about the weird facial expressions I make all throughout the day and thought about the horrors of permanent wrinkle lines in the shape of my most famous brow scowl.


I tried to count in one day how many times I make that face, and I got lost around 535. Every time I come across a problem at work, read something totally off-the-wall, find Kaydn Rye with an open bag of Fun Dip in the living room (why in the world do people give kids FUN DIP for Valentine's Day? WHY???) or just in general when hubby comes home. He'll say something totally weird and I respond with this.....



Or this....




Or there's the not quite as famous lip smooch face. This is the face I make about three-quarters of the work day. It's my "I am in deep thought about jury verdicts (you know, since I write jury verdicts for a living)" face. Or while I'm driving, or while just staring out the window (which I do quite a lot of - it's called writer's block) or even while cooking dinner, I have caught myself making this face.



Or this one...



Don't ask my why I took five minutes out of my day to snap pictures of my bizarre faces.

I'm going to have a "furrowed brow, pursed lip permaface" for the rest of my life, unless I act fast. Having a child and a husband doesn't help the furrow brow, but I have come to the conclusion that I must be annoyed probably 90 percent of the day. I came to the this conclusion on Sunday while talking with another couple in our church who have taken it upon themselves to meet with us regularly for I guess what you'd call marriage discipleship. (Who knew marriage was going to be THIS hard?) No one has ever taken the time to really take us under their wings (Take, this broken wing, and learn to fly again...okay no more songs and no more parentheses today) and guide us through some sound Biblical truths on marriage and staying together, until now.

So anyway, we were sitting at their table on Sunday discussing some deep marriage stuff when we stumbled upon one of the questions in the back of the marriage book we're all reading together, Sacred Marriage, which is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read, by the way. One of the chapter questions reads, "What are some things about your partner that annoy you?" The chapter was all about respecting your partner, despite their weaknesses, and yada yada yada. So hubby had a couple actually pretty insignificant things that he rattled off, and this just set me off - to say the least. Another part of this question is to remain calm and not absolutely freak out at your partner's answers, and I definitely failed.

We somehow get around to me, and I don't list anything specific. Instead I just blurt out, "I'm just always annoyed!"

At that moment I was like, whoa, I AM always annoyed. What is my problem??

So, long story short, not only did I not know that I could spew marriage advice and anti-wrinkle advice all in the same post, but now you see how being constantly annoyed in your marriage can cause wrinkles. And nobody needs that. And that big revelation about my own character flaws? Well, let's just say that this week I have only made the furrow brow face 535 during the entire week, not just on Monday. I call that personal growth.




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Let's Watch it in Turkish This Time....

This past week has been rife with french movies, sugar addictions and "See, I didn't lie!"

To start, a couple of weeks ago Kaydn Rye somehow stumbled upon the fact that he has the option of watching The Bee Movie (which I think is one of the lamest movies ever created) in french. I don't know how that happened, but now he watches all of his movies in french. Not spanish, not english, not even Turkish. None of those will do, only french.

And every once in awhile as he's watching a movie, he can be overheard trying to mimic what the characters are saying. And it comes out something like, "Ubablu blap blufla toladoolo blaloo."

And let's just say that he gets really, really upset if he hears you quietly laughing at him as he practices his french.

Also hilarious this week is the revelation that he will apparently go into shock if he is denied candy.

While on our way to the bank the other day he was already planning out what color sucker he was going to grab from the bank teller when I very politely told him that since he had just inhaled both his lunch and two pounds of Valentine candy for dessert, he could pick out a sucker but he'd have to wait to eat it until after his nap so his stomach would not explode.

His response to this?

"Well I need some sugar now or my stomach will go into shock."

What in the world? Shock? How does he even know there is such a thing as "going into shock?" I don't know, but to avoid laughing hysterically I just ended the conversation there.

Oh, and his new favorite line is, "See, I didn't lie."

Just the other day he had a little bit of an accident, which I would not have been too upset about except that it was while we were in town and at the mall of all places. I made the 55-mile trek into town on Thursday so that Kaydn Rye could attend the birthday party of one of his little friends from church, and afterwards he felt like while we were in town he was also entitled to a trip to the mall, namely Barnes and Noble so that he could play with the trainset in the kids' book section. (That darned train drives me insane.) I agreed, but because I was absolutely brain dead at the time I let him have a little ice cream cone before we made our way into the bookstore.

Keep in mind, Kaydn Rye has a big of a lactose intolerance problem, which is why I don't let him have ice cream unless we're at home in our bathroom. Actually, his lactose intolerance is what created the "hole in the bathroom" situation recently. See Holes in the Bathroom.

I must have been completely out of my mind that day. Even worse is that while I was sitting there, a friend of mine saw me and started chatting. She had just come back from the bathroom because her little man had had an "accident" as well. At that time I of course was thinking, "Whew, I'm so glad I'm not still dealing with potty accidents anymore. Lucky me."

So, she leaves and as I'm just sitting there staring at the wall while he plays trains, he suddenly starts doing his potty dance and we rush to the bathroom. We made it there in time, but apparently he was not finished doing his "business" when we left the bathroom because I eventually had a bit of a mess on my hands. The worst part of the situation, I didn't realize I even had a mess on my hands until we had made our way into Wal-Mart, approximately an hour after we had left Barnes and Noble. So I was forced to actually face the Super Wal-Mart bathroom in an attempt at cleaning up whatever I could.

And when asked why he did not tell me about the mess ASAP, he had no reason. I explained to him that not telling me something was the same as lying and that since I brought him into the world I could take him out of this world. I was pretty livid about the whole ordeal and he got the message loud and clear that he had better not EVER withhold the truth from me.

So now, he feels the need to tell me about absolutely everything that runs across his little brain, for fear of withholding anything, and then he proudly proclaims, "See, I didn't lie...I will never do that again," with a huge grin on his little face. It's like he's trapped in the sequel to Liar, Liar.



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Abandoned Port a Potty and Fenceposts in the Snow

This picture about sums up the North Dakota experience. For some reason, even though I spent 17 years amongst the snow-bound eskimoes, the complete whiteness of the countryside on the way into town struck me as so interesting the other day. Many winters would go by where by the end of it, you couldn't even see the fence posts along the road. And believe me, the fence posts are usually the only things left to break up all the white.

Can you see the port-a-potty almost buried in the snow? I was just driving by and I actually backed up to take this picture on my cell phone. I don't know what the heck a port-a-potty is doing in the middle of nowhere, but it struck me as absolutely hilarious.

But you know what I've always found interesting about North Dakotans, especially in light of my years in the South? Well, in Memphis, if the temperature hits 50 degrees in the winter, you'll see people walking down the street in their parka, mittens, and big fluffy scarfs. Yet on Sunday, when it was maybe upwards of 1 degree above zero, at church I saw a lady in flipflops. FLIPFLOPS! And then at Wal-Mart I saw a kid, maybe 10-years-old, in capri pants and shoes with no socks. I don't know what kind of mother would let their kid go out in subzero temperatures in capri pants and no socks.

The other interesting thing about North Dakota is the fact that you can get all my North Dakota-native, Norwegian-ancestried relatives in a room together in the middle of winter, and all you'll hear is complaint after complaint after complaint about how it's so cold and there's so much snow. This, coming from people who have lived in North Dakota THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. When you get my aunts, my parents, my grandparents, my cousins, they have all lived in North Dakota probably a million and two years accumulatively, yet they all still complain about the weather.

But I'm sure they still live in North Dakota despite all the winter complaining because in the summer when it's 95 above, while I'm off basking in the sun at the lake, all you hear is complaint after complaint after complaint about how it's so hot and it's so humid and it's so hot that they all just want to take their clothes off. Okay, that was not a pleasant picture. A bunch of Norwegians in a room together without their clothes - not good. I'll leave it at that.




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Confessions of a Three-Year-Old

It is time again for Confessions of A Three-Year-Old, courtesy of Mary at Notbefore7.com. I'm not sure why there were no confessions last week except that I must have been doing other things.

This week's confessions start with beans. Yes, beans.

During one of our daily family prayer times last week, hubby began praying for a couple he knows from some local missionary work that he did last year. Their last name is "Bean" and apparently without letting Kaydn Rye know who in the heck he was praying for, he started praying for "The Beans." There was nothing extraordinary in that until the following night when he again prayed for "The Beans."

As soon as hubby finished praying, his curiosity must have finally gotten the best of him, and with a very consternated look on his face, Kaydn Rye asked, "Why are we praying for beans?"

I felt like saying something like, "Well, because even vegetables need prayer every once in a while," but I decided against such a smart-alek remark.

And then there was the question about the blinking tower right outside of town. We were driving past the tower the other night, and of course he had to ask me what it's for. I don't know how many times in a day I get asked, "What does that do?" "What's that for?" "Why are you doing that?"

Uffda, it's enough to drive me to crazy town some days.

So with this particular question I just started rambling on about how I didn't know what the tower was for but that it could be this, this or this.

He replied with, "Hmm, interesting," with his finger tapping his chin, like he was really debating all the possibilities for some research paper he's got in the works. Talk about enlightening conversation.

And he apparently had an interesting conversation with one his little preschool friends who made his way over to our house one afternoon last week. He's a little bit older and he balances out my kid's bossiness quite well. Kaydn Rye thinks he's Hitler and instead of getting upset about being a part of Kaydn's little bootcamp, this little boy usually just says, "No problem, buddy," which is definitely a delight until I can break the bossiness out of the kid. Talk about a laid-back kid to balance out my super-anal, OCD, control freak child.

At lunch time, a train went by and Kaydn's little friend is apparently just as into trains as Kaydn is because he jumped off the chair and started looking to see if he could spot the train. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

"I wonder where that train's going?"

"Hmm, maybe Canada, I don't know." says Kaydn Rye, with a furrowed brow and a tilt to his head.

"It could be going to Montana, too," replies his friend.

"Yep, could be." says Kaydn Rye.

I swear I just overheard my grandparents having that exact same conversation at their dinner table the other day.

And today, Kaydn Rye is on my parents' farm until tomorrow so he can spend a little time with them before the cows start calving and things get busy on the farm. Apparently, my little brother asked Kaydn to go sledding, but of course he couldn't do that because it's not safe on the sled. So he just ended up standing on the sled hill while my brother went down. And then my mom asked him if he wanted to go outside again to burn garbage with her (they obviously don't have garbage pick-up in the middle of nowhere), but he couldn't do that because he might burn his finger. He was going to make his way with her to go feed the cats in the barn last I talked to them. When he got there he probably made up some excuse about how my mom would have to hold him because the cats aren't safe. I don't know where he gets this stuff.



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