Oh, woe to me.

If you can tell me what movie that line is from, I'll give you a cookie! ;) Look at me blogging after only two days! See, I'm making an effort. If only I had this much motivation every day of the week...

SO! Watching shows like "Kids Say the Darndest Things" (I'm having issues with the word darndest. Surely that it is not in fact an actual word.) always makes me laugh. It also makes me take a step back and think about when I was a child how I misinterpreted the world around me. From a kid's perspective, things get pretty jumbled up, and generally parents have no idea their kids are even confused. Example? I grew up in the church. My parents were die hard Jesus freaks and so every Sunday morning, I would first attend Sunday School and then be dragged into what became known as "Big Church." Where my siblings, peers, and I got this phrase is still up for debate.. I think it had something to do with the fact that grown-ups were bigger than we were. At any rate, I have very vivid memories of the times spent in worship. Most of the songs I learned by heart long before I could read, so sometimes the actual lyrics to the hymn versus what I was hearing around did not always match up. I clearly remember standing between my mom and my dad as a four year old, singing at the top of my lungs: "He is exalted, the King is exalted, and I, I will praise Him!" Little did my parents know that I had no idea what the word "exalted" meant. In fact, my little girl brain registered "exalted" as "salted," and I spent numerous nights pondering why in the world we would want to salt Jesus. But who was I to question the often bizarre and absurd world our parents lived in? You know what I'm talking about.. that strange, almost 4th dimensional realm that, as kids, we saw adults circulating in. Grown-ups had strange grooming rituals ("Mommy, why are you putting that green slime on your face?") and even stranger mating habits (we all remember how our faces contorted in horror upon being given the knowledge of procreation). I can only imagine how much Mason (the little guy I nanny for) is picking up from me. I tend to spend a lot of time talking to him as if he were an adult rather than a child.. sometimes I don't even notice I'm doing it. I will jabber on and on about life and things he should know and what surfaces or objects he should avoid because they are crawling with germs and deadly bacteria that could, at any given moment, stage a coupe against our healthy immune systems. And while we're on the subject of nasty amoeba's, if you have a child that is still in the phases where they want to stick everything in their mouth, I strongly suggest NOT having a cat that is allowed both indoors and outdoors. I almost had heart failure when I noticed Mason chewing on something, only to discover it was a feather from a dead bird the cat, Milton, had dragged into the house and generously deposited on the rug in the hallway in front of the bathroom.. I was convinced Mason had become infected with some horrid bird disease.

With all that said, it's funny how we, as adults, take certain things for granted. I'm not talking about people or money or what not, I'm talking about things that just are. Case and point? The garbage disposal. When was the last time you really sat down and thought long and hard about how the garbage disposal works and where all that junk in the sink goes? Well, my last time was in fact today. Our sink has had a leak for heaven only knows how long now, and neither Anna nor I have gotten around to call in the little man to fix it. We were not surprised when the sink started backing up. But when Anna turned on the garbage disposal, the problem made itself more than apparent. I said to her, from my spot across the room on the couch, that it appeared to be broken, and she agreed. She then mentioned that she had tried to collect all of the little ends of the Otter Pops I had cut off into the sink, but maybe some had escaped. I stared at her blankly. I had no idea what Otter Pop ends had to do with our congested sink. Anna, in her calm and patient manner, said to me, "Plastic isn't biodegradable." Again, a blank stare. I KNOW plastic isn't biodegradable, but again, what did that have to do with the kitchen sink? All of a sudden, I started to feel the earth tilt on it's axis.. something was not right. Anna obviously knew something that I did not. This brings us back to the idea of things that just ARE. In Amber World, word association is a must. Because the term "garbage disposal" has the word garbage in it, I immediately assumed that anything you throw down the sink inevitably ends up at the garbage dump with last night's leftovers and Dan's holey sock. Apparently, friends, this is not the case. My entire life, I just assumed that anything that was small enough to fit in the sink hole and also frail enough to be chopped up in the disposal's metal teeth were fair game. But this is just not so. In fact, the garbage disposal actually ends up dumping into the sewer system along with the water being flushed with it (how I did not put those two together, I don't know). So really, we shouldn't be putting anything down the garbage disposal other than maybe food debris left over from dinner. Plastic Otter Pop tops are a definite no no, along with all the hard artichoke pieces I recall trying to jam down there... that body was probably a bad idea.. hmmmm.. ;)

I seriously do not know how I have gone through my entire life not knowing where the garbage disposal leads. In Germany, we didn't even HAVE a garbage disposal, so apparently the magic only happens in the United States. But it makes me a little nervous.. I mean, how many other things do I take for granted? I remember the first time I had to pull the garbage out to the curb because Dan was out in the field. The first time around, I forgot all together. Apparently, the garbage man does not have time to drag my garbage out from the backyard. German trash only gets picked up every other week, so by the time the NEXT garbage day rolled around, I was more than ready to get it out of my house before it grew legs or started talking. But get this! There is no magic "Trash Can Return" fairy! After days of our garbage cans being the only ones still sitting out on the street, the little old lady downstairs ended up dragging them back behind the house herself. Dan always did it without talking about it, so it never even crossed my mind that I would need to put them back. Along those same lines is my problem with washing my own car. I have four brothers and two dads, so there has never been any need for me to wash or clean out my own car. All I knew was that every couple of months, I would walk out to my car and find it fresh as a daisy with a wax job to boot. Obviously, the Car Wash Fairy had been running amock the night before. Imagine my surpirse when, upon getting married, my car started to get dirtier and dirtier without any explaination as to why. I had assumed Dan would be the new Car Wash Fairy. I guess the tights didn't fit.

Anyway, it's late, and I have to work bright and early tomorrow morning. I will be spending the day trying to refrain from using any words that Mason may subconsciously be storing away to use as blackmail against me when he goes through his terrible two's. Oh, and P.S., I looked it up. Damndest is a word, and therefore darndest gets to be a word by default.