Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

Learn About Laura: Chapter Two

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You learned a bit about my school life…now I’ll tell you more of my home life. Here are some farm memories..in no particular order:

  • My dad was a farmer when I was growing up. He was busy all the time. My parents did a good job of hiding it from us kids, but there was a lot of financial stress. It was at that time that my dad went to school to learn how to “talk fast” (to be an auctioneer). He also referreed basketball in the winter. He did odd jobs for other farmers. He worked hard (still does). 
  • I remember long, hot, busy summers. My brother helped my dad in the field…I helped my mom in the house. Often we had teen boys living with us during the summers to help my dad on the farm. I always thought that was fun. My mom didn’t. I think it was something about all the extra laundry and cooking they caused. :)  Those summers, I would bake a batch of cookies every day. By the time I was a fifth grader…I could bake them with my hands tied behind my back (er, so to speak).
  • I remember taking lunches to the field during wheat harvest. I loved it. My mom didn’t. Sometimes I would spend the day at my grandma’s helping her get food ready to take to the field. I also spent a lot of Saturdays at Grandma’s when my dad had auctions before I was old enough to help. I LOVED being at Grandma’s. I got my love for baking and cooking from her. 
  • When I was old enough to learn to drive, my dad tried teaching me to drive a stick shift. I have extreme traumatic memories of that. Driving a stick shift vehicle was harder for me than popping a balloon with my bootie….and we all know that the balloon never popped. Neither did I learn to drive a stick shift. I still break out in hives just thinking about it. 
  • Kevin and I were in 4-H…and raised pigs each year. I always started the summer pretending that my cute little pigs were my pets. After a long…oh, I don’t know…two days or so…the pigs weren’t cute anymore. They were big, smelly, and a lot of work. And one summer….they kept getting out of their pen. Sometimes I would be the only one home. Like I could get big, fat, snorting pigs back into a pen by myself? Oh the stress. 
  • And also….about the pigs? We took them to the fair every year to be judged. Have you ever tried to walk a pig around in a big pen in front of judges and before a big crowd of people? (hives, again)  Anyway, one year, both mine and Kevin’s pigs looked exceptional to the judges. He got grand champion pig, and I got reserve grand champion pig. We both got Golden Pig Trophies (if you think I’m kidding, I’m not). It was one proud day when I walked away from the fair with my golden pig trophy. Wonder what ever happened to that trophy?
  • Here’s my most favorite memory of growing up on a farm:  Oh wait…that’s going to take too long to write. I think that will be a part of chapter three. :)

Sooo…did any of you grow up on a farm? Anybody break out in hives driving a stick shift? Ever have any pigs in your yard? Have any Golden Pig Tropheys to brag about?!

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Learn About Laura: Chapter One

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I was born on the very first day of my life in a small Kansas town. 

My brother, Kevin was only 14 months old. My mom often talked about how difficult…and how fun it was to have two babies so close together. We grew up much like twins, doing new things at the same time. I don’t think the “birth order thing” really applies to us so much, since we were so close in age and he a boy and me a girl. 

My parents would have loved to have more kids…but when I was three my mom developed a tumor in her uterus. She had surgery, then months of treatments. I don’t remember any of that time.  Grandmas and aunts and neighbors took turns helping to take care of us while Mom was weak and sick. She told me once that during that time, she wished so badly that she had the strength even to just fold a load of laundry. I try to remember that wisdom when I feel whiny about all the laundry I have to fold.

Mom made a full recovery and the cancer never came back. Mom and Dad would celebrate her birthdays heartily, having learned the hard way that life is precious.

When I started school, I had a very hard time…probably because of some insecurities I developed when my mom was sick and I was passed around a lot. My mom always felt bad about that. I cried a lot at school and had tummy aches. I finally “came out of my shell” a little in the seventh grade. (I never knew I was in a shell before that…but that’s what my volleyball coach told my mom. What am I, a turtle?)

Here are some exciting memories you’d probably love to hear about my school years:

  • In first grade we put a note and our school address inside a balloon and sent them off from the playground. Months later the school received a letter from some guy in California. My balloon had made it all the way from KS to CA and lived to tell about it. I was a six year old celebrity. (I mean, they put an article in the Pratt Tribune and everything.)
  • Ooh, another first grade balloon memory… For our class Christmas  party, one of the moms had us play a game where you had to sit on a balloon and pop it. I gave it all I had, but I could NOT pop my balloon (I was so stinkin’ scrawny). Kristina’s mom finally came and pushed down on me real hard to get my balloon to pop. It still didn’t pop. All the moms laughed and I thought they were laughing at me. (sniff)
  • In the fifth grade, we did a musical called, K.I.D.S. Radio. My friend had to do a solo called, “Figaro”…about a dog and she had to sing, “Bow Wow, Bow Wow” several times. I was SO glad I didn’t have to sing the Figaro song.
  • I hated P.E. Always.
  • I cussed twice in the fifth grade. I called Wesley a “Jack—“. I said it to impress Joey. I’m pretty sure he was impressed. That summer, I cried and confessed to my mother my potty mouth. I never cussed again.
  • I started to play sports in the seventh grade. I played volleyball and basketball and ran track. I was never very good, but I tried hard. (Kevin got all the athletic genes.)  When we lifted weights in high school, I was always the one who “benched” the least amount of weight. It was that scrawny thing coming back to haunt me.
  • My junior year, I tore a ligament in my knee while playing volleyball, which pretty much killed my sporting career, even though I didn’t really have a sporting career to begin with. For a few months, I had to wear a thing on my left leg that was half cast – half brace. The only kind of pants I could wear were sweat pants. I bought a pair of sweats in every color and even wore them when I sang in choir concerts. Lovely. My left leg is still slightly smaller than my right leg (muscle wise). Lovely.
  • I played the flute.
  • I had 17 kids in my graduation class. Impressive number isn’t it?

Well, we’ll stop there for now. Did you hate P.E. or love it? Did you play an instrument? Could YOU get a balloon to pop with your bottom in the first grade? (sniff)

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Learning About Laura: Prologue

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As if you don’t already know too many things about me….I thought I take my Christmas break to tell you everything about my life and more (or less). Then, you can decide if you still want to read my blog or not. (Oh, please come back.)

Really, I just figured that it would be good for you to know more about the whole me. About what has shaped me into the person I am today…then you can read and watch as I continue to be molded by God. It’s hard to look back on your life sometimes and see who you used to be. But really, isn’t that the point of growing and being molded? 

We can’t start out the way we will end up. (Wow, Laura. Profound.)

I really will try not to bore you with too many details. Like what color of shirt I was wearing when Matt and I went on our first date (red and white striped, button up, by the way) or what my favorite cereal was in Kindergarten (Cheerios). And I’ll try to refrain from telling you about all the thousands of ways my brother tortured me growing up. That’s another book in and of itself.  I guess that’s what helped me grow into who I am today too, huh? (Although I don’t see how him pouring water into my ear while I tried to sleep really helped me grow into a better person, do you?)  (Perhaps I have some bitterness issues?)  (Ah, Kevin…you know I love you.)  (Like Kevin actually reads my blog?)  (Yeah, well his wife does…so I’d better be careful.)  (Hey, Michele! What’s up? Great guy you married, that Kevin.)

I find it hard to pick and choose what information you really should learn about me. Like…do I really want you to know what my high school nickname was? It’s horrible. And…I’ve shared some pretty dorky things I’ve done in the past…do I really want you to know more? 

And, some things are painful to write. What deep places within my heart do I need to draw from to share with you? 

I think I’ll just start writing and let God lead me. My prayer is that what I write will be beneficial to you and encourage you. I hope to make you laugh. But it isn’t all funny. I may have to skip some of those parts.

Thank you for being my audience. 

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Learn About Laura One Story at a Time: The Day of the Fire

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve taken the time to embarass myself in front of you. (I should work on being more motivated.)

Thought you might like to hear about the time I burned down an entire barn. (I mentioned it so long ago. I was hoping you’d forget, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t.)

(I’d like to.)

I was a senior in high school. So, somewhere in between getting my senior pictures taken, filling out scholarship applications, and having a really bad case of “senioritis”…I also burned down the barn on our family farm.

Lest you think I was a 17 year old playing with matches, I need to let you know that because we lived in the country, we were allowed to burn our own trash. Quite opposite of enjoying matches, I was always afraid of the little sticks. My mom never could get me to light a candle for her in the house and I certainly never wanted to burn the trash.

But finally one Saturday, she took me out to the trash barrel with her and showed me (again) how to light a match and catch the trash on fire. I guess she figured it was one of those skills I really should learn before leaving home in a few months. So like all good daughters, I watched carefully and learned how to light a piece of a garbage on fire.

Fastforward to the following Saturday. We were cleaning house like we always did on Saturdays, but Mom started to not feel well so she went to go lay down.

I decided to keep cleaning and surprise her with a clean house when she got up. And then I decided that I really wanted to surprise her with what a brave girl I was by burning the trash all by myself. (Sounds like I was five, but really, really the burning the trash thing really freaked me out.)

So out I went with the bags of trash and the matches, working up my courage all the way to the barrel. I got the match going on the second try, which I felt so good about. The trash was now burning and Mom would be so proud.

Perhaps I should stop here and tell you that I was so concerned about the fact that I would be suprising Mom with a clean house and by the fact that I had actually burned the trash myself that I didn’t consider the fact that the wind was blowing pretty hard. Oops.

I don’t know why I chose to look outside later – probably to look out proudly at my burning trash. But look outside I did. I noticed that some of the trash had blown out of the barrel way over to the grass in front of the barn. I thought, “Hmm. That can’t be good.”

So I went out there to stamp out the “bit of fire” I had seen from the window.

(Okay…I’m starting to have stress at this point of telling the story. It’s okay, Laura. Just relax. It was years and years ago, and no one got hurt. It’s okay.)

I went out to stamp out the fire – but really – it wasn’t very stamp out-able. There were quite a few pieces of trash and the grass in front of the barn was tall and dry – and it was pretty windy. (How did I not notice the wind before?)

I decided that I’d better go wake up Mom. (This was not quite the way I had planned to surprise her.)

She was realllly groggy, so she was quite disoriented when I was trying to tell her about the trash burning by the barn. But she went out there with me and we dragged our little garden hose over to the burning patches of burning grass. The hose produced a little trickle that barely even got our hands wet. (I’m PRETTY sure we looked ridiculous holding that dinky hose with a tiny bit of water dripping out!! We laughed about that later. Much later.)

Then we noticed that the fire was spreading to inside the barn. I was kind of feeling somewhere in the middle of being freaked out and being in denial that the barn was now on fire. I mean – THIS could not be happening!

We went in and called the “fire department” which in Tiny Town USA, meant a bunch of volunteer farmers. When the first guys got there, they saw that the fire was now bigger than they could handle so they started calling all the other fire departments in all the surrounding communities.

They sent Mom and me back into the house while they worked. At this point, they decided that there was nothing they could do to save the barn so they just started to spray down all of the other buildings on our farm so that the heat from the flames wouldn’t catch them on fire too. I was in the house crying and watching the huge barn I had played in all my life be engulfed in flames. The fire was now HUGE…because that was one huge barn. And, while we actually didn’t use the barn much anymore – it was full of old, dry hay. Lots of old, dry hay. The fire was huge.

My dad, in the meantime, had been on a tractor a few miles away. He saw the smoke growing larger and larger in the direction of our house. He finally got nervous enough to get into his pick-up and come on home. The closer he got, the more afraid he got because the fire really looked like it was coming from our place. He knew Mom and I were home, and he was afraid that it was our house on fire.

So while I was freaking out and crying and panicking about what my Daddy would say when he saw that I had burned down our barn, he was just so thankful when he pulled into the yard that it was just the barn and that we were safe.

Well, I guess there’s nothing much more to tell. The barn and all the hay smoldered for about two weeks, which was a really fun and long reminder of what had happened. I called my brother, who was away at college, to tell him what had happened. The way I was crying and carrying on trying to tell him the story, he was worried that someone had died or something – so when I finally got it out that the barn had burned down – he was also relieved that it was just the barn.

And then it just gave him one more thing to tease me about… :)

So there you go.

What I’d like to know is – have YOU done anything like that will top that one? Please tell me I’m not the only one with outrageous memories and stories to tell.

Whew…I’m exhausted. ;)

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Learning About Laura, One Story at a Time: A Great Way to Freak out Your Doctor

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Here is the long awaited story that I promised to tell you about how our third son, Elias was almost born in the doctor’s office.

Prerequisite information is:  My total labor and delivery time with our firstborn, Asa, was a six hours. With Justus…total time was three hours. With both of them, my water broke first…then labor started…um, quickly and intensely.

(And for all of you who had 46 hour labors…please don’t start throwing tomatoes…I am just the person who helps the average labor length be what it is…and um, so are you…we’re just on opposite ends.) ;)

Anyway…when your second labor lasts half the time of your first labor…you pack your bags and are ready to leave for the hospital for the birth of your third child about the time you see two pink lines on the stick. 

I KNEW I couldn’t mess around with getting to the hospital…and my doctor should have known too. (Guess he was just sorta used to the 46 hour labor people.)

So, when I woke up with contractions one week before my due date…I was thinking…”Hm, these feel like real contractions”…but my water hadn’t broken yet…so I just wasn’t sure. As we got dressed and ready to go…I was deciding that yes, these were real contractions. 

I called the doctor’s office to tell him that my contractions were about five minutes apart…but that my water hadn’t broken yet. He said, “Well, why don’t you come on in and we’ll have a look at you.”

My mom was already there…so she stayed home with the other boys (who were only four and one at the time…oh, where has the time gone?).

We made the twenty minute drive to the clinic…which, by the way, was across the street from the hospital. (Thankfully!)

All the way there…I was having wonderful contractions…the kind that make you NOT love being in a car.

But I was freakishly calm…because with my other two, my water had broken first…and with this one it hadn’t…so I thought, “Well…this could be false labor.” (Matt just smiled and said nothing when I mentioned that. He had seen these kind of contractions before and the face that I wear when I’m having them. He was quite sure that this wasn’t false labor…).

So we get to the clinic and and everyone took their time getting me into a room. Then, once I was in the room…the doctor took forever to come back there. Matt, who had been dutifully timing contractions (which were 1 1/2 minutes apart by now, thank you very much), was starting to get concerned…because again, he had seen me like this before…and he knew that this baby was coming soon. 

I, on the other hand, was really not thinking clearly…because really…I was just trying to breathe…and to not rip the leather off of the examining table.

Finally, Matt went out and found the doctor and said, “Um, things are getting pretty intense. I really think you should come check on her now.”

So the doctor strides in with the nurse…and takes his time putting on the rubber glovey thingies…

Then he checks me…goes pale…and says to the nurse, “Let’s get her across the street.”

The nurse says, “How many centimeters is she?”

And the doctor says, “Let’s get her across the street.”

(Apparently he felt that if any of the rest of us know that I was 9.9 cm dilated..we would all panic…)

So Matt pulls the van around and the nurse puts me into it…and we go in through the emergency room entrance.

In the meantime, the nurse at the clinic called over to the ER and said something like, “A patient named Laura Coppinger is coming over right now. DO NOT mess with her in the ER! DO NOT ask for insurance papers. DO NOT make her sign anything. GET HER UPSTAIRS!”

And then the ER people call the Labor and Delivery people and they start frantically getting my room ready and getting the baby warmer ready…

SO, we walk into the ER (at exactly 9:45 am)..and they throw me into a wheelchair (oh, such a fun place to be when you are about to explode)…and they hurry me upstairs.

Matt and I are looking at each other like, “Is this really happening?”

We get to the Labor and Delivery floor and there’s all these people flying around with blankets and stuff, saying, “Is this Coppinger? Get her into this room!”

They whip off my clothes, throw on the gown…the doctor comes in with his delivery gear on…

He breaks my water, and the baby crowns. I push once, we have a head. I push again, the baby is born.

At 9:58…thirteen minutes after arriving at the hospital.

Another boy…Elias Joel…weighing in at 7 lbs 13 oz.

We call my mom to let her know that yes, after leaving the house only about an hour and a half ago, we have had our new baby! 

Nurses came and went all that day just to see the lady who had come in and popped out a baby in 13 minutes (oh, if only it really had been that easy..).

Oh, and would you believe…I was charged a CO-PAY at the clinic for that visit? The nerve. :)
———————————————-

You can find other fun birth stories at Amy’s Finer Things!

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Learn About Laura…One Story At a Time: The Day Matt Fired His Favorite Secretary

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Way back in our college days…

You know…way back in the 1990’s?

Back in the day when girls had big hair… 

Back in the day when were singing the Bryan Adam’s song:  “Everything I Do…I Do it For You…”

Back in the day when we wore shoulder pads (or was that the 80’s?)…

Okay, I could keep thinking of these really cool things we used to do…

Or I could just get to the point.

Matt and I met at York College and began dating our sophmore year. 

After a few months, our relationship began to get serious. So serious in fact, that I began to type his research papers for him.

(You know it’s true love when you start sharing a typewriter.)

This worked out just fine, because I was the kind of student who really couldn’t sleep well at night until her research papers were typed, placed carefully in a plastic cover, and turned in to the professor…three weeks early.

And Matt was the kind of student who, waited until the last minute…um…worked better under pressure.

So, our relationship grew…and so did the number of research papers I typed for him. 

Ah, the memories. 

Me (with my big hair) sitting in the dorm parlor at a table with my typewriter,  Matt standing behind me with two or three books open…dictating his paper as I typed. It was a pretty good system. We got to spend (quality) time together…I was a fast typer…he liked to “talk” out his papers. It worked.

So one research paper leads to another, and we ended up getting married just after our junior year of college.

For a wedding gift, Matt’s family all pitched in and surprised us with a computer. Wow! What a nice surprise! 

Thus we said goodbye to our dating days with the typewriter…and entered our new lives as husband and wife with a computer.

Now, we would sit in our little apartment…me (with my big hair) in front of the computer…Matt standing behind me with his books open…dictating his papers as I typed.

Ah, it was the picture of married bliss.

Until one day.

I’m not sure what the deal was with this particular research paper…but um, well…it was due in about five hours…and we were just sitting down to start typing it. (It must have been soccer season…which took up a lot of Matt’s time…and prevented him from getting his papers done three weeks ahead of time.)

So, we were a couple of pages into the writing of the paper. Matt started looking through one of his books to clarify the facts in his head before he started dictating some more.

And I decided to take advantage of the pause in typing to close my eyes and stretch.

Bad idea.

I straightened my back and kicked my feet forward to stretch my legs…

And I opened my eyes to a blank screen.

Yep, I had kicked the cord and unplugged the computer.

Matt looked up and saw what had happened…looked shocked and dismayed for about two seconds…then smiled and said…”Ah, man. It’s my fault. I should have been saving it more often…and I should have started earlier in the first place…”

Of course I was sitting there sobbing at the computer (like all the good wives do when they have just helped their husband get a bad grade)…

So I hiccupped and apologized and asked him what he was going to do now…

And he just calmly picked up the phone and called the professor and told him that his research paper had just accidentally been erased. Not, “My wife just chucked my paper”…just , “it got erased.” He didn’t even slander my good name.

Did I pick the right guy to marry or what? (Especially if I was going to do this kind of thing very often…)

Oh, and the professor was kind enough to give him a deadline extension…and we started over…and the paper was better than it would have been in the first place…and I think he got a B on it.

The end.

I did continue to type his research papers..so he didn’t really fire me that day. But you better believe that we clicked that save button obsessively from then on. 

We still do.

Now what should I tell next…about burning the barn..or shoplifting? Or any of the others on the list?

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Learning About Laura…One Story at a Time: Why I Will Never Eat at Fuddruckers

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Alright…you talked me into it. I’ll tell you about what I did on the York College choir tour bus…but only because I can hide behind my computer.

(You should all know that my heart is beating rapidly right now as if I’m having a panic attack. I HOPE you enjoy this and appreciate the courage it is taking to tell this story…)

<deep breath>

Okay…so it’s my sophmore year in college, and we are on our Christmas break choir tour, in which we travelled for about ten days on an old (and loud) bus…stopping every night to sing for different churches around the country.

There are around 50 to 60 college kids on the bus…and I’m sitting with my friend Mary pretty close to the middle of the bus. We are just sitting there yacking and playing cards and doing whatever to pass the time.

(Did I mention that the bus was loud? It was loud…I mean the bus itself…plus all the 50-60 voices on the bus…)

About six rows behind me sits this really ornery guy named Donny. And instead of playing cards to pass his time, Donny decides to be the funny guy…

So Donny calls out to no one in particular… “Hey, what’s the name of that one restaraunt? The one with the great burgers? Rudd…what?”

(Notice that he switched the letters around in the word…just setting someone up…)

(Because if you don’t say it right…Fuddruckers…it comes out  Rudd—–)

(See why it was so hard for me to tell you this?!?) 

Okay, so I heard him asking…and SO didn’t get that he was joking. I was just trying to be nice and help out the poor guy who was simply trying to think of the name of a burger joint.

So, I stand up at my seat, turn around and holler, “F—–s!!”

Now, keep in mind too…no one else really heard Donny ask the question in the first place. All they knew was that seemingly out of NOWHERE…sweet little Laura stands up on the bus and drops the F bomb. Out of nowhere.

Right as it’s coming out of my mouth…of course I realize what I’m doing!!! But it was too late to do anything about it then, wasn’t it?

And so I flop back down in my seat and put my head down in my lap…trying to decide whether to laugh…cry…or throw up…

The whole bus…of course…is getting over their shock…and dying with laughter…for like the next 50 miles of road time…

And I’m sitting there trying to remember how to breathe correctly (kinda like I’m doing now). 

And Donny (bless his stinkin’ little heart) appologizes to me a hundred times…cause he was just being silly…and didn’t think ANYONE would fall for it…

I’ve never lived it down…and probably never will…

And now you know too.

Okay, I’m going to go do some breathing exercises in an attempt to calm myself down after just sharing with you the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me. 

You go ahead and laugh…

(Shucks…I’ll admit…it IS really funny.)

I’m not sure my burning down the barn story or my shoplifting story will top this one…but I do hope that after learning this dark secret you’ll still come back for more…

:)

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Learning About Laura…One Story at a Time: Frozen Cash

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Well, I set myself up for this…so there’s no reason for me to sit at the computer having panic attacks any longer. 

I’m sure none of you have slept a wink since reading the list of 13 surprising facts about me…as you are on the edge of your seat just dying to find out about how I could single-handedly burn down a huge barn…and you can not WAIT hear what word I shouted on the choir tour bus (trust me, you DON’T want to know…).

I’ll get to them all in time… (and as I muster up the courage to embarass myself all over the bloggy universe…).

Today though, I’ll be telling you about the day I put $350 dollars cash into the freezer…and forgot about it. 

Well, actually…I didn’t realize I was putting it into the freezer in the first place.

We were getting ready to go on a trip. I had a four year old, a one year old and I was pregnant with our third…(need I say more?).

I was running errands the day before we were to leave. You know, doing all that pre-trip stuff…buying snacks to take on the road…filling the car with gas…buying diapers to last us while we were gone…paying a few bills…returning library books…and getting cash out of the bank to take with us.

While I was out running errands, I found a great sale on something (I don’t remember now what was on sale…it was six years and many sales ago…but it was something good enough to take the time to stock up on while I was running around getting ready to leave the state.).

And it was something that needed to go in the freezer. (Do you see where this is going?)

So, I return home from all of that… with a hungry four year old and one year old… and was grabbing as much as I possibly could from the car so that I could make it in as few trips as possible. 

I threw stuff on the counter and ran to the freezer in our garage to put the frozen sale stuff in.

Blah, blah, blah…the day goes on…we pack…we do whatever else needs to be done to get ready for our trip…

And then that evening we went to church.

Right in the middle of Psalms and Proverbs (okay, I made that up…I don’t remember what we were studying)…anyway, right in the middle of our Bible study…

I suddenly thought…WHAT did I do with the CASH for our TRIP???!!! (Ever seen a pregnant lady panic in a pew?)

I then started mentally re-tracing my steps…going through the events of the afternoon ( so much for Psalms or Proverbs for me)…and I came up with…

Nothing.

No clue. No recollection of seeing or doing anything with the money once I pulled away from the bank.

And I felt sick. SICK…I tell you! 

I also really enjoyed telling Matt after church, “Great job teaching class tonight. Also… I got that $350 cash out of the bank today like we talked about…and I don’t have a clue where it is.”

As soon as we got home, we started looking everywhere and taking the car apart and the house apart and praying and asking the same questions over and over… (Did the lady at the bank actually hand me the money, or did I just ask for the cash and drive away? Noooo I’m sure she handed me the money…and then I…??? Fog…blank…nothing…)

(BTW, tearing your house and car apart is SO NOT what you want to be doing the night before you are leaving for a long road trip!

We finally gave up and decided to just let it turn up when it turned up, and  go get more cash out of the bank in the morning before we left… <gulp> (Do we even have that much more cash to pull out?).

SO we got the kids to bed and tried to put the house back together a little and I went to the freezer to get something for Matt to eat. While I was there, I saw that the stuff I had bought earlier that day was still in the bag because I had been in a hurry.

I decided to make the freezer look nicer…so I took the stuff out of the bag…and what do you know?

Out came a sweet little envelope full of green bills (ever seen what President Andrew Jackson looks like when he’s frozen?) 

(I’ve never been so happy to see that beautiful, frozen, smiling face!)

SHEW!!

Well now, of course we use our credit or debit card to swipe everywhere when we go on a trip…so we don’t need to take cash like that.

But then, that also explains why I am so used to whipping out my credit card everywhere I am…and why I keep handing it to my librarian when I check out books…

Okay, story number one has been told. It’s SO cool to tell people the air-headed things you’ve done. You should really try it. I’m feeling just so proud right now.

;)

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