I’ve become much less detail oriented in my old{er} age, in my role as a mother and/or maybe just because I can never think straight. I still have a keen eye for detail about certain things – like grammar, my work, and most things pertaining to Molly. I used to be a stickler for cleanliness, but I’ve learned to let the house go a bit; no magazine is ever going to feature my home on its pages, and, if by some chance, BHG or Southern Living called me to feature my charming cottage of a home, they would send a designer AND I would have advance notice to purge and clean before the photo shoot. Molly doesn’t like it when I run the vacuum cleaner, and I’m certainly not getting up to do it before she’s awake. And anytime I entertain the idea of wiping down the kitchen cabinets or dusting under my bed, Molly wants me to sit on the couch with her and really, who could resist that?
It has been a long-running joke between Jim and myself that I would buy the exact same thing at the grocery store every week, regardless or whether we need it or not. This is for two reasons, mainly: 1) I *hate* going to the grocery store and 2) I don’t really cook, so I have no idea what we need or what’s been used. Years ago, I needed to make pralines for a school event. Jim sweetly offered to help, so I showed up to his house with a bag of ingredients and a recipe. He took one look at the recipe and asked, “What is this?”
“That’s the recipe for the pralines,” I casually replied.
Jim responds with a shake of his head and starts up the stairs to his office. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“To look up a REAL recipe,” he called over his shoulder.
“What’s wrong with the one I just gave you?”
He told me there was no way the pralines would turn out because he had no idea how much of each ingredient to use. I had not written down the measurements. I usually don’t. Which I guess explains why most of my culinary experiments end up in the trash can and Jim, for the sake of saving money and sanity {his and mine}, does a lot of the cooking at our house.
Another example: I recently ordered a valance and roman shades for the family room. I measured the inside width and length of the side windows and outside the moulding of the picture window for the valance. I measured three times in order to purchase the fabric and give the woman making the window treatments the correct measurements, because I’ve lived with my husband long enough to know that he would NOT be pleased if those window treatments didn’t fit. When we hung the shades a few weeks ago, Jim steps onto the step ladder and says to Molly, “Let’s see how well Mommy measured the windows.”
I am pretty sure he almost fell off the ladder when they actually fit.
But anyway, the point of these stories is that Molly is a nice mix of Jim and me: she is actually particular about all of the things Jim is AND she is particular about my items of interest, too. So technically, I don’t know how nice that will actually be, all of us living together in this house, but I digress. Last week, she was playing with her laptop, “working like mommy.” We point to the letters and pictures on the keys and she’ll name them. Last week, she actually called the bird on the V key a vulture, but she still calls the oak on the O key a tree. One at a time, I guess. Jim then points to the B key and asked, “What’s that?”
“An orange bug,” Molly replied.
“A bee,” I said.
“Orange bug.”
And you know what? She was right. That bug didn’t look a thing like a bee – or at least any of the bees in all her books or on her bug puzzle. So there. Jim and I cracked up at her confidence in her answer and the fact that she should be confident. She was right, after all.
Life with Sweet Peaches 