7 Quick Takes about Tractor-Grade Spraypaint, Nature Sightings, and the Rising Generation of Scriptwriters for Feminine Hygiene Product Ads

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

As my son likes to remind me every 5 minutes, I'm 39 now!

We postponed celebrating my birthday because the actual day of my birthday (Saturday) was nuts because of a hundred soccer games plus some other stuff, but Sunday got off to a rocky start.

Phillip told me to sleep in and went to make my birthday breakfast in bed, when our youngest came in and asked for cereal. 

I told him that his dad was literally in the kitchen and would be happy to accommodate his request. He countered with the fact that he wanted me specifically to make it. 

I countered with something along the lines of "life's hard, get a helmet" to which he responded by throwing a fit and making us miss church.

Fun times, guys. Fun times.

—2—

Luckily, the day got better. The breakfast was tasty, and Phillip fulfilled both of my birthday requests. 

When he'd asked "What do you want for a birthday present?" I'd told him "To not have to think about it." And when he'd asked "What do you want for a birthday cake?" I'd answered "To not have to think about it."

(Seriously, husbands: your wife does so much planning for everything and everyone all the time, the greatest gift you can possibly give her is the ability to just show up and enjoy something — anything — that she had no part in putting together.)

And like I asked, I didn't have to think about either. 

Phillip's gift to me was spraypainting our Kitchen Aid, which we got back when we had a blue kitchen and... now it's a red kitchen and new Kitchen Aids are expensive. I've looked at online tutorials of painting your Kitchen Aid, but the ones I saw involved taping over all the metal and I never really liked the way those turned out.

Phillip of course saw his chance to take something apart, and the rest is history.

Picture of the old color for reference.

He disassembled everything, applied several coats of spraypaint, and then put all the metal parts back on. It looks AMAZING.

Now I may be actually motivated to change our 1995 forest green laminate countertops... at some point.

Phillip says the spraypaint he used is the kind they put on tractors, so maybe it will even hold up to being in this household.

—3—

The kids also made me birthday cards. They were all very nice but I wanted to highlight a few.

My 15-year-old's card congratulated me for having a birthday. As a reward, it suggested I look at this picture of a very clean room:

Next year, I'll ask for a VR version of this "clean room."

Then there was this card from my 17-year-old:

I may not have a clue about 70% of the things teenagers talk about nowadays, but I'm totally down with a 1980s nod to Freddie Mercury.

—4—

My 7-year-old came in and said, "Mo-ooooom, there's a big bug on the door outside..."

If this had been one of my other children I might've gone to see it, but to my 7-year-old what qualifies as a "big "bug" is anything large enough to be seen by the naked eye. He has a thing about bugs, and won't even go in a room where there is one. 

At the time I brushed it off, saying something like "Yes, there are lots of interesting bugs on God's green earth and you don't have to go by that door if you don't want to." 

Only later did I realize that we had a truly interesting visitor, indeed.

Luckily, it stayed around all day, sleeping. Even though one of my kids literally started poking it with a stick to get it to move.

The only place I've ever seen a luna moth is pinned in a natural history exhibit. It was so cool to see a real live one in nature! I didn't even know they lived in New England. When I Googled it I learned that they do, it's just rare to see them because they're nocturnal and their adult lives are only 5-7 days long. #themoreyouknow

—5—

It's been vaccination city here. I got my second dose, which was not fun at all. That night I had chills and nausea while I was trying to sleep, and in the morning I woke up with a splitting headache. 

I'm apparently also an idiot, because after I laid around dying for several hours I took some painkillers so I could run a necessary errand and quickly felt almost back to normal.

The older three kids are also eligible for the vaccines now and their appointments have all been this week or last week.

In fact, when my daughter stayed home from school the other day saying she felt sick I couldn't remember who'd gotten their shot when to judge whether it was vaccine side effects or she was actually ill.

That was the day I was on my deathbed from my second dose, though, so my difficulty doing the math was understandable.

—6—

I saw this notebook at Dollar Tree that made me chuckle "Ha ha, that's so me!" In fact I almost bought it, and then I realized I'd read the title wrong:

At first glance, I'd thought it said "Too Tired to Be Inspired," which is the opposite of what it actually says and a 100% Freudian slip (but with reading) on my part.

—7—

I lead the teenage girls at church, and the youth activity this week was an easy walk at a local hiking trail.

Part of the trail is a meadow where the grass right now is about waist-high, so just for kicks the other leader and I had them line up and we recorded a slow-motion video of them running/frolicking through the meadow.

When we gathered around to watch the video I commented that it looked like something from Little House on the Prairie and one of the girls corrected me: "No, it looks like a tampon commercial!"

Then they all started brainstorming the script out loud with each other, and let me tell you: teenagers are hilarious.

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