7 Quick Takes about Hobbies that Don't Make Sense, Consultations in the Loosest Possible Sense of the Word, and Discovering that Kleptomania Runs in the Family

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

—1—

For family home evening this week, we held an informal "Ask Mom and Dad What It Was Like in the 1900s" night.

We've decided to stop being offended that our kids think we're ancient repositories of wisdom from another century and start embracing it as a cool and unique thing we have to offer.

After Phillip telling a story involving falling a good distance off of a homemade zipline in the woods when he was a kid, our children started making plans to build something similar in our backyard this summer.

"Maybe you can fall off that one, too!" one of them suggested helpfully.

"No way," Phillip answered. "I'd probably die. Back then I was young and squishy, now I'm brittle and crumbly."

It's nice that the kids want to recreate his Huckleberry Finn childhood, though.

—2—

One night at dinner, Phillip kept offering vegetables to the 11-year-old. She repeatedly refused and he tried one last time, saying "Come on, they're good for you!"

The 14-year-old, who was standing nearby watching, piped up. In the gravelly voice of the grandpa from The Princess Bride, he intoned "And as he kept giving her celery sticks, she realized what he was really saying was: I love you."

—3—

Writing about how I was going to procrastinate a sewing project last week made me actually get started on it. 

And you know, sewing is totally backwards. If you like to sew, it actually doesn't take you that long to finish a project because you're good at it. But if you don't like sewing, you do everything wrong the first time and have to re-do it several times, so you end up spending all day on it.

A hobby where the amount you enjoy it is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes doesn't make sense.

—4—

As I had my sewing stuff out on the table for a few days, I noticed that my 8-year-old had been playing with my pincushion.

This is how you know a child is going to grow up to become a serial killer.

What the heck? Who does this to a pincushion? He just boobytrapped it for me and left for school like everything was totally normal. 

—5—

At her last dental appointment, my 16-year-old's dentist said her wisdom teeth were coming in and referred us to an oral surgeon for a consultation. It didn't end up being much of a consultation.

They did take X-rays of her mouth, but I'm not sure if the oral surgeon looked at them before he breezed into the room and started explaining to us how long the extraction would take, what kind of anesthesia they would use, and how she shouldn't eat or drink anything after midnight the night before the surgery.

"Ummm... does she need her wisdom teeth out?" I asked, feeling like it was odd that this wasn't the first thing addressed at the consultation.

The doctor quickly said yes and then continued with his pre-op spiel, which cemented my decision to book another consultation (hopefully a real one) with a different oral surgeon at a different clinic. I know most people do get their wisdom teeth out, but the surgical conveyor belt they were throwing us on felt way too weird for me.

—6—

I've been reading a book lately called The Power of Fun. The basic idea is that we're too serious and the way to flourish instead of just survive is to prioritize times when we can experience "playfulness, connection, and flow." 

I'm ⅔ of the way through the book and I'm still not sure if I need to add more fun in my life, or if doing that would even be a worthy goal. I would agree in a heartbeat that it's worth adding more meaningful moments into your life, but fun ones? Undecided. It's always been my thought that happiness finds you when you're actively engaged in something meaningful, so the idea of creating fun moments as a way to find fulfillment is kind of a foreign concept to me.

So maybe I'm not reading it right, but the one thing I have been doing differently since reading the book is giving myself permission to take it easier lately. This week I've taken a nap because I needed it and one day I even wrote down a list of things I was NOT allowed to do, because I probably would've out of obligation but didn't want to run myself ragged.

—7—

I keep a pair of mittens in the car from October to April, they're my cold weather driving mittens. They date back to the late 90s, when I did the thing teenagers do where they "borrow" something that belongs to their mom and sort of just never give it back until it becomes theirs. I always wondered if my mom knew I took her mittens, but last time she visited she saw them in the car and didn't seem surprised, so I guess that answers my question.

Now that I have teenage daughters myself, I know from experience that your mom absolutely does notice when her thing goes missing, but she doesn't say anything because she (1) loves her daughter more than anything and (2) is secretly a little flattered that she had something her daughter thought was cool enough to take.

Anyway.

My 16-year-old needed to go somewhere, and she has her permit so she was going to drive. I sat in the passenger seat and slipped on my mittens, but after a few moments she said, "This steering wheel is really cold on my hands."

So I took off my mittens and gave them to her. The circle of intergenerational thievery was complete. If she's lucky, someday her own daughters might be stealing those very mittens.

"I took those from my mom when I was your age, you know," I told my daughter.

She looked at her mitten-clad hands, looked at my bare hands, and said, "We're horrible people."

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