Breaking All The Rules

Everyone has their own little oddities. I know someone who can't eat the corners of Doritos because they are too pokey. He breaks them off first. I know someone else who counts the ice cubes as they fall in the glass. Someone else can't eat the part of the sandwich that he touched. Everyone has little oddities.

My dad has more than his fair share of oddities. His socks have a left and right foot. He marks his work shirts with a "w" on the label. I could write a book about my dad. The sad thing is that I have inherited his predisposition for oddities, or as my kids call them, "mom's rules". They are more than happy to announce mom's rules to anyone who visits our home. I try to tone things down when company is around. I just haven't taught my kids to be gracious to others when it comes to my rules. That lesson is coming soon, though. I mean, I don't want people to thing I am weird or anything.

My husband calls me neurotic, my kids call me strict, I just think I am, um, whimsical.

I can't sleep in a bed that has not been made, I cannot walk bare-footed on carpet that has not been vacuumed in the past 24 hours, Kris must sit on my left when eating, at the grocery store - I must take the second item on the shelf, the window blinds must be slanted down in my bedroom - slanted up on all other windows, I cannot serve with a spoon smaller that 3 inches in diameter. . . .

I count things, like legos. I went through a period of several months, when I counted Zack's legos every night to make sure he hadn't lost any. I finally put them in the top of his closet because I couldn't stop counting them. (For those of you who are feeling bad for Zack, he now has 1,562+ legos and he is free to play with all of them. Oh, and I have stopped counting them.)

Oh, and don't get me started about the importance of hand washing, bleaching all household surfaces, and the number of bottles of hand sanitizer we go through.

Germ-a-phobe? Worry-wart? Compulsive? No! Neat freak? Not at all!

I am "Whimsical", remember?!

I am whimsical because my oddities are balanced by my somewhat messy closets, my fanciful art supplies, my unorganized recipe collection, and my love of dirt (as long as it stays outdoors).

So where I am I going with this? Oh, yes! Coloring books!

Coloring books?

Yes, I don't like pages to be torn out of them and I most definitely do not like the pages to then be stuck to the wall.

But that is exactly what makes my little Zacky-boy happy. My mother bought him a poster-sized coloring book of Toy Story 3. He colored 10 pages, ripped them out and taped them to his wall.

It looked, um, well, messy. Delightfully messy. So, I gave him some of that sticky stuff that will not damage the paint. I lived with it for a while without any major issues until it got hot and he started running his ceiling fan every night. The fan blows them off the wall. Every morning it's the same. I go into his room and tell him to make his bed and pick up those pictures - those delightfully messy pictures that have been torn out of their book and stuck to the wall!

Today I did something I never thought I would do. I actually stuck the pictures to the wall with thumb tacks. THUMB TACKS, I TELL YOU! And I did it MYSELF! Thumb tacks make HOLES in the wall! There are 10 pictures with 4 tacks in each. THERE ARE 40 TINY HOLES IN ZACK'S WALL! I don't know how I am going to sleep tonight!

This will either be major break through for me, or it will push me over the edge and I will start eating purple paint because my friend, David told me too.

Heaven help us, I don't know what my little world is coming to!

The next thing you know I will be getting a pedicure!



(Oh, yes. In case I haven't told you, I can't let anyone touch my feet.)