Thursday, March 4, 2010

Getting Wet and Worries!

I read a couple of blogs this morning that I just had to post about. One is Hanging On By A Needle and Thread and the other is Mockingbird Hill Cottage. I read both of these blogs all the time.
Hanging On posted about how she is very careful when she "gets in the pool". She starts out slowly, one toe at a time. This is a metaphor for how she proceeds with her sewing. She takes her time and is careful. OH TO BE THAT WAY!! I've posted before that my motto is "Take Your Time So You Don't Waste Your Time". If only I lived by my motto!!!!!


I'm afraid that I have more in common with this guy! I tend to dive in head first from the high dive without stopping to think or pay attention to what's in the water below!!! I make so many mistakes that have to be taken out and redone because of my carelessness and "hurriedupness"! I need to learn PATIENCE!
Yesterday, I posted that I needed to get these tees painted for St. Patrick's Day NOW! Yep, I said NOW. I hurried up last night when I was too tired to be painting anything, and got these done. This morning they were dry. They were stiff. I washed them. There is no m
ore glitter, and I found places where I dripped paint. I also found that the permanent pen that I used to outline Little Man's shirt does not have washable ink in it. The ink ran. It got on all of the other shirts. So...................

I'm going to cut the lace off the girls' shirts to use on something else. If there's enough salvageable fabric, I'll use it for something, maybe. I guess the kids will get store bought St. Patty's shirts this year, if I have time to go buy any.
BTW, I must have been wrong about the St. Patrick's traditions being from the NE. Several of you said you had never heard of them. Perhaps my daughter, who is very creative, thought these up herself.
After talking to my daughter yesterday, I found that our Kellen would not wear a shirt like this anyway. I didn't paint one for her, so at least there's one shirt in tact!

(It saddens me that she is so grown up that she is picky about what she wears, but I understand it!! I do not want her to be teased because she wears something that I sent that she thinks she has to wear so it won't hurt my feelings. I love her too much for that. I hope my grands and their moms will always let me know about these things.)

Here are a couple of real "d
iving in the water" kind of stories. I love to swim. I have swum all my life, as long as I can remember. I took all the Red Cross swimming lessons from beginners through Senior Lifesaving. I was even a lifeguard one summer. I taught Red Cross swimming many years.
The summer that
I was taking Senior Lifesaving I nearly drowned!!
After our class was over one evening, those of us in the class decided to play Chicken off the diving board!! I was not afraid of doing almost anything off the board. The person in front of me did a simple Swan Dive!!! Simple, but not always safe. If you do it right, it is, but if you forget to come out of the arched back, arms stretched out flight through the air before you hit the water, IT HURTS!
I hit the water on my chest. My legs flew back over my head. Your body is not supposed to bend this way from the waist! It was like I was trying to touch my toes over my head from behind! Anyway, when I hit, not only did it HURT my back, it knocked the air out of my lungs!!! I was momentarily paralyzed in the water. Luckily for me, all these kids who were playing Chicken with me were taking a LIFE SAVING class. One of the guys dove in and pulled me out to safety. My doctor told me I would have problems with my back when I got older. OLDER is what I am now!!! He was right!!!! Another really "NOT SMART" thing to do on a diving board is to hang from underneath it when someone else is getting ready to run and spring to jump off. Talk about a HEADACHE!!!

Now, for the Mockingbird Hill Cottage Blog. she writes about how much she worries about things, and how this keeps her from sleeping, etc.... This is going to sound contradictory. I said that I dive in head first with out paying attention to what's in the water, but I AM A WORRIER! Not so much now as I used to be!!! I never worried about myself much, but about my kids, other people's kids, etc......

I had the best teacher in the world for this character trait (flaw)!! MY MOTHER IS THE QUEEN OF WORRIERS!!! Yes, she STILL holds this title!!! Even amidst all of her confusion she is worrying! There are usually "little kids running around the nursing home who need their bottoms wiped", and their names are usually Julia and my cousin's names!!! There is usually her mother's funeral she needs to get to in a nearby town, but it is muddy and no one will get her dressed to go! There are numerous luncheons, receptions, and other parties that she is supposed to fix food for and she needs to get to the grocery store. She can never find her purse or her keys. Now, for those of you who may be new to my blog, my mother is in a nursing home, confined to bed and her wheelchair. Her mom died in 1972. You get the idea....


My girls got the brunt of my worst worrying years. I know that everyone worries when they have children, especially when they are old enough to go out with their friends, etc... and mom can't be there. I apologize now to my girls, not for worrying, but for letting them know I was worrying.

This picture reminds me of the time we went to Disney World. We road the Space Mountain ride! If you've never ridden it, let me tell you, it is a heart stopper! Our youngest, who was 6, our middle daughter, who was 9, and our oldest, who was 12 sat in the front seat. My husband and I were a few seats back! Mind you, it is pitch black dark in that ride. You cannot see your hand in front of you. I was scared that our youngest would get flung out of the car, or try to climb out, or I don't know what I thought would happen. But, the whole time we were on that ride, I was screaming, "(Our youngest daughter's name) are you okay?" I mean, I screamed this over and over until the ride was done. Our girls were so embarrassed when we got off that ride!!! Everyone was like, "Oh so you must be (our youngest daughter's name)." Then they would laugh!!! Okay, so I got carried away. I don't know why I was more worried about the youngest than the the older two, but I guess I just thought she was so little!

I hope they don't worry as much as I did. I hope if they do they don't let their kids realize it.

This last picture reminds me of when our girls were young, and they pretended that the floor in their room was the ocean and there were sharks in it. They would have to tell this whole story, but it was told by our youngest at our oldest daughter's wedding reception. She was warning my new son-in-law that he better take care of her big sister and not be a shark. He's not been shark-like at all. He's more like a good King Triton taking care of his wife and daughters.

Question:
Why does blogger underline what I type sometimes and not others? I don't tell it to do this; it just does.

5 comments:

Claudia said...

Make sure you didn't accidentally hit the underline symbol - otherwise, I have no idea why it happens.

Thanks for referring to my blog - I forgot to write that my Mom is a huge worrier, too. The apple doesn't fall very far from the tree.

xo
Claudia

Jocelyn said...

Julia, I have had that happen at times after I have loaded a picture. The next line with be underlined. What I do is skip to the next line, and then go back and delete the one that was underlined. I really don't know why it does it, but skipping to the next line seems to solve that problem for me :-)

Beangirl said...

Re: St Patrick's Day, I grew up in an Irish family (well, half) in a very Irish town (St. Paul MN) and I had never heard of such things as this "coming in the middle of the night and leaving footprints, etc" until last year when TLo's pre-K teacher sent home info about it. I think this must be a relatively new thing that's making the rounds with the littler kids' and their schools. It's very cute, though.

Susan said...

I don't know Julia...sometimes I wish I was more like you! I have so many projects waiting for me to get everything "just so" before they can be started. You do have a point though about rushing in. There must be a happy medium out there somewhere! LOL

Karen said...

Hey Julia, I love your stories about worrying. When I think back on how I must have worried Mom and Dad (back in the 70s), I wish I could apologize. I really did put myself in harms way alot, and its a wonder they didn't die of worry. But I ended up getting my just desserts...my 1st child ended up being twins, and that's when the nightmares started for me. It seemed like every night I'd dream of them falling off a pier or a boat or a cliff or something, and I'd have to decide who to save. Always woke in a panic at 4:11 am. I don't think I slept through the night until all my kids reached 21....that was last year btw :) LOL!

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