Lucky 13

Happy 13th to Nate and me! We spent the night away. We came back relaxed and ready to go another 13 or 33 or 103!

Happy Anniversary

Happy Day to Jake and Amy as well! September 8th was a great day!

Can you spot the difference?

Somethings new...can you tell what it is?

You guessed it. After 4 years of splint therapy, two surgeries, 3 months of liquid diet, a retainer, rubberbands and enduring 3 years of braces (which, by the way, is even worse when you are thirty something and pregnant),

I GOT MY BRACES TAKEN OFF!!

I was so excited the whole day yesterday and haven't been able to stop smiling. In fact, after they took off all the hardware and polished my teeth the assistant needed to take pictures. One of me smiling(which was not hard at all), and one of me not smiling (which I just couldn't do!;D) Then, because I have been waiting for so long and been through so much and this meant so much to me, I started crying. ARGHHH. What a boob! The girls in the office that were watching me commented, "We've never had that reaction here before." But they were tears of joy and I am still smiling:) I feel like a new Betsy.

Two observations I have made in the last 24 hours:

• I will never complain about how long it takes to floss ever again.
• Kissing is much better without those pesky wires in the way.

News to me

Today I was baking (I got a bag of overripe bananas {organic even} for only $2 at the store and made 10 batches of banana bread). That's not the point though. I was doing the dishes after the baking. I developed the habit of pondering while doing dishes when I was a teenager (my parents' punishment for just about any infraction was to give dishes...I think I did all the dishes, by hand, for about 6 years all by myself.) Anyway, I was pondering while doing the dishes and realized something about myself: I am somewhat obsessive/compulsive about the way things are done and the way things are organized around my house.

My closet is organized according to clothing item, length and color. My dishes are stored in the cupboards the same way and the plates (which are fiestaware in nearly every color they come in) are stacked in rainbow order. I even load my dishwasher in a similar way: like items together, by size and height. My laundry has to be folded just right so that it looks neat when it is stacked and put away in drawers. The towels need to be hung just so in the bathrooms. And everything has to have a place, a home to go to that is behind a door, in a drawer, or a box. Clutter just makes me anxious and stressed.

I am so OCD about these things that I inwardly cringe when the dishwasher gets loaded differently by the others in my household. I have to leave the room and not watch. It is why I usually end up folding all the laundry, even though the kids are able to do it their own way. (When I do have them help me, I usually end up refolding a lot of things when they are done, especially my things. If they take their own clothes and put them away, I just don't open their drawers. Mostly I just don't go in their rooms. Kids have their own organization systems which really don't match mine.) It is why I switched to hooks in most of the bathrooms so that the kids have an easier job of hanging up their towels and they look neater. It is why I go after the kids and rearrange the dishes in the cupboards.

I know I should just let it go. And I have--to a degree. I realize that my kids need to learn how to work, how to clean and how to do laundry for themselves. So I close my eyes tight and try to not think about it. And then I let them clean their rooms, put away their laundry, do the dishes and organize their stuff their way. Because, in the end, it doesn't really matter. And there are better ways to use my energy and more important battles to fight. So, sometimes, I give in to my OCD housekeeping demons...and, sometimes, I come off conqueror. But when I load the dishwasher, it's done my way.

So there you have it, something you didn't know about me, that I didn't know about myself! (Or maybe you did know that about me, and have been too kind to point it out...thank you!)