When we were first married, I spent my days working and figuring out married life.  We were invited to the big family fourth of July celebration.  I was assigned with bringing potato salad.  I thought, cool, no one can mess up, potato salad.  We drove to York, Pennsylvania and spent the night at my husbands Great Aunts house.  I didn't have a glass dish for the potato salad, but I did bring all the ingredients to prepare once we got to the house. I still needed a bowl, and his aunt just sent me to the attic to pick from the many collecting dust on the shelf.  She said, she just moved all her china up to attic, because she no longer entertains...I love going up into attics of old houses.  She had lived in this house since 1907 and it was the house she was born in, so there was much history.  I finished my potato salad and put in fridge to chill until I could find a serving bowl in the attic.  Potato salad must be chilled, and so I left it in the fridge while I went bowl hunting.  I wandered up the stairs, and it was a treasure trove up there, magazines from the 1930s, Victory Magazine from the world war...and it was so cool.  I found a shelf of beautiful bowls, and one caught my eye.  It was way up and behind, a box but that was the one, I grabbed the step ladder and moved the box to retrieve my bowl.  It was white porcelain with inlaid gold design all through the body, solid gold or seemed so handles, and a beautiful lid. The bowl was so dusty and yellowed with age.  I made a baking soda and peroxide mix to clean the inside, scrubbed the old yellow age discoloration on the inside.  It was just beautiful.  I took my potato salad out and scooped into the bowl.  We were off to the big picnic.  This was to be my first time meeting most of the extended family.  I was nervous but equally thrilled with this beautiful treasure I found for my potato salad.  We arrived, and I carried my potato salad into the pavilion and since we were newly married, everyone stopped and looked as we entered.  I held out my potato salad to my mother in law, and she said, "Oh, dear"....Oh..dear??? huh?? She asked where it was I found this pot...I said in the attic....isn't it beautiful...but soon...laughter roared through the pavilion...and my husbands aunt came over and put her hand on my shoulder, and said, "Dear one, thats a chamber pot"....oh...know...oh..my word...I can tell you, no one ate my potato salad, and 18 years later, I have yet been asked to prepare a dish for a family gathering...

We all remember in math class when the dreaded math statements were introduced....true or false... All spiders are arachnids, therefore all arachnids are spiders.  I initially said, oh, yep, so true as my son was pressing through his homework.  He looks up and says, false, and I naturally look up from my Amazon Kindle and ask why is it false?  He then, follows with the question, is a scorpion a spider?  No, of course not, I reply and he says its an arachnid.  I sit corrected.  My mind was wrapped up with all these little facts.  Today, my boys started their insect collection for science class.  Oh, stunning, or finding an insect on the ground to pin it to a piece of styrofoam, gives me the heebie jeevies.  The boys have collected several specimens already and love that mom is staying an arms length away from their discoveries.  What happened to leaf collections or maybe a model of the solar system, but bugs....oooo....yuck...blech...I so do not do insects. 

There are bugs in jars, I don't recognize....and they are flipping through books, and online looking for the names.  They couldn't push a pin through the stink bug...so I gorilla glued it to the styrofoam...there's no way, I am sticking anything through that body....what if it has a stink sac?  I don't know....I don't want to smell like a stink bomb...though my kids would find it quite amusing.

It was a really blustery day just before Christmas.  The girls were hanging the garland on the picket fence, and I was inside baking the gingerbread.   Whisper and Spring, our two Pomeranians, suddenly appeared at my feet doing what we call the potty dance.  I placed the spatula down in the bowl and grabbed my jacket and scarf and took them outside.  The winds were at the time 25 to 35 mph and I had not realized the wind was quite so strong.  Imagine a flying squirrel, as it's body just sort of flattens as the wind lifts it from a branch, well, that was a bit how it was for poor whisper.  She hit an ice patch and slid down the driveway, an suddenly her legs sprawled the wind came and up she went.  I would say she defied gravity, but then she weighs maybe 4 pounds soaking wet.  Her little eyes widened, she squealed and barked, as I ran or rather slid to her rescue.  She didn't fly to high only maybe a foot or two, but was enough to scare her.  I pulled her close to me, and she was shaking so hard, she was traumatized. Springer-dinger as we affectionately called her, stood by the garage, and waited to return to the safety of our home.  Whisper did not go out the rest of the day, she only would go to the garage and use a piddle pad. 

It was registration time for second semester.  My daughter was now registering for her second semester at college, and I was left in the lobby with my checkbook.  As, she emerged with her schedule, I just sat nervously, wondering how much this was gonna cost us.  Although, the HOPE scholarship pays for a good bit of her classes, the fees, books, and, some electives were not covered by the scholarship.  We departed the university and headed home.  We were searching for books online at Amazon, and rental sites.  Where the snag comes in, she has two classes with homework on a mathlab, and her cell biology and genetics class required a code that cost 100.00 each.  Are you kidding me???  We overnight these, and all that arrived was a piece of cardboard with a 12 to 15 digit access code.  Shipping and handling for a piece of cardboard, in a world of electronic technology, I pay shipping for a number?  We are now at the point of selecting her four year college.  She will have completed to years of undergraduate work while simultaneously finishing her last two years of high school.  My daughter asks me, "what should I do with my life? " I can only say, do what makes you happy, what brings her joy.  She loves the human anatomy, she can tell you the strangest facts about the body.  She has a library of human anatomy books, right beside the Teen Vogue and Seventeen Magazines.  She struggles with math, but loves science. I remind myself, she is just sixteen, and not eighteen, and she will change her mind five or six more times.   How do we survive in a single income family and next fall we will have two in college, and the following fall three in college?