Extreme Randomness

I'll follow my college buddy Rachel's lead and let you in on the randomness of my brain today.

I work in an accounting department and therefore enter a lot of financial journal entries. Many of these are very similar from one month to the next. There is some particular series of numbers and/or words that trigger extremely random memories that seem to have nothing to do with what I'm typing. If you brain stored memories like a computer, these would be the misdirected shortcuts of life.

One that popped up this morning that pops up only once a month is a memory from our family vacation to Williamsburg when I was a kid. My sister was somewhere between 15 and 17, and I can completely picture her outfit: a baggy white T-shirt with horizontal blue lines over beige shorts. We were standing in some sort of rock building listening to an explanation of what was done there in colonial times. Something like a metal forge or a cooper or something. We were near the back standing with a teenage boy whose family we had been following from demonstration to demonstration. Suddenly, there was some loud conversation just behind us and outside the door. Sis and the tall lanky boy (he had on a green stripe shirt) turned toward each other and looked out the door at the noise. The guy giving our demonstration stopped talking, and then said 2 or 3 rude sentences to them about how rude it is to make such a racket during his demonstration. He clearly thought they made the noise. Everyone in the tiny building turned to stare at Sis and Boy. They both made signs like, "wha, not me, it's out there.."

Now why one earth is this memory attached to some random series of numbers? But once a month, up it pops.

When I open the file to create insurance invoices each month, I remember a time with my Mom. She and I were done with some project in the Sunday School wing and were skipping and singing, arm in arm, loudly down the hallway. We rounded a corner to find the pastor (pink dress shirt, blue tie with hints of pink) and some woman talking and obviously surprised to see anyone else in the building, much less irreverently skipping down the hall. We froze as if caught doing some heinous crime, and meekly left after a sentence about working in Mom's Sunday School room. This has nothing to do with the trigger for this memory, but once a month, here it is!

*DING* Subject change

I read this article today and have decided to add cinnamon to my baby's introduction to oatmeal.

Last night, for the first time in several days, my baby boy seemed to feel good and be himself. I suspect that his teeth/gums have been hurting him and he just hasn't seemed to feel good. No laughing, hardly any smiling, and heightened mom-radar. If I went out of sight for more than 60 seconds, crying ensued. Even if I just popped my head into view and said, "you're alright baby boy" things were better.

Last night on the way home, while going around a corner (NOT too fast, I might add) the carseat fell over sideways in the back seat! Quint was perfectly safe and perfectly suspended sideways, but it scared him pretty darn bad! I pulled over and cuddled him for a few minutes until he stopped crying. He was very hesitant to get back in that thing. We had removed the carseat and its' base this weekend when Quint spent the night at a friend's house and apparently put it back in a slightly different way. After spending about 10 minutes examining it, I DID finally figure out what might have been different. That explanation is extremely detailed and I'm not getting into it here. Even before this happened, we had talked about moving his carseat from the center backseat to one of the sides to allow the air conditioning to actually function in the backseat. So last night I moved his carseat and put it in super-duper tight. Quint had a whole new experience driving to Priscilla's today!

Why is it that the house suddenly seems to be more of a wreck when your mother is coming to town? I completely believe this to be a perception thing, not really a messiness thing. It's like when you take pictures of your kitchen or living room, you suddenly SEE the piles of clutter in the picture, when you blindly walk by the same pile every day.