Adapting

There are two circumstances completely out of my control that I have decided to learn to love.

The first thing is the darkness that settles in at 5:30 every evening. My internal programming tells me that darkness = night and therefore I can no longer go anywhere or do anything. If that were indeed true I would be missing out on several usable hours each day. However, this has been working to my advantage in some ways, as my children also have the same internal programming. When the sun sets, they declare, "It's midnight!" and run off to brush their teeth for bed. On Sunday, neither Lars nor I looked at the clock. We just did our Sunday evening routine and put the girls to bed. Then we went into the kitchen to finish cleaning up from dinner and realized we had just put our offspring to bed at 6:30! Oops...oh well!

The second thing is the rain. Now rain, in and of itself, I have no problem with. In fact, I really do enjoy it...the sound, the smell, the site of it. But there is no denying that I am far from being a true Oregonian. I don't get seasonal depression when it is sunny. I don't grumble when I am driving and the sun gets in my eyes. I don't start cursing when I have to turn on the hose to water the lawn. But the thing that makes me look most like "a tourist" (sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me) are my lovely polka dot rain boots. I can't help it...I just love them; and I love that the rain gives me an opportunity to wear them EVERY day.

No, the effects of rain that I need to learn to love, or at least tolerate, are the daily tasks that I don't even blink at when it is sunny, or cloudy, day or night. For example...getting kids into the car. In the rain, this task takes on another level of difficulty. It is not just the usual struggle to get four kids buckled into their respective cars seats ("I want to sit in Leah's car seat." "Do I have to wear a seatbelt every time?") but now their car seats get wet when they stand on them and the backs of all my seats will have size 6, 10 and 11 muddy footprints on them until June.

Another challenge is loading groceries from my shopping cart into the car in the pouring rain. I know paper bags are more eco-friendly and since I live in Oregon I am now required to be "green", but really...soaking wet paper bags don't really help the environment when they are wilted on the bottom of my shopping cart and all the lables from my canned goods have slipped off ensuring yet another night of "Guess what's for dinner". Sorry my dear Oregonian friends, but I still use plastic (and I don't recycle Peanut Butter jars either).