I know I usually tell stories about my little boy, Aidan, when I blog. Don't worry. That'll still happen. The kid is a gold mine of sound bytes. The thing is, his little sister, Ainsley has been moving up in the ranks. She's past that "I'm a cute blob with big brown eyes" stage and now has become a force to reckon with. Actually, that seems like an understatement. I'm not sure there are enough words in the dictionary to aptly describe her personality. But I shall try to paint a picture of who she is with the eloquent brush strokes that are my stellar writing skills.
Okay, I'm currently on percocet so please bear with me and ignore my overestimations of how talented and funny a writer I am.
For some reason in our household the babies have a serious aversion to phones. Okay, that's not necessarily true. Ainsley can successfully distinguish the difference between an iPad and iPhone and asks for them on a current basis. She's actually taught me some tricks on the iPad. It also took me a week to figure out how to turn the annoying voice over off. I was too stubborn to Google it.
So I guess you can say they just hate home phones.
When Aidan was about nine months old, we were sitting at home and I heard a faint beeping in the distance.
It wasn't one of those nice, soft beeps. No tinkling of wind chimes. Not even a distant car alarm.
Nay, it was that horrible, horror movie, makes you want to punch someone in the face beeping that comes from a phone being off the hook.
I can just imagine back in the eighties- you know, the decade God turned his back on the world, back when you wanted to make a call you rotary dialed that number and were attached to the phone terminal by a leash- a really curly bouncy leash that just cried out to you to use it for a jump rope while your mom was on the phone with your Auntie.... and then it'd get all tangled in a big curly knot and you'd spend three hours slowly twisting the ringlet back in order like the phone was going to the prom or something. Why the curly cord? Was that to make it safer? Less strangleable or something? Anyway, I digress.
So I assume it was in the eighties when they decided to have the phones make that noise when it was left off the hook. Someone was like "Hey guys, we've got a problem! All of a sudden there's been a rash of people using their phones for jump ropes and forgetting to hang them up when they're done! Maybe we should come up with the most annoying noise known to man and have the phone start emitting that noise like it's demon possessed so they know to hang up their phones!"
Done.
So Aidan and I are hanging out and I hear faint demon beeping. I stalk around the house searching for this evil noise. No where to be found. Finally I make my way to a heater vent in the floor. Hmm.. It's mysteriously askew.
Ah yes. Sure enough the phone and some other trinkets had been shoved down the heater vent by my angelic nine month old.
So when Ainsley tried the same thing I stopped her with a smug grin on my face. Not this time. I'm an experienced mom now.
So she broke the heater vent cover. It became her personal storage unit.
Okay.
Then she decided to start using the garbage to hold all of our valuables.
Keys, money, wallets, and of course, the phone.
I can't even tell you how many times I've barely rescued household items from the eternal banishment of the garbage truck. We've had some close calls.
Really, in my heart I knew it was only a matter of time before I would be defeated.
One day I had to make a really important phone call.
I searched everywhere. I looked in all of Ainsley's hiding spots. I looked in all the places that I leave things (hey, I never said Ainsley didn't come by it honestly). I hit the search button that's supposed to make the phone beep so you can find it.
No beeping.
I went to look in the trash.
Empty.
It was Wednesday morning.
Trash day.
I ran to the front to look in the garbage cans and saw the garbage truck driving away from our house.
Dang.
Meh, I wasn't a huge fan of our home phone anyway.
So Trevor and I did the logical thing. No, we didn't ge a new phone; we cancelled our phone line all together.
A couple months later we were spring cleaning and moving our couch. As Trevor pulled out the cushions, deep in the recesses I saw a glimmer of fake metal.
Our phone.
We laughed and realized how useless it was then since we had gotten rid of the base for the phone.
The silly thing is (that I don't want to admit) is God really got a hold of me when I saw that phone.
I realized how easily I give up on things and think they're gone forever when I'm actually sitting on them, stifling them myself and blaming someone else for it.
And I think we all do that. We get discouraged, we get distracted. We think we've failed before we've barely begun.
So we give up.
God speaks to me through everyday things. Sometimes it's embarassing. It's almost always funny. And it's something that I don't want to shut out.
So here I am. Because this blog is my phone. It hasn't been lost. It's been sitting here the whole time, waiting for me to get off my bum and see it.
