Can We Talk About My Morning?

Before I tell you about my morning, let me start you back at last night. My neighbor's church has been having an AMAZING pastoral counselor teaching a marriage workshop on Wednesday nights. Jeremiah and I have been enjoying it, and we invited Ashley and Brett to come "get fixed" (as we like to call it) with us. Gordon had been teaching us about how marriage is not about two good people, it's about one good God. This guy is deep and he is passionate about what he's saying. Tears have been shed on more than one occasion. Suddenly, he says that he wants to read a quote, and he warns us that it's kind of hard to read out loud in a group. I look down at my paper, like a good student, to better follow what he's saying...I can't even bear to type the exact quote, but it involved the word copulate and described the position and manner in which most primates perform that act. I lost it, I didn't hear the rest of the quote, which was really making a great point about the way we are the only primates God created to "copulate" face to face, heart to heart yada yada yada. I'm sorry, but are any of you laughing? Should I have been prepared, in front of God and my Sunday school friends, to hear those words? I had one of those sputtering noises pass between my lips as all my air escaped at once. I tucked my head down, closed my eyes, pursed my lips together as hard as they would go, and shook violently with supressed laughter. Then, I noticed that Ashley was doing the same thing on one side, and pretty soon Jeremiah had joined in on the other. I contemplated making a run out of the room, since I could feel no end in sight, but that would have been even more humiliating. I tried to think about sad things, I even used Mom, but then I just thought how hard she would be laughing too and it got worse. I knew if I made eye contact with Ashley or Jeremiah then that LOUD bubble of laughter would come spitting out for sure. I felt like a 13 year old boy. It was so bad and so obvious, that Gordon actually came up to Jeremiah and I after class to ask us about it! I wish you could have seen how red our faces got. We apologized and tried to quickly change the subject to how great his teaching had been, but I knew he really wanted to tell us that it was going to be hard to have a beautful marriage, with the maturity level of a couple of 7th graders.

Fast forward to midnight, when Mary Aplin wakes up for her first feeding. She eats and as I am putting her back to sleep I notice how cold our house is. We have been having a warm spell, which had obviously ended, and I realized that I needed to turn the heat back on. 4:15 am, Jeremiah wakes me up complaining about how freezing he is. I tell him that I turned the heat on, but we get up and there is frigid air blowing out of the vent. Partly due to Jeremiah's noisy complaining, Mary Aplin decides it's time for meal two. So, I'm feeding as Jeremiah heads down to the basement to "check on things." I don't know why, but Jeremiah can't stand to do projects by himself. This is normally OK, but at 4:30 in the morning when I am trying to nurse in the freezing cold bed, fretting over the cold, bald head of my 3 month old, it is not the time to yell for me to "Throw me a lighter!", nurse nurse "Turn the heat on!" nurse nurse "Wait, no, turn it off!" nurse nurse. He finally comes back upstairs with the bad news that our pilot light won't stay lit, and our 60 degree house is not getting warmer any time soon.

So, I turn off our whirring fans/noisemakers, zip M'Apples up in a fuzzy bunting, and make sure Pace is under her quilt. Then, Jeremiah makes the next fatal mistake. He finds a big down comforter and throws it across our bed. We snuggle in close, and things are starting to look up when I hear, "I'm itching! Are you itching?! There must be fleas on this thing!" he says as he hurls it off the bed. The damage has been done, and Jeremiah suggests that we just get up and eat breakfast.

If you've been reading you know Jeremiah is ALWAYS willing to build a fire, and that apparently includes 5am. Jeremiah is still complaining about how cold he is and I finally snapped that I wasn't going to listen to any more complaints unless he put some clothes on! He does that a lot, complains about being cold while he sits there half dressed. I go and find some warm PJs for him, since I know he won't do it himself, and we sit with our feet basically in the fire and eat breakfast.

It was sweet for a while. We had a devotion and prayed together (although I laughed because Jeremiah only prayed for two things 1-that God would kill the fleas in our bed and 2-that the bill for the heater would not be too high :)), and then parted to start our days. I had two objectives this morning and they were to cook dinner for our neighbors who recently had a baby and to dust. Which would you chose at 6:15? You're right--baking! So I pulled out my recipe for chocolate caramel bars and got going. At around 6:45, towards the end of my bars, I see that I am supposed to have evaporated milk. Ughh! I call my neighbor, thinking surely she is up, and her husband sweetly informs me that he is the only one awake so far, but he will be happy to go and see if they have any evaporated milk. I feel sure that this call confirmed what he was thinking after the marriage workshop last night, "This girl is nuts, and I'm not sure I should let my wife be friends with her!"

However, at 7 Lauren called to inform me that the milk was on our doorstep (notice that she--and her girls--we no longer asleep after my early call). I was laughing with her about our morning as I walked to the door and found the room was chokingly filled with smoke from our unattended fire. I was cold. I was tired, and Pace and Mary Aplin both started crying. Talk about a morning!