10 random things about me

Sometimes on Instagram, people do Friday Introductions posts, where they share some random things about themselves.   I always love to read those and I figured, hey, why should Instagram have all the fun? So I thought I’d do one here.

It’s gonna be pretty much completely off-topic, but hopefully it’ll be a fun diversion.

1. I have some kind of weird inner compass.

I can almost always tell you which direction I’m going, and it’s not because I deduce it logically by looking at the sun. It’s just something I feel.

And it’s been like this my whole life.

For example, I visited my uncle’s house in Kentucky once when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old, and I know that his house faced south (I confirmed it with him recently!) I’ve found that all of my childhood feelings about which way my relatives’ houses faced are correct, in fact.

I have no idea why my brain works like this, but I don’t think it’s something I learned.

2. One of my pet peeves is: people who don’t GO when the stoplight arrow turns green.

Turn-lane green lights are notoriously short, and I hate it when people dilly-dally their way off of the light, leaving the rest of us to sit through another light cycle.

GO!

🙂

3. I have super bad eyesight.

My nearsightedness is so bad, I can’t put on eye makeup without putting my contacts in first.

I have to get SO close to the mirror to see myself, there’s no room for an eyeliner pencil or eyeshadow brush!

I’ve had glasses or contacts since I was 7, so I have no recollection of what it’s like to be able to see unassisted.

4. I rarely spent money when I was a kid.

I’ve been a saver for a long time!

5. During high school, I did almost all of the cooking for my family.

My sister and I kind of volunteered ourselves, although I think I must have been slightly more enthused about the idea because I did more cooking than my sister did.

My mom felt that this having-dinner-cooked-by-someone-else arrangement was just fine, so it wasn’t a hard sell. 😉

6. I always wanted to have 5 kids.

But pregnancy was a lot harder for me than I anticipated.

(Hyperemesis. It is a drag.)

I got sicker and sicker with each successive pregnancy, and after a really, really tough pregnancy with Zoe, I decided I couldn’t do the pregnancy thing anymore.

So. Four it is for me.   And I’m good with that!

7. I will be 45 when my youngest kiddo graduates from high school.

Which means that, God willing, I’ll still have lots of years ahead of me after the years of full-time mom-ing are past (though of course, one is always a mom!)

8. Once, I put a cactus in my jeans pocket.

I was on a bike ride on a camping trip (I was probably 7 at the time), and I found a cool, relatively flat cactus on the side of the road.

So, I picked it, put it in my front jeans pocket, and biked back to the campground.

Friends, tiny cactus spines go right through the material jeans pockets are made of. 😉

But they poke through jusssst gently enough for you to only realize the extent of the damage once it’s too late.

9. I have always been much better with words than numbers.

On every standardized test I took from grade school through the SAT, my English scores were always significantly higher than my math scores.   And in school I was usually ahead of my grade in spelling and vocabulary.

That is a thing that never happened with my math curriculum.

Thus, I am a blogger, not a mathematician.

(Though I must say, I’m getting pretty good at Algebra 2, since it’s my second time through it as a homeschool mom. Imagine how good I’ll be by the time Zoe goes through it. OH HEY TRINOMIALS. YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME?)

10. I never understood why Laura Ingalls Wilder hated her brown eyes and brown hair.

I have nothing against blonde hair and blue eyes, mind you. One of my own kiddos has that combo!

But I don’t really get why blue/blonde is so often coveted over brown eyes and brown hair. And I always thought Laura’s hair was probably quite lovely.

I think brown eyes are beautiful (I love the variations in the brown of Mr. FG’s eyes), and I feel the same way about brown hair too…there’s often such an interesting combination of colors that make up a person’s brown hair; some lighter, some darker, some redder.

Anyway.

I always liked mine, and I think there should be more societal love for brown hair/eyes. Just because something is common, it doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.

Embrace your ordinary-yet-beautiful eyes and hair, people! 🙂

___________________

Well. That was fun to write. I hope it was fun to read too!

P.S. I am very curious if any of you know anything about the internal compass thing.   I’ve googled in vain, but I’m positive I’m not the only one whose brain works like this.