Expectations and reprieve

Our expectations are crushed every day. I expected to wake up to a crying baby. Instead I'm waking up to a crying wife. I expected to be tired from 2 a.m. feedings. Instead I'm tired from insomnia. Heather was expecting to be nursing now. But her body doesn't know what happened.

I'm also learning how emotions like laughing and crying are so closely connected. For those who wish they could be here with us right now, I have to say that it's not all doom and gloom at our house. When the tears run dry for a time, we have had some fun conversations. I'll name two that may give you some emotional reprieve.

1) My uncle Tony is a catholic priest on an island off of Florida. He was telling us about all these crazy cat ladies who wander around the church grounds. Evidentially, cats are taking over the island because these crazy ladies feed the cats all the time and let them breed incessantly.

To solve the problem, the church set up a separate feeding station for the cats a ways away from the church. They also put up signs to deter the ladies from setting out milk and cat food all over the campus.

Well, the ladies still kept feeding them in the middle of night ... so the cats just multiplied even more because now they had two places to eat. We gave him a few solutions ... but I can't remember them all ... something about arsenic and guns.

He also told us about one of his first weeks at the church. When he walked past one of the crazy cat ladies, he made a comment like, "Man, there are a lot of cats around here."

The lady said back, "Yes there are. You like cats, don't you?"

"Yes, I love them! Stir-fried with lime."

2) Any pregnant woman knows about Preparation H and Tucks wipes. One ingredient in it is cod liver oil, or shark liver oil. Heather and I started thinking, who came up with that idea? Did some old seaman with bad hemorrhoids accidentally sit on a fish one day? ... "Oh, that's feels kind of good."

Side note: I got a call from some flower lady in Columbia, Kentucky. Someone ordered flowers for us but didn't know what state we lived in. It must've been someone from up north, who thinks all the states down here are kind of the same. Same with people not from the Northeast ... they all seem like just one giant city up there.