Daydreamer

From as early on as I can remember, I have always been a daydreamer. Pretty much, no matter where I am, I usually end up in some sort of a daydream. This has gotten me into trouble more than a few times in my life as teachers would ask to speak to my mom about my “issue”.

I couldn’t help it, I really couldn’t. Sitting in a boring classroom listening, or truthfully, only half listening, to the teacher go on and on about this or that, could not come close to the excitement of the thoughts swirling around in my head. I would gaze out the window to watch the beautiful snow or leaves falling, the squirrels and birds scurrying around, or just watching cars go by. That was all much more interesting to me, and I was convinced that it was a much more valuable lesson than anything that the teacher could have been trying to teach me.

Watching the snow fall, I would wonder if it was really true that no two snowflakes were alike. I made a mental note to start comparing them on my walk home from school. Oh, how I wished that walk home would be so much sooner than the 4 hours away that it was!

Watching the squirrels gather nuts, I had to wonder how they were going to remember where they stashed them once winter came and they were hungry. Hmmmm...

My mind moved on. Watching cars go by the school, I wondered where the people in those cars were going. Some place exciting, I just knew it!

My mother was actually pretty understanding of my daydreaming” issue”, but urged me to please try to pay more attention to what was going on inside the classroom, rather than what was going on outside the classroom. I tried, but found it almost impossible to do. I am sure that she thought that this was just something that I would outgrow, but as I eventually found out, it wasn’t.

Years later, when I got out into the work force, I quickly realized that I could not sit next to, or even in eye shot of a window, if I was going to be productive at all. So, without giving reasons why, I would volunteer to sit away from windows. I was more productive that way since it kept the outside world away from my view and my thoughts. Even now, I can’t walk by a window, no matter where I am, without looking out and quickly taking a mental walk.

When I first started business travel, a colleague had advised me to not sit next to the windows on a plane, or if I did, I shouldn’t stare out them as it looked like I was a novice and I needed to have a more professional demeanor. What?? No way!

 I purposely book all of my flights with window seats for just that reason. I love to look down at the world going by and wonder what all of those people are doing with their lives. I know that I probably make their lives more interesting than they actually are, because I also think that if someone like me was doing the same thing from their flight, looking down at me in my house, they would be imagining a much more interesting life than what I actually live.

 While daydreaming can be an “issue” in some circumstances, it has also led me to solutions to some problems that I might not have come up with otherwise, and some pretty creative thinking, which serves me well in my professional and personal life, so I guess it’s a good thing that I never outgrew my daydreaming “issue”.

A Helping Hand...or two

I was awakened at 6:30 this morning by my phone ringing. It was my husband who had just recently left for work, asking me to come and get him down the road, as his truck quit running. Ugh. I was so cozy in my bed, but I got up and threw on some yoga capris, a shirt, and hoodie, grabbed my purse and crocs, and backed out of the garage to go and bring him home. I didn’t feel that I needed anything else since it was just a short trip there and back. Once home, he could take my car to work while someone else towed his broken down truck to a service department to be fixed.

 Luckily, it’s a Monday, and I work from home on Mondays, so it was fine if he had to use my car for this one day.

Driving, only half awake, I see him standing by his broken down truck. I look at my temperature gauge and it reads 14 degrees. Brrrr, good thing I am just bringing him back home because I am clearly not dressed to be out in this weather. He didn’t look like he was either, so it’s a good thing that he broke down so close to home.

As I pull off to the side of the road, I see that his truck is at a stop sign, but still not in a great spot to be sitting for very long, so, I wonder what his plan of attack is going to be. He walks up to my window with a tow rope in hand, and then after assessing my car, advises that I don’t have any of the towing “thingy’s” (my word, not his) that one would need to tow a truck, so he tells me that I would just have to help him push his truck back off of the road a bit to get it out of the way. What? I have to get out of my car and help push a very heavy truck off of the road? I am not dressed for this, and it’s freezing out!

He tells me that I will be fine. Famous last words…

 Luckily, I was a girl scout, so I reached into my emergency bag that I keep in my back seat, and pulled out a pair of gloves. There is nothing in my bag to cover my exposed shins, so I will just have to live with my decision to wear yoga capris in January in Indiana.

I was happy that it was still dark out as I was sure that I looked like a vision in my “outfit”. Just then a car rolls up next to him to ask if we needed help. YES! I yell out in my head, but he thanks the driver and tells him that we have it handled.  Brother…

I walk to the front of his truck and get into position to push, while he has one foot in the truck, one foot on the road, and a hand on the steering wheel to help guide.  I was thankful that I have been lifting weights for the last couple of years and was hoping that all of that sweat was about to pay off.

PUSH!! The truck barely budges. PUSH AGAIN, HARDER! This time it moved about an inch. Another person stops to see if we need help, and my husband waives them on.  NOOOOOO!! Come back!!  I yell out again in my head, but he too is gone. I try to muster up that super strength that you hear about in extreme situations, but after a few more futile pushes, I curse my muscles and lack of upper body strength then suddenly realize that my lower body is really cold. My husband jumps out of the truck and walks up to me to discuss plan B, when yet another good soul drives up to ask if we are okay. This time, I take over and encourage my husband to accept this kind strangers help as I climb back into my warm car.

I start to thaw out as I watch these two men try to push the truck out of the way. They pushed and pushed but didn’t really get any further in their attempt than I did, so I apologized to my muscles for the previous curse, and I continued to watch them from the warmth of my car.

 Another person stops to ask if we need help. If I haven’t said it enough before, let me reiterate it again, I love living in the country! I love everything about it. Here it is, Monday morning, around 6:45am, 14 degrees with snow flurries, and people are stopping on their way to work or wherever, to help us. I don’t know if you would get this kind of selflessness in the city, but I do know that you get it in the country!

Finally, my husband and the other man decide that they can’t push it out, so I move my car out of the way so that they can tow my husband’s truck off of the road with the other guy’s truck.

10 minutes later, the truck is out of the way, the kind man is on his way to continue with his day, and I am back at home making coffee to start my day. I never really doubt why I love living in the country, and today is just another reminder of why I love it and the people so much!

Ignorance is Bliss?

Someone help me here please. Is it just me, or does it seems like there are more women having miscarriages now days than ever before?

In the past few years, I have known of so many women miscarrying, and I am trying to figure out why this seems to be.

Most of them seem to be miscarrying within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, so that part doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, as that has always been the critical phase of pregnancy, but it just seems like there are so many of them occurring now.

The really odd thing that I have noticed with these miscarriages is that the women don’t seem to be actually losing the babies when they do miscarry, so they are left to carry them in their bodies and wait for the fetus to come out on its own. That sounds so cruel to me that these women have to go on with their lives and wait, knowing that their baby is no longer alive, and then if it doesn’t come out on its own, the woman has to have a procedure called a D and C (Dilation and Curettage) to remove the fetus.

 The emotional pain that they go through just seems so horrible to me. I have seen this with not only my daughter in law and friends, but also my nieces, including my one niece who openly writes about her experience in her blog, www.lyndsayslastbite.blogspot.com. It’s so sad to hear and read about her and all of these women on what they have gone through.

As I wondered what was going on with this, I remembered seeing a commercial for an early pregnancy test, where you could find out if you were pregnant in as early as 6 days after conceiving!  6 days!!

That seems amazing, considering that years ago, you usually didn’t find out that you were pregnant until you had missed your first, and sometimes your second period, meaning that by the time you thought that you might be pregnant and went to buy the over the counter pregnancy test, you were probably already about 6-8 weeks along, certainly not 6 days!

The pregnancy tests back then were like an actual science project as well. You didn’t pee on a stick and within minutes looked for a line or plus sign. Nope, our test were an actual test tube that you put urine in, shook it up, kept it in a dark place, OVERNIGHT, and then the next morning, looked for a circle at the bottom of the test tube. If you saw that, then you could call your doctor (if you had one, which sometimes you didn’t if you hadn’t planned on getting pregnant, so add another week to that timeframe to find a doctor to call) to have your blood drawn and confirm or deny the pregnancy. All of that process took you to about the 9-10 week mark, so you were then left with only a couple of weeks in that critical first 12 week phase of the pregnancy.

In talking with my sisters about this, we concluded that we may have also miscarried when we were having babies, but since technology was not as “advanced” as it is now, we may just not have known that we were pregnant and just thought that we were having a really bad period when in fact, we may have been miscarrying. I think that I would rather have not known that I was pregnant and miscarried, than to have to go through what the women today are going through by knowing so early on.

 I do understand, to a point, the need for finding out early if you are pregnant, so that you can start making healthy choices for you and the baby. But, I think that you have to determine if learning so early and possibly having to go through what these women have gone through outweighs the benefits of knowing early so that you can start make healthy choices. I can’t answer that, but I think that in many cases, the body is still going to miscarry if a fetus is not healthy enough to make it full term, regardless of when you find out that you are pregnant.

So, if the above is true, and there aren’t really any more miscarriages now than in the past, just the knowledge earlier on, then I would say, in my opinion, that just perhaps, knowledge may not be power in this instance, but rather ignorance was bliss for those of us that didn’t have to go through all that today’s women may go through by having this knowledge so early on.