Category: not normal

3 Ways to Improve Your Workouts

I’ve been working out consistently for just over a month now. That’s a month of my whole life, so I don’t have much experience to draw from unless I also pull from way back in my childhood when working out was not a thing I did, but playing was. As an adult, I have been a terrible role model thus far and definitely no one you should trust for fitness advice. However, I’ve learned a couple things recently that I would like to share with you, and I am also going to pull from way back in my childhood.

1. Eat a healthy diet.

nawlinsDo you want to know why working out sucks SO bad and you hate it all the time always and hate everything that exists in the world while you’re exercising? It’s because the food you’re putting in your body is not fueling your body properly so that it can work out. At least that was true for me. I barely had the energy to change into workout clothes, but I forced myself to work out because I knew I should. And I kept waiting for the day when I would look forward to it, when I’d feel sluggish if I missed a run, not if I went on one. That day never, ever came, and eventually I gave up. Even when I didn’t give up (remember that time Amaris and I did a half marathon?), I didn’t lose a single pound because I didn’t change my eating habits. They may, in fact, have gotten worse. I lacked the energy I needed to train, but I trained anyway. Then to get the energy back that I needed to finish out the day, I would eat a ginormous plate of pasta because dangit I had EARNED it.

Some of you are shaking (or smacking) your heads at me right now, and you are correct to do so. Looking back, I know it didn’t make sense, but I didn’t know any better. Now I do, and y’all, I am not kidding when I tell you that I didn’t get to work out yesterday, and I was disappointed. If you give your body what it needs, it will return the favor. Get rid of the sugar and fried foods and as much of the refined and processed foods as possible. Eat your veggies. Limit your grains (not to the extreme, but probably half as much as you would like). Report back to me on your workouts.

2. Make a plan to change things up.

I get bored pretty easily, so doing a different workout every day helps me to keep it up. But I also need structure. I hated going to the gym because I would walk in, look around, wonder what I should do, not have any good ideas, and end up doing the same thing. Planning what you’re going to do, though, allows you to feel in control and ready for your workout while also preventing you from getting bored with it. It’s the same with diet. If you plan to eat different things every week, you’ll get to eat new things but also not find yourself in the kitchen staring into the fridge wondering if you’re actually hungry.

3. Play!

I have workouts that I do with a DVD throughout the week, and they are not the most fun, but I do them because I must, because they’re different every day (which keeps me from zoning out), because they’re planned for me (structure), and because doing them is FAR healthier than watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. But on Sundays, I’m going to a Zumba class up the street, and that is FUN. I look forward to it. It makes me excited about exercise (most weeks) because it doesn’t feel like exercise. When I was a kid, I was in great shape because I was on a competitive jump rope team. Have you tried jumping rope lately? Good luck going for more than a minute. It is no joke. But when I was a kid, I didn’t think about it as exercise. I just loved doing it. What do you love doing that gets your heart rate up, makes you sweat, and works your muscles (keep it clean, kids)? Dance (Zumba, swing, contra (!!), Just Dance), play a sport, jump rope, run as fast as you can down a hill, ride a bike, play in the ocean, walk/hike with friends, go to a playground and climb on the jungle gym, get some buddies together and play tag (or any other childhood game that won’t make you feel like the fat kid in gym class). HAVE FUN!

Oh, and if you are giant nerd and you know it (you know it), I just found this. Enjoy!

The Honest Guide to Pregnancy – Weeks 14-15

I don’t know if I’m starting something here that I won’t be able to keep up with, but I’ll try. I really like the idea of documenting this journey for other women, but also for myself so that if we have another kid, I can look back and remember what happened when…not that a 2nd pregnancy will necessarily be at all like this one. But still…

Today is my last day in week 15. It’s been 19 days since I last vomited (knock on wood). I know it’s been 19 days because we keep a chalkboard by our front door, and for the past month, it’s had a square drawn on it followed by the words “days without incident.” We update the number in the square every morning on our way out the door. We’ve had to reset it to zero a couple of times, but this is the longest stretch so far, so I’m feeling pretty good about the odds that my “morning” sickness phase is finished. I may give it another week just to be sure, and then return the chalkboard to its original role as Sweet Note Spot.

Some interesting things have happened in weeks 14 and 15 besides the fact that I haven’t hurled once (knock on wood). Let’s start with the least interesting and work our way up.

Flintstone’s Vitamins

I am not a champion when it comes to taking pills. I can do it, but I really have to psych myself up, and it’s not enjoyable. So when we found out I was pregnant, we got gummy vitamins. They tasted not awful, and they were easy to take, but I really think they contributed to my nausea, and I was not cool with that. Then we found some that were supposed to be easy on the stomach and actually help prevent nausea, so we got those, and voila! The nausea abated. Unfortunately, they were larger than rifle bullets, and I dreaded taking them so badly that I just gave up. I mean hey, women had healthy babies for centuries before prenatal vitamins even became a thing, right? And I’m suuuuuure I’m getting everything the baby and I both need on my diet of cereal, pickles, and peanut-butter crackers…

After some internet research on the subject, I found out that many women take Flintstone’s chewable vitamins while pregnant, so at our last appointment, I asked if that was ok, and I got the go-ahead. Yabba-dabba-doo!!

Shortness of Breath

This is actually not new. I think I’ve been out of breath since about week 6, but back then, I got out of breath from walking up stairs whereas now, all it takes is rolling over in bed. To be fair, changing positions in bed is a greater ordeal in pregnancy in general what with all the pillows involved in propping me up so I don’t sleep on my stomach. But seriously, it’s just rolling over. It’s not an Olympic event.

Sidebar: What would pregnant Olympics look like? Would rolling over in bed be an event? Surely one could compete in how long she can go without peeing. Later in pregnancy, leg shaving could be very competitive. And of course, the long-distance waddle would be a highlight of the games. :End sidebar

Baby Bump

At the end of the last quarter (3 weeks ago), I promised my coworkers that I would work on a more respectable bump over our two-week break, and I’m proud to say that I totally delivered (pun intended) on that promise. Here’s the thing, though: I’ve always had a belly. The only real difference now is that I can’t suck it in anymore. At all. It is out there for all to see, and honestly, I’m ok with that. We were walking around Target the other night, and I said to Will, “You know what I really like about being pregnant? It’s totally ok for me to look pregnant.” When skinny women get pregnant, they are generally still pretty thin, but they have a baby bump, you know, like every time US Weekly posts a grainy long-distance photo of a celebrity on the cover with her belly circled. But when you have the kind of build I have, it’s hard to tell when you’re pregnant and when you have just started to let yourself go.

The people who know I’m pregnant know I’m starting to show. The people who don’t know definitely wonder, but they don’t have the guts to ask yet because it’s still very possible that married life has just been that good to me.

As the bump gets bigger, though, I’m starting to believe that it has power. People are starting to make way for me and let me have their seats and stuff. Not a lot, but you better believe I’m going to use this thing to my advantage as it becomes more obvious.

Relaxin

And no, I don’t mean chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool (and definitely no shootin’ some b-ball outside of the school). Apparently, around this time in the pregnancy, your body produces a hormone called relaxin that relaxes your joints so that your hips can spread out to make way for baby’s grand entrance into the world, and possibly so that your rib cage can spread out to make way for all the organs your baby is displacing as it grows.

But what you feel is that your legs could detach from your body at any moment, your hips are sore, and your back muscles are begging for mercy from working overtime to hold your torso together. Hence, the no b-ball.

The Great Migration

At this point in pregnancy, your uterus is getting too big for its cozy little usual spot and decides to take up residency a bit farther north. So it squeezes itself out of its downtown location, which is unpleasant in itself. I was sitting on the couch one night and got very uncomfortable. It felt crampy in my baby box, which had hitherto been the worst possible thing that could happen. In the first trimester, almost anything you look up has an explanation with this final sentence: “As long as you’re not cramping, you’re probably fine.” But the second trimester…well that’s a whole new ball game, so I Googled “14 weeks pregnant pressure in lower abdomen.” And I found this awesome website with the best sentence I could have possibly read at that moment. “If you’re feeling little contractions or pulling and stretching sensations this week, don’t panic.”

It went on to explain that all my organs were going to move. And friends, they DID. And I felt it happening. And I knew what the earth felt like when Pangaea broke up. It was weird. I told the nurse at our last appointment that I woke up in the middle of the night and could feel everything moving around inside me, and she said, “Yep, that’s probably exactly what was happening.”

Skeletor

At our first appointment, we saw the baby. It looked like a kidney bean with a heartbeat, and it was amazing. At the second appointment, we saw the baby again. It looked like a very squirmy pile of string beans with a head and a heartbeat, and it was also amazing. At our third appointment, it looked like Skeletor. Yep. Still amazing.

And let me tell you, Skeletor is ROCKING OUT in there. L-Josh gave us her home fetal monitor thingamajig, and we haven’t had any success finding the heartbeat with it so far, but now we know why. The little booger won’t sit still long enough for you to find its heart. Even the nurse couldn’t do it with her fancy medical-grade doppler. That’s how we got to see Skeletor.

As real as the symptoms of pregnancy are, it’s still hard to believe there’s a tiny human in there. I see my belly growing and understand, theoretically, why it’s happening, but even when I see the ultrasounds, it doesn’t seem real. It feels like they’re putting cold gel and some kind of Pampered Chef product (you know, one of those things you got as a gift but don’t know what it’s for) on my belly and then showing me a crappy black-and-white movie of a really freaky-ass baby kind of half-heartedly trying to do the worm.

Maybe when I can feel it moving and kicking, it’ll start to feel real. Until then, I’m just going to rejoice in the fact that I haven’t thrown up in 19 days (knock on wood).

Google Voicemail Just Doesn’t Get Me

Every woman wants to be understood, and until recently, I didn’t think I was that hard to get. I try to express myself clearly. I think I’m pretty articulate. But now I know I just talk gibberish all the time.

W-Josh has Google voicemail that texts her a transcript of each message she receives. Conceivably, this means that she doesn’t actually have to listen to the messages. She can just read them and respond accordingly. But it NEVER has a clue what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter how clearly I enunciate. It just doesn’t understand me. A few weeks ago, it thought part of my message was, “yeah yeah.” I wish I could remember the rest of that one. Maybe she’ll help us out by posting it as a comment, but I can assure you that at no point in that message did I say, “yeah yeah.”

So as you may have guessed by now, that cryptic message I gave you the other day was one of Google’s attempts to translate me. I’ll refresh your memory. It said:

Leading well in your private will give you indigestion. This word for the day. It’s not the by. Relax. Church.

And let me pause right here and tell you that when Whitney called me to read this to me, I thought she was saying, “Bleeding well in your private…,” and I was equally amused and grossed out. What the eff, Google? Is there not a logarithm in existence that determines whether or not these things make sense? Granted, it puts the words it’s unsure of in gray and the ones it’s pretty certain of in black, but it was sure about most of this message. The only parts it doubted were:

  • private will
  • It’s
  • the by

I wish I knew how to get the sound byte on here, but since I don’t, I’ll just tell you what I REALLY said.

Buddy, swallowing your pride won’t give you indigestion. This word for the day is brought to you by Freedom Life…Church on Fire!

Now. Lest Whitney and I be accused of having inside jokes, I’ll explain. On US1, close to I-85, there is a church called Freedom Life…Church on Fire. Seriously. Look it up. They have a facebook page. Four people like it. Anyhoe, we think it’s hilarious that that is really the name of the church, and whenever one of us drives past it or just thinks about it, we call the other and say, “Freedom Life!” to which the other responds, “Church on Fire!” Their marquis is always equally amazing. Once when I drove by, it said, “Stop, drop and roll won’t work in hell.” You can’t make this stuff up.

So as I was driving up to VA last weekend, I noticed the message and decided to give Josh a call. And as you now know, hilarity ensued.

But wait! There’s more.

We laughed about it for a while, and then I suggested that I try again, but with VERY CLEAR NON-REGIONAL DICTION (anybody catch that Anchorman reference?). She thought that was a good idea, and I said it would happen when she least expected it, to which she replied, “No. I want you to call me right back after we hang up and try it.”

I felt put on the spot to come up with something to say, but never fear. I went for an old stand-by. That’s right. Lyrics, dude. Recite her some lyrics. (Bill and Ted? Anyone?) I called and left this very clear message:

Rush. Rush. Hurry, hurry lover, come to me. Rush. Rush. I want to feel it. I want to feel you all through me. Oooo, what you do to me.

Here’s what Google thought I said:

Hey Rosh latch hurry hurry love her come to me rush, rash. I want. 2. Feel it. I want. Sincerely you. All the room with me. Ohh. What You do to me.

I give up.

Going Postal

Ok y’all, I have about a million things to do, and I’m supposed to be lesson planning right now according to the schedule I set for myself last night, but I HAVE to tell you about how I was STRONGLY reprimanded by a very sassy postal worker the other day.

Back story. A couple of weeks ago, I went up to the mailboxes as the mail male was doing his thing. I live in an apartment complex, so the mailboxes are the kind where one large panel opens up about 20 of them at a time. Our panel was open, and I asked him if I could just reach in and grab ours. He said that was no problem, so I took my mail and went on my merry way.

Ok now. The other day, I got to the mailboxes as the mail female was there doing her thing. I was on the phone with Amaris, and I didn’t want to have too much going on at once, so I didn’t say anything to the mail lady. I just went in for my mail.

She whipped around so fast you’d have thought I was stealing her baby, and with a horrified look on her face and a sassy neck swivel, she said to me, and I quote, “NO. Uh-uh. Step AWAY from the mailbox.”

Shocked, and trying not to laugh, I don’t know how long I stood there with my mouth open before I replied, “Oh. I’m sorry. The other guy let me just get my mail before, so I thought…”

But I was interrupted, this time with an accompanying finger waggle, “Huh-uh. Wrong answer. No. Mm-mm.” Seriously, she said, “Wrong answer.”

At this point, I really wanted to try for a grab-n-run, but I was afraid she’d taze me or something, so I went for a more docile approach. “Uhh…ok, can I give you this then?” I said, tentatively holding out my Netflix envelope.

“Yes,” she said, obviously using every bit of restraint she had to keep from saying or doing something that might get her in trouble, “but you need to leave now.”

Oh my gosh, y’all, ask Amaris. I was giggling uncontrollably all the way back to the car. I still can’t believe this happened. It absolutely made my day, but I still haven’t gotten my mail.

I’m Psychic: Brazilian Monkey Edition

It’s amazing how many little kid games I have my students play in class. We play board games, Memory, Cootie Catcher, but my favorite is Telephone. It’s perfect because it incorporates listening and pronunciation skills, and today, I made it use writing skills too. Because I’m the jam.

We were working today on quoted speech. You know, where you tell exactly what somebody else said and use quotation marks. I only just recently realized that not all languages write quoted speech the same. We use a comma to introduce a quote while other languages use a colon. We also put both of our quotation marks up high whereas in other languages, one of them goes down low. It’s crazy times, I tell you.

So I started two messages going in opposite directions around the room. As each student heard the message, he/she had to write it down as a direct quote:

Miguel said, “The fly water is ugly bathtub.”

That way, when we got the messed up one at the other end, we could trace our way back through the mistakes. And I don’t know, but I think that was more fun than just hearing the messed up version at the end.

Well. One of the sentences was, “Maria has a pet monkey in Brazil.” In my lesson plans, I’d written, “__student__ has a pet monkey in __country__,” and I’d planned to see who was there in class today and pick someone with a good sense of humor to put in the sentence. Maria worked out well because she has a great sense of humor, and she was far enough around the room for the sentence to have changed significantly from the original by the time it got to her.

On the other end, it came out, “Maria likes smoking,” but before that, it was, “Maria likes monkeys,” and ,”Maria is a bad monkey in Brazil,” which I’m sure they thought was some crazy idiom I’d thrown in. You know, like Shaft is a bad mon… (Shut yo’ mouth!). Aaaaaand YouTube-ing the theme from Shaft…

Anyhoe, once we traced it back to the beginning and everyone knew what the original sentence was, Maria’s face lit up, and she said, “Yes! It’s true!”

Y’all. The woman straight up had a pet monkey in Brazil. I was so confused, I didn’t know what to do with myself. She thought someone had told me, and I had to show her my lesson plan to explain that it was all a big coincidence. Amazing.

Incidentally, the other message was, “Without geometry, life is pointless,” which they totally didn’t get, but I was amused.

Planning Ahead

Amaris‘s brain doesn’t always work. I don’t know if she needs more sleep or if she’s got some kind of vitamin deficiency or what, but sometimes she just ain’t all there. I can say these things about her because she knows it, and I’ve said it to her (though she probably doesn’t remember), and well, she’s just not ashamed. She is who she is, and we love her.

Well, this morning, I got a tweet from her that I should go look at Mary’s feed because the content of one of her tweets was a direct result of me and my awesomeness. So I went, and I looked, and I did not get it. Then, as I thought more about her most recent tweet, a tiny, vague and very hazy memory began to creep ever-so-slowly and sneakily into the very back corner of my mind. It said, in part, “[my husband] is singing along to Billy Joel, which is just awesome.” And I thought, Did I turn Karl on to Billy Joel? That feels kind of familiar.

So I asked Amaris, and she told me this WHOLE long story about how I told Karl that any man who likes music should have a basic appreciation for Billy Joel, and how the women in his life, and maybe even his future wife, would love it if he liked Billy Joel, and on and on and on.

Y’all, I have no recollection of this whatsoever. So I told Amaris that if we don’t have husbands when we’re old, we need to just move on in together so we can try and help each other remember to put our teeth in and wear clothes when we leave the house. I don’t even care if they match. (Well, I want my teeth to match my mouth, so I hope I don’t put hers in, but as far as my clothes go, I’ll still be so urban that it won’t matter.) Clearly our mental capacities are already failing us, so now is the time to prepare.

So if any of y’all want to get in on this, let me know. We can buy a big ol’ house somewhere and form our own old folks home. Surely somebody will have a kid who’s a doctor who’ll come over and check on us once a week. We’ll hire a college kid to do all our grocery shopping, and when he/she comes over with our rations, we’ll say things that are totally inappropriate and unexpected for old people. We’ll play games in the back yard, but we’ll cheat, of course. We’ll go on early evening walks through the neighborhood, smiling and waving at all the families out playing in their yards. We’ll sit out on our porch on Sunday afternoons and wave at passing cars. We’ll always have candy in our pockets to give to the kids at church. We’ll have surprisingly good Halloween decorations. We’ll dance as much of a jig as our hips will allow when Christmas carolers come by. We’ll drink wine on the porch at 10 in the morning just because we can get away with it ’cause we’re old. And when we wake up at 3 in the morning because we went to bed at 7 the previous evening, we’ll take the opportunity afforded to us by the cover of darkness to go skinny dipping in the community pool.

Won’t you join us?

The Teacher Becomes the Student

Oh y’all, this semester is going to be FUN! First of all, I’m going to be teaching a new class (that I’ll be inventing as I go) on phrasal verbs, idioms and slang. Now, for those of you who are not total grammar nerds, a phrasal verb is a verb composed of two or more words which, when put together, convey a meaning different from the meanings of the individual words. For example, “hang out” can be literally hang + out as in, “I hang (action) my towels out (where) on the balcony railing to dry.” Or, “hang out” can be a phrasal verb as in, “Ryan Gosling and I were hanging out in his hot tub last night…”

Ok fine, so that last one might have a possible double entendre, but you get the idea.

Anyhoe, that class is going to be awesome. But my other class, my morning class, is also going to be lots of fun. I’ve recently discovered some new podcasts that I’ll be using for listening practice. All from HowStuffWorks.com, we’ve got Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, and my personal favorite, Stuff Mom Never Told You. Well, I was listening to a Mom Stuff podcast just now in preparing my lessons for the first week of class, and as I was writing down a few vocabulary words from it, I began to wonder whether I should also use this podcast for the slang class.

The terms in question were “guyliner” and “manscara,” but they also got me thinking about “manscaping,” which made me curious as to how many other such words exist. So I looked it up and was not shocked to find the following:

  • guylights
  • boytox
  • manbag
  • brozilian

I WAS, however, both surprised and very, very amused by mantyhose. Yeah. Just you go look that up and enjoy. Feel free to come on back here when you’re done and leave comments.

True Confessions

True Confession #1

When I think about planning lessons, my whole brain shuts down, and I have to convince myself that it’s a necessary thing to do. Then I have to think about how long it will take me and what else I have to do that day, and if there’s any time at all to spare, the lesson planning gets bumped back. I like the actual teaching, and I love hanging out with my students every day, but the planning part is so draining. The only things in life I like planning are trips and parties. That’s it. Everything else can be improvised.

True Confession #2

When I’m walking alongside a single guy friend, I always want to hold his hand. Always. It doesn’t matter if I’m interested in him romantically or not. It just seems to me like the natural thing to do, and I have to constantly remind myself that we are not dating, that I’m not actually interested in dating him, that if I were to try and hold his hand, it would be weird, and that nothing good could come of it. It would make everything awkward and not be worth it at all. So if you are a single guy friend of mine and you notice that my conversational skills are lacking when we walk, it’s because I’m having to concentrate very hard on not weirding you out. You’re welcome.

But if you want to hold my hand, go for it. I won’t think anything of it.

Justice and Hate

I’m not sad that Osama bin Laden is no longer with us. I do not mourn his absence from our world. But the general response to his death has disturbed me, and I just have to say this.

I am generally pretty nonpolitical, mostly because I’m not confident enough in my ideas to take a stand on them. I know no political jargon, and I’m pretty sure Sasha Obama could easily defeat me in a debate on any global issue. But what I do know is that Jesus died for Osama bin Laden just as much as he died for me. And although he was a horrible, horrible, terrible, awful, murderous man who will not be missed on Earth, God mourns the death of his soul.

Earlier this afternoon, I put a Martin Luther King Jr. quote on facebook that said, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” No one has commented on it directly, but I have seen some folks talking about the difference between hate and justice as if to say that bin Laden got what he deserved, and rejoicing in that justice does not qualify as hate. Perhaps. If that’s what you’re doing, then I absolutely agree. Justice is always right and good.

But let’s be careful not to justify hate by calling it something else. And let us not forget the justice that has mercifully not been done to us.

To those who found and brought earthly justice to Osama bin Laden – thank you. To the men and women of the United States armed forces – thank you for your tireless and selfless service. I cannot say enough how grateful we are for you, and I wish you safety and success in everything you do for us. I mourn the loss of those who have given their lives to protect us, I grieve with their family members who are trying to pick up the pieces and carry on, and I pray for those in the field and at home.

But I do not rejoice in eternal death, even in that of an enemy. I’m glad that bin Laden can no longer harm anyone, but I wish he’d known a better way, and I feel sorry for him that he never did and never will.

Better than Twiggy the Waterskiing Squirrel

Yesterday morning, I heard a radio commercial for a boat show in Greensboro this weekend where everyone’s favorite waterskiing squirrel will be performing LIVE!! I got a little excited and then a little nostalgic about my own encounter with Twiggy, but not quite enough to make me want to drive to Greensboro and pay money to attend a boat show.

Little did I know that small, furry, woodland creatures would be a theme for the day.

I later entered into an email conversation with Mrs. Emily Furr Hogan that turned at some point to the topic of transferring VHS videos to DVDs – something neither of us is capable of. She then made the following statement:

I’m pretty sure Matt’s grandma knows how to do this. I need to call her. And yes– I did just admit that a lady in her 70’s knows perhaps more about technology than I do. I think she uses the VHS / DVD thing when she’s making videos of her chipmunks. I’ll find out details.

Now look, friends, you cannot say that someone’s grandmother makes videos of chipmunks like it’s a normal thing and just leave it at that. It is not a normal thing. Please acknowledge that. Since Emily and I had not previously established that things of this nature must be adequately presented both for their creativity and incredulity, I requested more information. Here’s what I got:

It’s all true.  She sets up these dioramas on her back porch and lures the chipmunks that live in her yard to come into the dioramas via a little trail of sunflower seeds.  Before you know it, you’ve got a scene that features a chipmunk driving a covered wagon.  Or hanging laundry out behind its teeny tiny house.  Or “wearing” a santa suit in a little Christmas scene.  (She props up the outfits & as soon as the chipmunk stands perfectly behind it, she snaps a photo.)

This stuff is AMAZING, and I’ve been dying to get my hands on some of it.  She’s got video and ALBUM UPON ALBUM of these types of photos.  I remember her expressing genuine, deep excitement upon finding the tiny covered wagon.  “And I told the store clerk that this would be just PERFECT for my chipmunks!!”

Y’all, this story expresses so many things I love about Emily:

  • She knows someone who builds dioramas for chipmunks and then lures them into tiny covered wagons with sunflower seeds.
  • She is related by marriage to this person.
  • She sees both the humor and the amazingness in such an activity.
  • This sort of thing comes up in the course of a normal conversation for us.

I must see these photos/videos, but more importantly, I must find a single cousin of Matt’s to marry so that I too might join this family.