Yesterday was one of those days where it threatened to rain all day, but it never actually poured down rain until the minute I walked out the door to pick up Caroline from school. I was so glad I was wearing a white shirt. Nothing like a peep show at the elementary school.
After we got home and changed into dry clothes, I emailed the soccer team to let them know we would still have practice unless it was pouring down rain at 5:30. If we’re going to continue at our current level of mediocrity, we need all the practice we can get. Especially since I missed last week’s practice and P reported that he’d basically spent an hour being beat up by a bunch of six year old girls. To which I replied, “Oh, that’s too bad. Did I tell you that I chose a color called Bubblebath for my toes during my pedicure today? Wow, I’d love to hear more about soccer practice but I’m on my way to eat delicious sushi with grownups at Nobu. Love you.”
We checked the radar around 5:00 because we are big meteorology nerds and determined that practice could go on as scheduled even though there were definitely some showers to the south that appeared to be heading our way in the next hour or so. But we decided a few measly showers wouldn’t stop the Cheetah Girls. The Cheetah Girls are warriors who may or may not occasionally cry when one of them falls and scrapes her knees.
After about twenty minutes of practice (insert picture of P and I herding a very cute group of feral cats), the skies opened up and the rain came down. Most of the girls’ parents were there so we called practice and everyone ran to their cars to head home.
But there were two girls left whose mothers weren’t there yet because they had to shuttle other kids to other various practices all over town, so we told those girls to hop in the car with us and we’d just all wait in the parking lot until their mothers arrived.
A little over seven years ago, I was pregnant with Caroline and P was in Colorado chaperoning about sixty high school students on a ski trip. Normally I would have been on the trip with him, but I had a host of issues with riding a bus for seventeen hours with high school kids before I ever got pregnant so there wasn’t really even a remote possibility that I was going to attempt that kind of torture while carrying a child. He’d arranged to have a few other female chaperones on the trip, but they’d all had to cancel at the last minute.
P, bless his heart, ended up being the chaperone and small group leader for ten fourteen year old girls during that trip. He’d call me every night after he got back to his hotel room and report that they’d put gel in his hair or that they’d used something called a “straight iron” on him. On the last night of the trip he called to tell me that someone had a pair of scissors and he wasn’t sure what happened but the girls all started cutting each other’s hair and, the next thing he knew, three of them were crying in the bathroom while the other girls gathered outside the door and tried to console them with loving statements like “it will grow back” or “it doesn’t look that uneven from the left side”.
In short, he was slightly traumatized by the whole experience.
He arrived home from the trip on Wednesday afternoon and I was scheduled to have an ultrasound the following Friday. It was the big ultrasound. The ultrasound that can tell you if you’re having a boy or a girl. And if you think I was going to wait to find out that piece of information then you don’t know me at all. Of course it wasn’t like I really needed the ultrasound to tell me I was having a girl because I’d known that for a long time thanks to the science of peeing on some Drano Crystals and seeing them turn a lovely shade of seafoam green. Not to mention that I felt that God was speaking to me through Neil Diamond every time I heard “Sweet Caroline” come on the radio.
On the way to the doctor’s office that Friday morning, P looked at me and told me he knew we were having a girl. I thought maybe Neil Diamond had been speaking to him too, but he said that he knew when he was on that ski trip surrounded by all the chaos and squeals of those girls that God was preparing him for life with a daughter. And as much as he didn’t understand all the drama and the high pitched voices and the nail polish and why they thought it was a good idea to cut each other’s hair, he knew that it was exactly what he wanted.
Fast forward to a rained out soccer practice seven years later. We pile in the car and we’re all soaking wet. The girls are all squealing in their high pitched voices and I put some Taylor Swift on my iPod because I know the love language of six year old girls. And from the backseat, all three of them start singing “Our Song” as loud as their little voices can sing. The fact that they didn’t know the majority of the real lyrics didn’t dim their enthusiasm and confirmed why I never realized that “Greased Lightning” was a really dirty song until I was in my twenties.
They sang their hearts out and laughed and tickled each other. And in between they were all yelling “COACH P! COACH P! DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME THAT MY MOM TOLD MY SISTER SHE WAS GROUNDED FOR A WEEK BECAUSE SHE STAYED ON THE PHONE TOO LATE?” and “COACH P! COACH P! DID YOU KNOW THAT I HAVE AN IMAGINARY FRIEND NAMED ZUM ZUM?” and “COACH P! COACH P! DID YOU KNOW THAT ‘WHITE HORSE’ BY TAYLOR SWIFT IS MY VERY FAVORITE SONG IN THE WHOLE WORLD OR MAYBE IT’S ‘PARTY IN THE U.S.A.’?”
At one point he asked me if Taylor Swift had been a contestant on American Idol and I replied, “No, she was just a seventeen year old girl who got struck by lightning.” (Because I like to mix metaphors.) And Caroline yelled out, “MY MOM JUST SAW SOME GIRL GET STRUCK BY LIGHTNING!” All the girls screamed and I had to explain that no one got struck by lightning, I was just using an expression that ultimately didn’t even make sense.
P just looked at me in amazement that so many different conversations and activities were taking place all at the same time in the backseat of our car. It was like his official welcome party to GIRL WORLD.
And I don’t know if anything has ever made me happier in my whole life.
______________________________________________________________
There’s a new post up for the Tropicana Juicy Rewards program with a chance to win a $50 gift card from BlogHer. Just click here to enter. Post #1 is now closed and the winner has been notified, so everyone is eligible to enter!