A Grand Entrance

So here I am. On the web. My mom would be so proud. Seriously, she would, but you can't ever tell her that I have a blog, because if I ever feel the need to vent about her, or make fun of her, say, for her obsessive cleaning frenzies, she might get mad. Now I don't know if anyone else's mom is quite like mine, but I'm 26, and I still know that Mom could take me. Yes, she's short and much smaller than me, but she's a tough cookie, so let's just keep the blog thing to ourselves for the moment, eh?

As I said before, I'm 26. This age still seems old to me. In fact, I was actually referred to as old by someone just the other day. He was 17, and I believe his exact quote was "I can't believe that an old person doesn't know any Kansas songs and I probably know all of them." So, resisting my urge to cast down my cane, remove my dentures and throttle that little whippersnapper, I squeaked out, "Umm, I'm not old. I'm not even thirty yet." Yeah, I'm that tough. Clearly I could learn a thing or two from my mother about being tough, no?

I am a mother, too, now. I had my little girl, Maya, when I was 23 years old. She was a bit of a surprise. My husband and I found out we were expecting the little bundle of joy before we were married even a year. Superbowl Sunday, it was. Let me tell you how that conversation went down, because I think it's important to immortalize these kinds of things, especially when you can taunt your husband with the tale for a few decades. I suspected there was something going on, so naturally I bought myself a pregnancy test. I slipped, unnoticed, into the bathroom to use said test. Well, I probably could have driven into the bathroom naked on a brand new Harley and holding a torch made of flaming cats and my husband wouldn't have noticed, Superbowl Sunday and all. It was pretty obvious after a few minutes that there were two lines on this test thingy, and that one of them wasn't going away. I called for my husband. I showed him the test. He took it and examined it, and then realizing what it was, exclaimed "Where'd you have to stick this thing to get it to work?" Ignoring that, I told him it was positive. He looked a little shocked, and then he said, "That's great. Can I finish watching the Superbowl now?" So much for a big moment there. Ahhh, my life.

Actually, it's a pretty good life. We live out in the country. Really in the country. Not "in the country" as in "actually just a few miles outside of a major metropolis." No, we live 20 miles from any town of reputable size (let's say, population greater than 4,000). We live an hour away from a Walmart. An hour from Target! (My friend Vanessa would faint if she knew that. Life without Target, how can it be?)

I'm a city kid. When my family moved to Kansas, my first year in high school, I swore I'd never marry a farm boy. I probably wouldn't have even met very many real farm boys, except that I decided mid-college to switch my major to one in the ag college of the university. And that's when it happened. Farm boy comes along, city girl swoons at the sound of his slight southeast Kansas drawl, and the rest is history. The next thing you know I'm riding in a rusted pickup truck that runs on propane and wondering what the hell my husband is talking about when he gives me directions that include things like "turn east" and "up by Spencer's crossing." A little note on the truck... If you ever date a guy with a propane-fueled truck, he probably doesn't have a gas problem. It's the smell of the propane. I seriously wondered what myhusband had been eating those first few dates.

Back to this blog.... I'm going to chronicle what happens when a city gal like me moves to the sticks. I've been here for two years now, on an actual farm (I'm choking on dust from the wheat harvest right now, I swear!), so I've been saving these stories up for a while now. Let's see if that college degree in journalism prepared me well enough for blogging. It doesn't pay as well as other jobs in my career track, but when you're the mother of a toddler, it's hard not to get excited about the prospect of using words with more than two syllables!