When I think if adventurous, our family doesn't instantly come to mind. When I think of adventures, I think of families globe trotting around the world parasailing and zip-lining which I refuse to do both because of my overwhelming fear of heights or more of my fear of unusually dying because I seem to be accident prone. Any given day I admit to tripping or dropping something.
I committed a cardinal sin when a perfectly good bottle of wine came flying out of the fridge and I do mean flying right onto the garage floor. Thank goodness we have a garage fridge and it broke there. Mind you the fridge smells like a winery or a lot like my grandparents basement. My grandfather would make wine from the grapes they grew in the back yard and my Mom said that stuff would get you smashed fast.
So that is the excitement in my life. Watching in slow motion the bottle of wine fall, break and than empty it's now lifeless body throughout the garage floor. I can't pin point when I became boring, oh wait I know the moment we found out we were expecting. At first it was slow and than my huge body that was orbiting small moons, couldn’t sit any longer than twenty minutes in a movie theater and about every food that I ate decided to have an internal battle with my digestive system. I couldn't eat lobster bisque for more than a year because of it and darn that is one of my favorites.
So I realized we became boring and for the most part still are boring people. Most days are the same. Get up, breakfast, kids off to school, clean laundry (never ending effing laundry), pick up kid from school, make dinner, get bathed, off to bed, and than sleep only to repeat it again tomorrow. Insane isn't it? I hear that when you define insanity that is what it is doing the same thing over and over again expecting the different results. For me I expect the boy to eat a meal I make and actually use the potty for number two rather than his pants.
So in determining all of this in being boring and insane, I decide we need to do and find things that are unusual. Some things we do might seem tame like spending the day at the train museum but for us it is different from the norm so it is unusual. I read every week about story time at the big park in downtown Houston and I think I should go down (mind you I have been thinking that since they first started it). Finally I saw something that made me what to pack a three year old in the car and travel down to one of the worst places to park a car- a downtown city!
I paid too much for parking but heck I wanted convenience and trekked across the park to stage to listen to a story I think my seven year old has read to me a dozen or so times, all while thinking this was a stellar idea. Than we ventured over to the special event area for what we came for. Stood in line for about twenty minutes for my son to play in a giant tub of foam. He was thrilled and I was jealous because I so wanted in as well.
The first thing the boy told big sister was he played in the foam. She sort of looked at him all weird because he does have a speech issue and dismissed him. He chuckled and knew that he had done something unusual that day.
Not every day has to be an amazing day but any ordinary day can have amazing things happen. Being adventurous to us is more about finding something we don't normally do. We find adventure in what some might find mundane and boring. We hope as parents that our kids look back and say we had fun no matter what we did plus I know that they will have likely learned lots of colorful phrases from their mother's never ending battle with being klutzy plus how to suck up wine off the garage floor (just kidding)!
Rebecca Benson is a League City stay at home mom who has lived here since 2003 when her husband took a job on the International Space Station program. She followed soon after working on the same program for nearly six years when she started staying home with the kids. Rebecca loves to craft, scrapbook, sew, and embrace motherhood. Rebecca has a blog called Mommiedom ((http://queenmommiedom.blogspot.com/) where she talks about all the things in her life not just those “confessions”.
