Awesome mom-some

Last year, I realized something kind of sad. The day that a woman gives birth, people say congratulations to her and say good job with labor and all that. But every year after that on that day, it's all about the baby. "Happy birthday!" they say. "Way to . . . be alive."

Now, I imagine that being born isn't the most pleasant experience (luckily, we all forget it), but shouldn't we still be congratulating the mom?

Normally, I would say the answer is no. Joseph's first birthday is going to be all about him, not about me.

But still, having been through childbirth now, I feel like I ought to thank my mom this year. Way to give birth to me! Way to deal with 12 extra days with me in the womb and then survive mastitis and blowouts and clinginess and whininess in the subsequent months. I appreciate you keeping me alive.

If that was all she did, my mom would be a pretty amazing person. But there's even more. (And I'm even going to leave out the most mushy and awesome and amazing stuff to leave you all in suspense.)

In no particular order, here are 23 reasons to celebrate my mom today:

1. She let us ride sleeping bags and pillows down the stairs.

2. She listened to the popular music more than we did in high school. I remember one time when I was riding the bus down to Allstate Choir that I decided to pull out "Mom's Mix 1" to listen to. My friend Brycen was intrigued and asked to listen. Imagine his surprise when artists such as Maroon 5 and Goo Goo Dolls came up. He wondered if the CD had been mislabeled and then began to joke about going to Green Day concerts with my mom. You have to be a pretty cool mom for that to happen.

3. In fact, she's always been cool when it came to music. As a teenager, she liked to jam to Sesame Street music. Even when members of the ward came over.

4. She taught math and English in junior high for a few years. That's cool on its own, but since she kept a lot of her old papers, we got to see historic documents like papers with fragrant purple ink. I don't think I would know what a mimeograph was otherwise.

5. She has read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. That impressed my dad so much that he wanted to marry her.

6. Speaking of their courtship, from first real conversation to engagement was 18 days. Talk about love at first sight.

I don't think my grandpa even knew who my dad was until they were engaged.

7. She has always been good at throwing creative parties. In particular, I remember one party where we watched Ever After and then she would pause the movie for us to do an activity related to the movie. Like when Danielle was pretending to be royal, we all pretended to be royal by balancing books on our head and walking around. Then there was the holiday birthday party where we went through basically all the major holidays in one party (a mini easter egg hunt, going to the neighbors for a little bit of trick-or-treating, decorating gingerbread houses, etc.) And this was before Pinterest even existed.

8. She sewed many of our Halloween costumes. I liked the eagle costume so much, she made me another one when I outgrew the first.

9. And speaking of sewing,
She did this:

plus she made one for my best friend Rebecca in 1st grade and we wore our sunflower dresses every Thursday.

10. One year she had a really good peach harvest so she made a different peach pie recipe every day for like a week! Tragically, I didn't like peaches back then (you pick up enough rotting ones as a child, you get a little scarred) so I didn't appreciate it.

11. She's not afraid of snakes. One time, we were out on a walk near the river on a Sunday afternoon. Some of our neighbors with kids Spencer's age were on the same trail. When they saw a snake, my mom picked it up and showed it to all the boys. I think she won some little boy points that day.

12. Also, iguanas.

13. Strange as it sounds, sometimes waiting for the bus before the sun came up in the dead of winter in Cache Valley could be a little cold. And I guess my mom thought we had enough character without freezing to death, so when it was like 3 degrees (maybe warmer), she would drive down to the bus stop and let us hang out in the minivan until the bus came. And this included everyone, even the scary high school boys. The only downside was that they knew which car belonged to our family, which stopped being cool when I was about 12.

This one. That's why I'm driving it to heaven. (Oh, and my dad wants everyone to know that the decals did not cost extra.)

14. Speaking of driving, she and my dad were good at taking us places. Do you remember my chapter called "The Drive" in Hello, Kristie where all the kids threw up? That's there because I thought that that was a normal occurrence in the car. And even with that to look forward to, she didn't stop taking us on trips.

15. She looks good in anything. Even a 70s prom dress that she always wore as a pioneer costume.

16. She was never the first to pick us up from parties. I think this was a deliberate attempt to make us cooler.

17. She managed to keep not only my dad and six kids alive (as well as cousins, foreign exchange students, and friends who lived with us), but also a garden, orchard, some roses (usually), and our yard. I have yet to develop this ability, considering how much I struggle keeping any flowers from Kevin alive.

18. One time for an elementary school carnival she dressed up as Oreo the panda bear, our school mascot. That is the one and only time that I haven't been afraid of a person in costume.

19. She once took a career test and it told her she should be a clown. Considering how organized, detail-oriented, and analytical she was, it seems like the test was crazy. But once you've seen her as a Primary chorister, it almost seems like the test was spot-on. (Unfortunately, I was too embarrassed to appreciate it when I was in Primary.)

20. She is kind and friendly to everybody, even the ones who call her Barb.

21. She has green eyes. And she is left-handed.

22. She always appreciated our performances and praised our efforts. I remember one time shortly after I started playing the violin (a short-lived stint) that I decided to learn "Somewhere Out There" from An American Tail one afternoon. Then I decided that I could sing the alto part while playing the soprano part on the piano. So kind of the worst sounding thing ever. But she listened to my performance and just said tactfully at the end, "I think you should try just singing the melody." (though she probably just wanted me to be silent as death)

23. She has taught me joy. Looking at my blog and especially at this list, you might think I had the perfect childhood. I'd say it was ideal in many ways, but definitely not perfect. We fought. Tempers were lost. Feelings were hurt. We dealt with real struggles, just like any family.
But . . . I am able to look back at childhood with joy, and a lot of that is thanks to my mom. She is a happy, optimistic person who found joy in the gospel, marriage, work, music, reading, planning, and especially motherhood. Because of her example, I have always been able to look forward happily to motherhood instead of dreading the drudgery.

So, hooray for my mom! Thanks again for having me 23 years ago!

How electrical engineering prepared me for motherhood

"You're majoring in math and electrical engineering? What are you going to do with those?" people asked throughout my college career. I would give some vague answer or a "I'm not sure" response. Deep down, all I really wanted to do with my degrees was "raise happy genius children" as I confided to Kevin at the beginning of our email correspondence before we started dating. (Apparently, he didn't mind that much because we started dating soon afterwards.) I often wondered if all my degrees would come to any use.

But the good news is, I have actually found electrical engineering to be quite useful in being a stay-at-home mom. Oh, I can't do things like execute a MATLAB script to do my laundry for me or perform a Fourier transform on Joseph to make him content in the frequency domain (i.e. actually like being in his swing), nor am I any good at fixing electronics (that's not where I specialized), but nevertheless, it has done me some good. Here are some examples:


-Signal processing: Besides being an adorable blob for the first few months, a baby is also an expert signal generator. His tongue, his arms, and eyes are all busy conveying signals. As are his vocal cords. A lot. A way lot. Luckily, with several signal processing courses under my belt, I've been ready to tackle all of the sounds and movements Joseph makes. Those cute high pitched squeals? My internal spectrum analyzer has processed those and determined those are too high to convey actual discomfort. (Really. They are several octaves above actual distress signals.) Those coughing cries? My subconscious has done a short-time Fourier transform and determined those to signal hunger. My success rate? . . . probably the same as any other mom, plus or minus 10%.

-White noise: All the baby books recommended saying "shhhhh" to calm your upset baby. That's what we normally say to people to get them to be quiet. But if you stop to think about it, your baby doesn't know that. You may as well be speaking Sanskrit to your baby to calm him down. What's so special about "shhhh"?

Here's where electrical engineering comes in. You see, sounds like "shhhh" are classified as white noise, like the blizzard that used to show up on TV screens back when cell phones were bricks. It has a flat power spectral density, which means there's nothing really to focus on. Which makes it a calming sound.

(Or you could just believe the "experts" who say that "shhh" sounds like the sounds of the womb, which is why it's soothing. Pshaw. My bet is on the flat power spectral density.)

-Tunneling: So, one required class for the major was Solid State Physics. In this class, we learned about a concept called "tunneling," which according to my textbook is a phenomenon in which a particle can make it across a barrier even though there's zero probability of finding the particle inside the barrier. (Or something like that. Physics people need not bother to correct me.) That is, there is some bizarre way of finding a quantum particle in a spot which classical physics says is impossible.

I've realized that Joseph's pacifier is a quantum object. How did I come to this conclusion? Often when he's falling asleep, he loses his pacifier and cries for us to put it back in. Sometimes we can hunt for several seconds before finding it in some obscure location such as underneath him or way above him. How on earth did it get there? Tunneling. This realization has probably saved my sanity.

-Tackling a problem: Oh, those were the days. The days I'd walk into the testing center after studying for hours and hours and take a look at the test. Look at the first problem. Turn the page to the second. Then the third. Then bite my lip and realize, I have no clue how to do a single problem on this test! Not a one!

But since I took enough of those tests, I came to expect that. I no longer had the panic attacks of freshman year. Rather, I was able to calm down and just approach the problem from whichever angle I could. As my brain turned back on, I would find myself slowly inching my way to the right answer. And luckily, engineering tests always had lots of partial credit.

Well, guess what? There are some days like that. Sometimes your handsome lab partner and husband is there to tackle the problems with you, like Joseph's gargantuan blowout in the temple parking lot or his vomitrocious display the day we were giving our talks. But then there are the days where you're on your own and you have to handle the screaming baby, spit-up, or blowout all on your own. And you don't know where to start. You don't even know if you can move without making the problem worse. That's when you inch your way slowly to the solution, and count on partial credit.

-The real world: In textbooks, things are straightforward. Breadboards work the way they are supposed to. The voltage at one end of the wire is the same as the voltage on the other end. V = IR.  The central limit theorem works. The coefficients you get for your PID controller fall easily from standard equations.

But in labs (and probably even more so in real life), things are not so simple. Sometimes the difference between a functional op-amp and a broken op-amp is if you blow on it. Sometimes random numbers aren't random enough. Sometimes you have to completely change your coefficients for the PID controller by a factor of 10. Real life is a lot more complicated than textbooks suggest.

And the same thing goes for babies, believe it or not. Oh, I did what I could to prepare. I watched this video about how babies cry. (Incidentally, did you know that recognizing babies' cries used to be one of 374 Young Women's requirements to get the reward?) I read all the papers the hospital gave me. I read several baby books including Baby Whisperer and took the quiz to see what kind of baby Joseph was.

And guess what? Even though all that information helped, Joseph was still his own person. Each time I took the Baby Whisperer quiz, Joseph fit into a different category. Sometimes his cries didn't fit the cries described in videos or books, which led me to play a lot of guessing games. Real life is complicated.

-Setting the problem aside: Even for problems that were just on paper rather than hands-on, I still found myself struggling a lot. I would find myself wrapped up in the details of a derivation and get wound around the axle so much that I couldn't think. What was the best thing to do? Just walk away from the problem for a minute.When I came back, I would find that it either fixed itself or I figured out another way to solve it. Likewise, when I just had no clue how to soothe Joseph and was at my wits' end, I would just set him down and walk away until I was ready to try again. Lo and behold, half the time that was what he wanted anyway.

-Enjoying the journey: In both school and parenthood, I've found the daily grind is a lot better endured with a sense of humor. After all, it is kind of funny when you're working on a project way past your normal bedtime or when your baby refuses to sleep and you have to keep going back and forth to console him. Or at least they can be funny if you let them be funny.

And then there are the things that are actually funny. (Maybe they're only funny to me. Oh well.)

I heard Kevin say, "Joseph, sometimes you make it hard to sleep" and I had to come investigate. It's blurry because I was laughing.

Talking about tunneling reminded me of this video from when Joseph was 6 weeks old. We are such helpful parents.

He is so talented.

At any rate, electrical engineering is incredibly useful for future mothers. In its own way.

Mother's love

Note: this is yet another post in my Proclamation series

Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.

-Proclamation, 7th paragraph

The other day, I was looking at a blog post I wrote back in February. In that post, I talked about my fears about motherhood and nurturing as well as the conclusion I came to -- nurturing is part of our divine role, even if it isn't part of our personality. We can develop those feelings of love for our children, at least, that's what I hoped.

And what have I found? It's wonderful and complicated. I think I can sum it up like this: Love is a gift, and love is a choice.

What do I mean by that? Well, let's start with "love is a gift." Think back to your first major crush. Do you remember the wonderful, terrible feelings of infatuation that filled you with such joy that you could hardly stand it? Do you remember the thrill of holding hands for the first time with someone you really really liked? Those wonderful feelings -- I think they're a gift. The feelings of romantic love are a gift from God (probably manifested through hormones) to bring us joy and make us want to commit to another person.

And what I've found is that mother's love is the same in several ways. When Joseph first came out, I didn't suddenly love him, nor did I expect to. My thought process was this: Well, whaddya know, someone was in there all along. Then: he's huge! How did he fit in there? Then:  See, I told you all that he'd have hair!

And then they handed him back to me, all clean and tiny and wriggly.

"Here. You should do skin-to-skin and nurse him."

Abject terror. What were they thinking, handing me something so precious and fragile?

Luckily, we both survived the encounter. Over the next few hours and days, I really grew to love this little guy. When we got a few minutes alone at the hospital, I would tenderly pick him up (still somewhat terrified that I would drop him) and whisper, "Hi baby . . . I love you." (We didn't have a name for him yet.) I didn't really feel like those tender feelings came from me -- they seemed more like they were bestowed from an outside source.

Joseph at about 5 hours old.

And they grew. Even though I was incredibly sore for the first little while, I still looked forward to nursing Joseph because I knew that I would get a sudden rush of oxytocin that would fill my body and fill me with this overwhelming love for my baby and for everyone. I feel like that sort of love is a gift  from God, given to make us happy and to encourage us.

But love is also a choice. A few weeks ago, a lot of people were asking "So, what's it like being a new mom?" and I was having a hard time answering. "It's . . . hard. It's . . . fun."

We were past the zombie days and nights, the 15 dirty diapers a day, the 5 outfits a day, the arc de triomphes, and the worst of the crying. Why did it seem so much harder now?

There are a few obvious reasons. I moved across the country, away from all of my family. Suddenly Kevin had a bit more of a schedule so he wasn't there to help. And Joseph had a few colds which made life no fun.

But there was something else that made it hard -- the high from being a new mom had worn off. Although the mother instincts and hormones are still there, I feel left to my own devices a bit. That is, I feel like loving Joseph is more of a choice.

It surprised me. Goodness knows how many times I had heard from parents and church leaders and books that romance fades in marriage and that love becomes an action word. I hadn't realized how it would be the same for parenthood. But you know what? I'm grateful it is. I'm grateful that it doesn't always come as naturally and easily as I anticipated. It makes it so much more personal. It makes me comprehend that my capacity to love is indeed growing each time I consciously choose to love. And it makes me realize how much we need to choose to turn to God to "borrow" His love.  I believe that one of the major reasons we are set up in families is to experience that transformation from instinctive love to Christ-love.

As C. S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce:

"He wanted your merely instinctive love for your child (tigresses share that, you know!) to turn into something better. . . . You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God."

Restrooms

I guess I was spoiled at BYU. All the bathrooms I regularly used had couches in them. Granted, I didn't have Joseph til I was done with classes, but it was still nice to have a couch to nap on. And then once I had Joseph and went up to campus occasionally, it was nice to have a couch to nurse on (unless someone was napping on it . . .). But as we traveled across the country, I found no couches in bathrooms. None. I've been so disillusioned.

It reminds me of when I was 4 or 5 and was at a restaurant with my family. I was tired, and I told my parents I wanted to lie down and rest.

My grandma just heard the last word. "You want to use the restroom?"

A rest-room! What a wonderful idea! I conjured up an image of a rest-room in my mind. It had beds and couches, and probably even a table with cupcakes on it. I eagerly agreed to go see the rest-room.

She and my mom took me there, and what did I find when we opened the door?

Toilets. And a sink. What was this madness? Why had they brought me to a bathroom?

"There's a rug on the floor. You could rest on that," my mom said.

"No, I wanted a place to lie down, like a couch!" I said.

"Oh, you wanted an American restroom!" they said. Even all these years later, I'm pretty sure that's what they said. I have no idea why an American restroom would have couches, because I've seen a lot of American restrooms and they do not have couches.  Maybe they meant a BYU restroom.

Anyway, I don't remember if I ever got my nap or if I just ate my food at the restaurant. But I've been disillusioned about restrooms ever since. More so since I actually use the couch for the intended purpose now.

Oh well.

Why church is never boring anymore

I had thought the adventures were over by the time we got to church. We were giving talks and had procrastinated writing them down until Sunday morning. So we had a somewhat frantic morning putting our thoughts on paper and printing them out. Luckily, we were able to get them done, and Joseph was even behaving well. He continued behaving up until we sat down on the stand for our talks, so we kept him in the car seat.

"Looks like he's smiling now," our high councilor said a few minutes before 10:30, the time that the meeting started.

"Oh, I hope it lasts," I responded. "You never know. Then again, he just ate at 10 so he ought to be good for at least a little while."

Then Joseph stopped smiling. He opened his mouth and began to throw up. Big time. It just kept on spurting out, getting on his clothes and his car seat and the carpet. We sat there frozen in horror, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding before us (I can only imagine how we looked to the congregation). When we began to reach for him, he went even more. Then finally he stopped and he sat there looking kind of uncomfortable in his vomit.

I did the first thing I could think of. I took a burp rag and tossed it at Joseph, as if that would clean up the mess. "I don't think that's going to work," Kevin said.

So we got him out and Kevin cleaned up the car seat while I carried him out to the mother's room, holding him at a distance to avoid getting all the spit-up on my new dress. I hurried in and took off his sopping wet outfit. Then he started to act hungry . . . so I fed him. I guess there was nothing left in his stomach, but I still felt like I was asking for trouble by putting more into his stomach which had already demonstrated amazing expulsion abilities.

But I was in luck. He fussed and cried and made all the other moms in the room cluck with sympathy for him, but nothing else came out of him. I put him in a new outfit and made my way back to the front of the chapel. He was calm, and all was good.

As the sacrament began, he started to fuss again. I was the first speaker, so I couldn't take him out. So Kevin got up and left with him. And then I spoke, still frazzled by the whole experience and grateful I had written my talk down word for word. When it was Kevin's turn to speak, he handed Joseph to me and I went to the mother's room and fed him again (he ate like he hadn't eaten in days). Came back into the chapel at the end of the meeting and met up with Kevin. Talked about Joseph with our high councilor who happens to be a pediatrician. Handed Joseph back and forth for diaper changes and bathroom breaks and carseat wipedowns (as I write this, Kevin is still discovering more to clean up) and fussy sessions. We missed Sunday School entirely.

Crazy to think that I ever used to get bored at church. I don't think I'll ever be bored again for a loooooooooong time.

Good thing he's so cute.

Joseph in his "graduation robes" with my dad. Oh yeah . . . we got our masters this week.

Growing boy

Today I took Joseph to his two month appointment and to get his vaccinations. He's about three and a half pounds more than at his two week appointment (putting him in the 29th percentile for height at 22.5 in, 42nd for weight at 11.5 lbs, and 47th for head circumference at 40 cm).

And let me tell you, that is pretty gratifying. It is nice to know that he is gaining weight.

Why is that? Well, for one thing, I've always thought he's been big. The second thought I had after he came out was that he was huge! How did he fit inside me? (My first thought was, well what do you know, there was someone in there all along.) So when people say "He's getting bigger!" or "He's so big!" I feel like my opinion is validated. (For the record Dad, you've had it backwards. When I was pregnant, you were supposed to say I was tiny and darling [men need to learn this word], not huge. And you're supposed to say that he's big and growing, not "when are you going to start feeding him?")

The other reason is that breastfeeding is surprisingly emotional. It's new and hard and scary and sometimes you're just not sure if you're doing it right in the beginning. So it's nice to know that somehow things have worked out between us two and we've figured it out.

(As a side note, I don't get why people hate on formula so much. It is so much better than it was when formula was the "in" thing to do in the 40s and 50s. Seriously. According to a book I read from the 40s, they recommended supplementing with orange juice so babies got vitamin C since formula was little more than powdered cow's milk and water. Nowadays they make it so that it's almost the same as breastmilk, and I think it's awesome that it's an option for babies who need it. Also, Mayor Bloomberg is a piece of work, and if I ever go to NYC I will feed my baby from a bottle just to be disagreeable.)

But yeah, Joseph is growing well and staying healthy. And adorable.

Opposition

Before Joseph was born, I blogged about unpleasant things. What I lacked in experience I made up for in perspective. Then again, it's easy to have perspective when you're not stuck in the middle of the trial.

I now have a little bit more experience, and I've learned a little bit, too. Labor hurts. Babies cry. They don't sleep when you want them to. They can be difficult to feed. It's hard being a parent.

I remember when I was visiting teaching one time right before Joseph was born. Both my companion and my visiting teachee had little girls and they talked about baby blues. The hard thing, one of them said, was that when they're so tiny they just take and take and take.

Having been there now, I know what they mean. Little babies don't really smile, they don't laugh . . . some hardly open their eyes! It seems they either just cry or sleep, none of which really makes you feel particularly warm and fuzzy inside.

But it gets better. They start sleeping more. Eventually they learn to smile. And I feel like as long as I know Joseph will eventually smile, I can put up with a lot more crying than I could a few weeks ago (and I appreciate every smile I get). Interesting little concept, "opposition in all things."

Nurturing

I just got back from visiting teaching. The lesson was entitled "Guardians of the Hearth" and it discussed nurturing. One of the quotes was from President Hinckley where he said,
 “You are the bearers of the children. You are they who nurture them and establish within them the habits of their lives. No other work reaches so close to divinity as does the nurturing of the sons and daughters of God.”

Quotes like this have sometimes troubled me for a variety of reasons. The first reason is the huge amount of responsibility I feel when I read about nurturing. You see, I may have a slight phobia of babies. I like them, but I've never been one to go out of my way to pick them up or play with them. While some of my friends became aunts or uncles when they were about 8 years old, I was 8 years old the last time I really spent much time with a little baby (my youngest brother). I didn't do too much babysitting, and even when I babysat younger cousins or nieces or nephews I never felt like I was the primary one taking care of the babies.

So, to hear that I have the divine role of nurturing feels like a great burden. Especially with a little baby boy coming in about 3 months.

And goodness knows that I'm not the only woman who feels this way. I think there are a lot of women in the Church who get almost annoyed when they hear that they're "supposed" to be good at nurturing. "But what about the rest of  my skill set?" they wonder. "Why do 75-year-old men feel like they can pigeonhole me into a corner with what my personality and skills are supposed to be?"

To some extent, I've sort of felt that way. But I said something while I was visiting teaching that surprised me. I said, "What President Hinckley's saying is that nurturing is part of our divine role, even if it's not part of our personality."

Thing is, there are lots and lots of things we are asked to do that we just plain aren't good at. Many men don't feel like they're cut out to be Young Men's President because they don't feel fun enough. Many women don't feel charitable enough to be Relief Society President. And then there are the less temporary callings, like being a parent, which no one is actually qualified for.

But the point is, if God calls us to do something, then He will give us the capability to accomplish it. Furthermore, sometimes He tells us we are good at something or that we're supposed to do something, not because we're actually good at it, but because we can become good at it.

So even though I'm scared about taking on a new responsibility of nurturing my own children, I can have the confidence that I'll be prepared for it because it is my divine role.

Babies and Balloons

I'm having a boy!!! Kevin and I went to the ultrasound, and besides impressing the technician with our vast array of knowledge from our one day of MRI class (using terminology such as "axial cut" and "frequency"), we got to see our little boy!

And suddenly it became a lot more real. Oh, we've been having discussions about kids and how we'll raise them and whatnot (poor little guy . . . it's already been predetermined that whatever he wants to do in life, he'll have to major in engineering first), but now there's a  . . . body to put with all those ideals and discussions.

Am I ready? Of course not. Will I ever be ready? Doubt it. But at least today, I learned that there's one aspect of motherhood/domesticity that I'm improving on -- looking for bargains.

After we found out, we went to Macey's to pick up a blue balloon. On the way in, we also remembered that we needed to pick up some mayonnaise. As we were coming through the doors I saw a little girl walking out with a pink balloon. Then I saw balloons tied to all the cash registers. Something clicked in my mind.

"Kevin," I said excitedly. "I bet if we asked, we could get a balloon for free."
"No, just go over to the back corner to buy a balloon," he responded.

"No, let's get the mayonnaise first and then go through the line and ask if we can have one of them."

He rolled his eyes but walked over to the condiments aisle. He continued to protest, saying things like, "How are you going to ask for one?" or "I'm pretty sure those are just for little kids," to which I responded, "There's a little little kid inside me, so that counts." We picked up the mayonnaise and then got in a line.

"What are these balloons up for?" I asked eagerly, noticing a little boy walking away with a blue balloon.

"Oh, just for fun. Do you want one?" the cashier asked (perhaps she had heard my conversation with Kevin at the front of the store). I nodded happily. After explaining that I wanted a blue balloon and not an orange balloon (and telling her why), we left with one small bottle of mayonnaise and one free blue balloon.

"Cheapskate," Kevin muttered.

"Brilliant," I corrected him.

So, despite all my fears and inadequacies, at least I know how to get free balloons.