Over the next 9 days, three of the five members of my family will celebrate birthdays. Mine is today, Hubby’s is Friday, and Small Fry’s is next Friday. For mine, I thought I’d share one thing for each year of my life (32!) that you may not be able to easily deduce from the blog.
1. I’m short. Extremely short. Like my driver’s license says 5’0″ but if I’m not wearing shoes, that’s not completely accurate.
2. I got married at 19. We dated in high school, but went to different schools. I think that still qualifies as high school sweethearts, right?
3. For the first 3 years of marriage, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store.
4. I quit that job 3 weeks before Seahawk was born in October 2003 and have playing the role of Mommy ever since.
5. Even though I know how to crochet (moderately well), I don’t have a clue how to knit.
6. I’m a member of a Nazarene church where my father-in-law is the senior pastor.
7. My mother-in-law passed away 5 1/2 years ago.
8. I’m not a very good housekeeper, but I’m much better than I was even 3 years ago.
9. I like creating things (stories, novels, quilts, things made from yarn, etc), but I don’t consider myself creative. I almost always have to get ideas from somewhere else and just execute them myself.
10. I never thought I wanted more than 2 kids, but now that I have 3, I think 4 or even 5 would be awesome!
11. I was born exactly 5 weeks before my mom’s 21st birthday.
12. I have one brother and one half brother, both younger (though much taller!) than me.
13. Both of them have 2 kids. My full brother has 2 sons and my half brother has a daughter and a son.
14. My parents divorced when I was 5. My mom married my stepdad, to whom she’s still married, shortly after.
15. My mom and stepdad have no kids together.
16. On hubby’s side, we have the only boys. His sister has 2 girls and his stepbrother has 2 girls.
17. I only wear skirts and dresses, no pants. (I mentioned this once before, but cut me some slack – I’m barely halfway through this list and it’s getting hard!)
18. With each of our kids, we tried to pick an original name. We failed epically with Seahawk. But it’s not our fault. Between when we picked the name (even before I was pregnant) and when he was born, it surged in popularity.
19. With the older two, they got family names for their middle names (Seahawk was named for his father & grandfather and Munchkin for my grandfather). With Small Fry, we just picked a middle name we liked that went with his first name.
20. Hubby picked Seahawk’s and Small Fry’s names; I picked Munchkin’s. It wasn’t planned, and I love all their names. That’s just the way it ended up going down.
21. Seahawk was my only natural (though medicated) birth. Munchkin was an emergency c-section (maybe I’ll share that story when his birthday comes around in September) and Small Fry was a scheduled c-section because I’d already had one. I DO NOT recommend repeat caesarean sections. The second one was MUCH harder to recover from than the first.
22. My favorite beverage is iced tea. Unsweetened with no lemon. The plainest one available is all I’ll drink.
23. My favorite store to shop in is JoAnn.
24. I don’t hate grocery shopping. For a lot of my adult life it was the only shopping we could afford, so I learned to like it.
25. I’ve recently learned to love biking again. It’s been really fun getting back into that habit. I can’t wait until we get Munchkin’s add on bike and a trailer for Small Fry so we can go for family rides.
26. I made Small Fry’s cloth diapers. But I didn’t design them (see #9).
27. We don’t have a dryer. This is a lot less bad in the summer than in the winter.
28. One of our favorite family activities is swimming.
29. Another one is bowling.
30. I play Words with Friends. If you do, too, hit me up. My user name is wmr1601.
31. I’ve used that user name for everything online for ages (until this blog, that is). It’s my initials followed by the day I got married (Jan. 6, 2001: 1/6/01).
32. I like reading. Currently I’m reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series on my Kindle. Hubby tried for a couple of years to convince me to read it, and I finally am.
I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know me a little better :).
–Wendy
Loved it!!! But now I can’t remember everything I was going to say! Why is it you have chosen to wear skirts and dresses? I was actually wondering how old you are! How tall is your husband? How on earth do you manage not having a dryer in the winter? When and why did you decide to homeschool? Man…that’s like a personal interview right there!!!! Lol!
Thanks, Sanz! Okay, so why I don’t wear pants… it was an experiment a few years ago (around the time Munchkin was a baby), to see if I’d hate it, and I didn’t. So I never went back. I like the way wearing skirts and dresses makes me feel like a traditionalist. We’re a very traditional family that embraces our God-given gender roles instead of bucking them (much like your family from what I’ve read on your blog).
Will (my hubby) is normal heighth – 5’10” or 5’11”.
For drying clothes, we bought a drying rack from Amazon last year (actually Jan. 1 this year), and we’re conscientious of the fact we don’t have a dryer when we buy clothes. Meaning we buy thin-fabric clothes so that we can wash them at night and hang them up so that they’re dry by morning. None of us have jeans; the males all have khakis instead. And for summer, they have gym-style shorts.
I think that’s all your questions… If I find I’ve missed one, I’ll add another comment in a bit :).
I missed the “biggest” question of all! Oops!
As for the when of our decision to homeschool, that’s easy: when Seahawk was born. We never considered another option.
The why is a little trickier. I can’t honestly pinpoint a specific reason that we made the choice in the first point, but we have come across literature (and our own experiences, of course) from sources we trust that reaffirm to us that we’ve made the right choice. So, I don’t whether I really answered your question very well or not… Feel free to expound on what I’ve offered :).
Thanks for taking the time to answer my personal interview questions! 🙂 I like dresses and skirts too, they are comfy and make me feel feminine. It is fascinating learning more about other people and their routines/lifestyle. Thanks for sharing! I do believe I will copy you with this post on my birthday! Oh and I love that you knew from the beginning that you would homeschool. We didn’t decide until Mowgli was 5 1/2.
I’m happy to answer the questions :). I like getting to know other people, even if just online. I’ve really enjoyed chatting back and forth via blog comments with you the past few months. I think it’s cool that you’re gonna use this idea on your birthday! I look forward to reading it :). Yeah, homeschooling was a no-questions-asked thing with us. We never even considered another option, and I’m glad we haven’t.
52 Lists: Quirky Things About Me
[…] more random things about me, check out this post from 2013 and this one from 2014. Some of the things on those lists are repeated here, but many […]