In Which I Discover I Am in Fact Grown Up and Consequently Attempt to Deny It.

I think I'm grown up.

I wish I had a picture to post of me when I was like three and all towheaded (that means blonde. Just doing my duty as a blogger to increase your vocabulary) and cute and wearing my dad's shoes. I was a super cute three year old. I don't know of any three year olds that aren't super cute, so admittedly, this isn't saying much.

But then I somehow grew up. I've lived twenty-four blissful years and they've happened really fast.


Before I started school, I remember my family lived in a split level house painted pea-green and I remember my mom made us cloth bunny-rabbits for Easter that year. And I remember I went to camp and loved horseback riding and was crushed when someone else got the "Most Improved Horseback Riding" prize at the end of camp.

In an elementary English class, we read a story called, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" and I was chosen to be one of the alien voices at the end talking about how earth could be conquered not not by brute force from aliens, but by neighbor killing neighbor. One of the kids in this class, Finis, also threatened to blow up the school once, so we all - all twenty-three of us - went to counseling. Finis was out of the class for awhile, so I became lead flute in the band. (Thinking back, there's a lot of humor in that. The kid played flute? His name was Finis?)

In high school, I got up at 4:45am for swim practice for four years, and worked on my high school newsletter, and ate mayo and bologne for lunch, and went to Europe where we slept in hostels with freaky bars of neon orange soap on the beds and discovered that sandwiches taste better over there (mostly because they use baguettes, not sandwich bread).

In college, I studied Plato and Aristotle and went to Hoe Downs (it's a dance, dears) and ate fruit and vegetables every day and made best friends and almost failed physics and fell in love with Jason Bourne, then out of love with him, and made apple pies from scratch and twirled when it snowed.

Then I fell in love with Ryan, got married (to Ryan, naturally), became obsessed with cooking, and we started talking about having kids and buying houses.

But you want to know something funny? I still do little kid-ish things. I still listen to Adventures in Odyssey. I still color. I still watch Cartoon Network. I still think gummy bears rock. I get cuted out every time I see these. I still think tree houses and forts are the coolest. I still think Dr. Seuss is magic on paper. And I still dream of the day I can have ding-dongs for breakfast.

And I see nothing wrong with that.