I Feel Pretty

Pretty Stupid, that is.

For the second time in less than a week I have paid the home warranty people forty-five dollars for a service call for something that turns out to be something I could have fixed myself.

First, last Thursday, the guy came out because our oven was burning everything we put in it. The man asked me for the oven manual, read it, and adjusted the temperature. (Duh. Here's your forty-five dollars.)

Saturday night the lights in the bathroom suddenly stopped working. Our first guess was that some breaker had tripped, but the GFCI outlets worked around the sink and the lights in the closet and toilet worked, but the ones above the bathtub and sinks just wouldn't work. Jerry took off the switch plate and we checked - the wires were dead. We called my step dad, who used to work with various aspects of electricity and asked his advice. We spent several hours trying to figure out this problem. Finally, we gave up. I called the home warranty folks this morning, thinking that at least THIS time I'd get my forty-five dollars worth. Well, the same guy who fixed my oven came in and in less than two minutes flat, found a GFCI outlet in our closet that we didn't know existed, and, GUESS WHAT!!!! It was tripped. I think it took me longer to write the check that it did for the problem to be fixed. Oh well - it's just money, right? And the problem is fixed.

Life is full of challenging moments isn't it? At the end of last week, for example, we got the girl's baptism certificates in the mail. Shortly afterwards I was trying to convince the girls to clean out their toys and give up some of the things they didn't play with much for the garage sale. Maggie got all upset because she didn't want to give away any of her toys. She did one of her high-drama, "You just want me to get rid of all my toys! Fine! You don't LOVE me!!!!" moments. I got exasperated and left the room. When I came back, there was her baptism certificate, torn in two, in the middle of the floor.

In my cool, calm, collected (NOT!) voice, I shrieked, "What have you done to your certificate!!!!????"

"God doesn't love me anymore because I made you mad!" was her response. Wow. Somehow I managed to moderate my voice, shift gears and turn this into a a teachable moment about how God always loves us, no matter what, but boy, that wasn't what I wanted to say. Of course, as my sister pointed out, how many times do we ourselves, as grown-ups, think the same thing, but never manage to articulate it? Perhaps I should let myself have a drama queen moment every once in a while. I'm sure Jerry would be thrilled! ;-)