For the woman in your life:

For the man in your life:

Really, why just say “Merry Christmas” when you can say “There’s somethin’ funky going on in your nether regions”?

You are welcome, people.

I’m still putting myself out there and hopefully will find a normal guy soon. But in the meantime, my friend Kim lent me her hubby, John for some winterizing at my home. He was in the process of weeding and mulching my flower beds when he (or more precisely, Kim’s son Bailey) noticed a large number of wasps flying in and out of the sprinkler box in my flower bed. John was brave enough to pry open the box and this is what he found.

That certainly qualifies as the biggest hive I’ve ever seen in my life. Needless to say, there was a tiny itty bitty swarm-like event, and a little bit of screaming and grown men and women running for their life. But when all was said and done, the abandoned hive ended up being a fascinating thing to look at.

Thanks, John and Bailey, for finding it and destroying it!

The first fourteen years of my life were spent in a tiny town of only 500 people. Wikipedia now says it’s over 800, so they’ve apparently had a population boom in the past 28 years. I lived in a small house with a huge lot on a tree-lined street, and spent my days roaming the entire town, which was no bigger than my current neighborhood. In the summer, my Dad assembled the pop-up tent in the backyard and we spent our days playing Barbies in it, or when that became boring, riding our bikes all over the surrounding countryside. We didn’t come home until it was dark and my Mom was okay with that. We never locked our doors and we slept with the windows open. I fell asleep to the sound of crickets with a cool summer breeze blowing over the bunk bed that my sister and I shared. We didn’t consider ourselves to be missing out on anything by living in such a small town. Our little grocery store pretty much had everything we needed, and if it didn’t, the “big city” was less than a half an hour away.

When I was fourteen, my Dad took a job an hour and a half away in a much larger town. We delighted over the fact that fast food restaurants and a movie theater were now just minutes from our house. Instead of living in the city proper, my parents found a hundred-year-old farmhouse just outside of the city limits on a narrow country road. It was in that house that I spent my teenage years, full of angst and hormones. I spent hours lying in the grass in the backyard, listening to the wind rustling through the corn field at the edge of our yard. I loved the quiet and the solitude there. We had neighbors close by, but it seemed as if we were all alone, surrounded on all sides by corn and soybean fields. We still slept with the windows open, although the pig farm a mile away made that relatively unpleasant at times. That house was quaint with its narrow stairs and painted-shut windows, and it’s still a frequent destination in my dreams. Last night, in fact, I dreamed that I lived there again, and was watching my daughter run down the grassy lane next to the corn field while I swung lazily in the hammock in the backyard.

When I graduated from high school, however, I couldn’t wait to move to The Big City. It was there that I learned how to navigate traffic and hang out at a mall. As my career blossomed, I found opportunities in even larger cities, and before I knew it, the rural life was far behind me. I liked living in the suburbs of a big city and didn’t miss the country at all. Or so I thought.

But nine years ago, when I built this home with my then-husband – the home that I still live in today, and the only home my Lauren has ever known – it was imperative that we get as far out of the city as possible. Because of my job, I couldn’t move far enough away to be in the country, but we went as far as we could. Our neighborhood is nestled in the crook of the mountains on the southwest side of the valley. My commute to work is 45 minutes each way, but it’s worth it to be in such a quiet area.

And yet, it’s not the country. I miss sleeping with the windows open and listening to the crickets chirping. I miss the fields of corn and the tranquility. I wish my daughter knew what that life was like. And because the country runs so deep in my soul, I try as hard as I can to make our home a tranquil place. My daughter knows the feeling of cool grass between her toes and the scent of lilacs in the spring. She knows that the best place to star gaze is lying on your back in the middle of the yard. She knows how fresh the house becomes when the windows are opened and a cool breeze runs through it. She is as country as a city girl can be.

And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.