Tool Girl and Valentine's Day

Happy Belated Valentine’s Day!

Yesterday I often found myself daydreaming about next Valentine’s Day. Will I be celebrating it with my daughter? Oh what a special day that would be! If timeframes remain the same (Who am I kidding? They change monthly!) I could be traveling to China next February and holding Hannah in my arms for the very first time! These days I find with almost everything I do that happens on a yearly basis, wondering to myself….Will she be here by this time next year? There are a lot of perks to adopting vs. pregnancy - Seeing my toes, Not needing an epidural for 2 weeks before my due date so as to ‘breeze through the birth’ haha! etc. but I’m finding the uncertainty of the timeframe vs. 9 months a little tough at times! My first ‘serious’ wait has been for Ministry approval. In November the approvals were taking 4 weeks so this 11 week wait I’m on seems like forever! It’s like a car ride – if you’re prepared for a 2 hour trip and get stuck in rush hour traffic a short trip can seem like forever. But if you’re prepared for a 2 day drive to Florida, 2 hours is nothing! I was prepared for a 2 hour drive and I think I’m almost in Florida! Bring on that Ministry approval!

Last evening I built a little bookshelf I’d bought just after Christmas. Since my niece was born I’ve slowly been collecting children’s books and now that Hannah is on the way, that trend is continuing. As I was putting in the screws (and then taking them back out to add a piece that needed to be assembled first) I thought back to another Valentine’s day work project and laughed at myself.

Go back in time with me 9 years. I’d been a homeowner for 5 short weeks and was excited to be independent, which included trying my hand at minor house repairs. Soon after moving into my new home, the squeaky floors began to sing out their not so sweet tunes each time I walked across the floors. Deciding to fix this problem I began to investigate options for removing squeaks from floors that are covered in wall-to-wall carpeting. I heard on TV (believe it or not, this was before my introduction to the Internet!) that by using ‘some-kind-of-nail’ I could bang a nail right through the carpeting and into the stud. Voila…no more squeaky floors! Problem: How do I find a stud? So that week I was on a mission and was off to ‘Canadian Tire’ to buy the fixins for fixin’ da floors! Here I am, Tool Girl Extraordinaire, browsing the aisles of the hardware store, looking for a ‘stud finder.’ What exactly is a stud finder? Where do I find one? Is it smaller than a thimble or bigger than a breadbox? As I browsed the aisles that contained more kinds of nails than should be allowed, I began to laugh right out loud! Here I am, single girl, searching for a stud finder on Valentine’s Day! I eventually found one, bought it and was still chuckling to myself over the coincidence of dates.

Deciding this story needed to go one step further, that evening I attached the package with the stud finder still in it, to a lanyard and wore it around my neck to Bible Study. Everyone looked at me funny when I walked in with this thing around my neck and quickly asked, ‘What’s that?’ I was quick to tell them it was a ‘Stud Finder’ and that it couldn’t find a single one in the room! They laughed and enjoyed the joke. We got along great and enjoyed having fun with one another.

Fast forward to February 2006 and the current score is:
Squeaks – still too many to count
Stud Finder – Zero!

Oh well….more chocolate for me and no obligation to share it! :o)