Rain or shine, right?

My morning and afternoon were pretty busy (in the life of a mom, this counts as busy): I Skyped with My Moroccan Friend again, and then this afternoon I went to pick up a Beco Butterfly to try out from someone on a local babywearing board I belong to.

Two, two, two events in one day!

But that wasn't all! Vee met me after work and took the Kiddokabiddo so I could get A MASSAGE! This was both a THANK-YOU for going to Kansas City + altering my schedule to accommodate his work, and an early Valentine's Day gift since I got a two-pack of massages. ONE MORE TO USE WHENEVER I WANT!

Sanctity of the danktity. My shoulder and leg muscles were jumping, they were so unused to being touched.

It was a gray morning that burnt off into a beautiful, sunny afternoon. The weather got me thinking about how STRONGLY my emotions are tied to whether or not it's a sunny day. When it's a sunny morning, I wake up feeling like I could do ANYTHING! Take a walk? Yeah! Meet a new friend? Why not! Check out that _____ I've been meaning to get to? Absolutely!

But when it's a gray day, I seriously feel like there's no point to doing anything. Leaving the house? WHY BOTHER. My imagination goes completely flat and I feel like ANYTHING isn't worth it. What am I going to do? Go to freaking Borders and sit around? Yet, on a SUNNY day, going to Borders seems like AN INTERESTING ADVENTURE!

We get over 200 sunny days per year (a number which I have been misquoting for years now as "300"--IT FEELS LIKE 300, OK?) so the gray days are pretty minimal here. Which makes me even more surprised by my malaise when it's cloudy out. When I was a kid growing up in The Land of Gray, Oregon, all the cool ideas at the end of Captain Kangaroo ("so many things to do, here are just a few!") used to INSPIRE me and make me beg my dad to take me to the OSU gym (which he had access to, being an activities instructor) and teach me how to do a backwards somersault. WHICH HE DID, God bless him. I don't remember a childhood of gray, cloudy days EVEN THOUGH, living in the Willamette Valley, where clouds get trapped between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascades and just drop their load on the land, that's DEFINITELY what it was.

I remember a childhood of activity! Because we got out of the house, rain be damned, and got involved in the day!

When I'm listening to Kiddokabiddo's sing-along-songs CD and the obnoxious whiny brat girl says, in the middle of "Rain, Rain, Go Away," "Mommy, it's not working!" and then the mom says, "We'll just have to try a little harder!" it infuriates me because the girl needs to learn that the rain will not just go away. You have to learn to play in the rain!

As long as it's not a gray day.