"did you do the sex yesterday?"

Is a question that perhaps a concerned parent would ask their teenage daughter after prom night.....maybe a girlfriend after you've had a hot date...more likely a gynecologist..but of course in my life this question was asked to me by my 76 year old grandmother. 

yup.

i know.

WHAT??!!!!! (is the general reaction I've gotten from various family members, followed by stunned silence.  Hubby said "what's wrong with your grandma?")

Now many of you, my fans, well the fans that I will one day have (here's to hoping!) know that my grandma has a weird and slightly (ok ok...i know...GREATLY) disturbing interest in my boobs, my personal life, the "relations" between my husband and I...and generally has no boundaries. 

Before I got married, she would say "what are you going to do since you're boobs are so small? You're husband will have nothing to play with." And now that I'm pregnant, she CONSTANTLY asks me if my boobs are getting bigger. And last week she told me that "my husband must be happy now that my boobs are bigger, cuz he has something to play with" (*diE*fAiNt~*gASp*lOok coNfusEd*gEt siCk aNd hURL~~* i know~) So I'm not really that shocked when questions like that shoot my way, but "did you do the sex yesterday?" took me to a whole new place of crazy! 

To be fair, a little background as to why she asked was, I had a little spotting last week and the doc advised me to stay home from work for a week so I was home during the middle of the day when my grandmother called. She wanted to know why I was home, so I (against my better judgement) told her, and then she asked me that, thinking that it might of been the cause for the spotting. 

*i would like to insert here, that sex was NOT the cause of the spotting, for those interested viewers*

Anyways, my grandmother had 6 kids, so I'm sure she has had everything single pregnancy symptom and issue known to man, so she was probably asking from a purely medical standpoint. 

*cross my fingers and hope to die stick a needle in my eye* (literally)....if that's NOT why she asked.

 And I should just know that nothing is too personal in my family to ask about. 

So I'll just take the advice my mother gave me when I told her what her mother had asked me which was "just accept it as our family way and.......forget it happened?" (even she didn't sound that convinced that ANYONE could erase such a comment/scenario from their minds) 

So now I just go about my days, accepting the good, bad and totally inappropriate and oh yeah...avoid calls from my grandmother~

"You're not controlling...you're just good at editing other people's ideas~"

AHA! is what I thought when my cousin told me that the other day at lunch.

As a child I (like 99% of the population) thought of my mother as my harshest critic. I always thought that she was never satisfied with what I had achieved and that somehow there was something MORE, something BETTER that I could have done in order to meet her expectations. I remember her comments on my scribbly doo artwork to be "Oh honey, i like it....but..maybe next time you can draw it BIGGER or put the cat IN the tree and not climbing UP the tree..."  (I WANTED THE CAT CLIMBING UP THE TREE DAMNIT! IT'S MORE DRAMATIC THAT WAY!!.......*bReaTh*BrEAth*brEaTh*)

 anyways, so I always thought... la~la~la~ " when I have a kid, I'm definitely going to be supportive of everything they do and never criticize them or put them down......." la~ la~ la~ but..

YEAH RIGHT THAT'S HOW I'M GOING TO PARENT MY KID! I DON'T WANT MY KID GROWING UP DISILLUSIONED AND SELF ABSORBED WITH AN INFLATED EGO! 

THAT'S HOW THE PARIS HILTONS AND KARDASHIANS OF THE WORLD ARE CREATED! BARF!

So I was telling my cousin, I would be devastated if my kid wanted to become a singer, but sang like a dying cat or a doctor but couldn't tell it's knee from it's head! and she just said..."well that's why from a young age, you just gotta "convince" them that what THEY want to do is really what YOU intended for them to do all along!" 

HmMmMmM...i thought..

interesting....

and then I realized, well...when I do art projects with my class at church, such as a painting project....I only put out the colors that I know will look good together and that will match the other parts of the room so that all the paintings don't turn out poop colored. That way, the kids still get to have fun and express their creativity, but the outcome is something that I can live with. That's when my cousin said it...

"it's editing. You're not controlling, you're just good at editing other people's ideas...." we had a laugh, it was (as Oprah says) an AHA moment! 

So next time anyone accuses you of being too controlling, just say 

"I'm not controlling, I'm just good at editing your ideas"