Far From Perfect

Sometimes I allow myself to pretend that I am "perfectly" average. You know, average house, average salary, average kids. In a boring way, really. I mean, how much more dull can you get than a teacher married to a cop, raising kids in a rather sheltered corner of suburbia?

I know that we in no way qualify for "perfect," though. By what I read in the media, we are far from it. I never used cloth diapers, I hated breast feeding, and I actually spanked my children occasionally. I regularly use spit to wash their faces, and have even fed them cereal for dinner. My house? Don't even ask. The dishes don't match and neither does the furniture. I daresay if Martha Stewart were faced with Living here, she'd opt for jail.

I wonder, too, if the average family is as weird as we are. Does anyone sing for no reason (and as badly) as I do? Are other mothers surrounded by boys who consider noisy body functions to be a daily source of entertainment?

Okay, I know we are far from perfect, (and I spend far too much time fretting over that distance) but I look for ways that we are far from average all the time. For one thing, I get just a little flak about the size of our family. My "big" family of four boys (something like 2.7 more than the average) gets a wise crack every now and then. "Were ya' tryin' for that girl?" or "All them babies! Hyuck, now y'all know what's causin' that, right?"

Hilarious.

Four kids is what I grew up with, and I just never thought of it as big. Until all four of them decided to play a sport during the same season, but that's another story.

When I was a kid, I thought to be perfectly average would be a shame. A failure even. I was gonna be well above average, a shining star, an expert in my field. La, la, la...Why do I suddenly have an flashback of myself singing into my deoderant-stick microphone in front of my bedroom mirror?

I've since discovered, as I'm sure so many others have, that--while the absence of superstardom certainly can be boring at times (as a matter of fact, I'd call that an understatement)--it certainly can be perfectly wonderful. And to tell the truth, I doubt that anyone is "perfectly" average.

Thus, this journal was born. Welcome.