Out of the Mouths of Babes, etc.

I realize that nearly a month has gone by and I haven't made a new blog entry. It seems we've been so busy trying to pack it in on these summer days that I haven't had a lot of reflection time! But, I couldn't let today pass while telling you two funny (and totally unrelated) stories.

First, a shining example of the pure (and sometimes painful) honesty of children:

Today while my parents were watching the girls, I checked off one of the things on my "to do" list: go to the makeup counter at Macy's and invest in some new under eye concealer (you know, to make me look less tired, old, and haggard, and to cover up what looks like shiners under each eye! Apparently there is no such miracle, but I digress....) Anyway, I let the makeup counter lady talk me into "the full makeover," which meant she got to do my entire face, complete with eye shadow, eye liner, and mascara (the first two of which don't really even exist in my makeup drawer anymore). When I got home, Megan's comment to me was, and I quote exactly:

"You look pretty. You don't look like Mama though."

Hmm....ouuuch. Looking pretty apparently is incongruous with looking like myself. And apparently it's been so long since I've really taken the time to do a decent makeup job that my eldest child has no recollection of ever seeing me that way. Gee. And if that wasn't enough, when Bill got home, in typical Bill fashion, he made no notice of my new look whatsoever. And here I walked around all day feeling like a movie star or something. Good thing I spent so much money on the makeup.

Second story:

So tonight we had a babysitter, and went to dinner at a fun little restaurant called the Electric Cheetah (recommended to me by my fabulous girlfriend Katie...awesome, by the way!). We were done before 8 pm and decided to drive a little further downtown and walk around the city for a stroll. Well, about 10 minutes into the stroll, Bill (again in typical Bill fashion) had a sudden bathroom emergency. Y'all know Bill, so you know how this happens with frustrating regularity. Anyway...we are in the middle of urban nowhere-land, where there is no immediately visible public place to use a restroom. We happen to be standing in front of this relatively new high rise condo complex called Bridgewater Place. Bill decides to run in there and ask the doorman if he knows of any public restrooms nearby. (A desperate man will do crazy things.) I am lagging behind, telling him that this idea is insane, that there's not going to be a public bathroom in a high rise condo building, that we should just run back toward the car and hope for the best.

I come in the door to the lobby about 10 seconds after he walks in, and amazingly enough, there on the balcony overlooking the lobby are two doctors Bill knows from work, along with the wife of one of the docs. Apparently the one doctor and his wife live in the high rise, and the three of them are on their way out to dinner. They invite us to come up and take a tour of their 18th floor apartment. (Divine intervention for Bill, right? He can actually use the bathroom at their place!)

This apartment had the most AMAZING, INCREDIBLE view of the city! It had floor-to-ceiling windows that made up two of the adjacent walls of the place, which gave the apartment almost a 180 degree view of downtown Grand Rapids. I never really realized how beautiful our city is until I saw it from this vantage point. It really defies description, but suffice it to say, it was breathtaking. It was like we were transported out of Grand Rapids and were in some posh urban high rise in New York or Chicago. Really awesome. The kind of place where you could wow your friends by throwing shi-shi cocktail parties every night! The doc and his wife said they had a great view of the city fireworks last weekend. It was still light out when we were there, but I would have loved to see the view once it was dark and the city was all lit up. I joked to Bill afterwards that we should have offered to house-sit for them while they were at dinner, just so we could sit and enjoy the view! And how crazy was it that we just happened to go into that lobby, looking for a bathroom, and that they just happened to be coming out right at that time? The whole thing definitely made the evening a memorable one. Although Bill and I probably enjoyed different aspects of the experience; I'm sure that Bill appreciated the apartment's bathroom at least as much, if not more, than its view.