Day Five: List of Never Again

Stuff I should never have put on …

The watermelon getup on my first day of public school in
sixth grade. I’m talking the watermelon shirt held with a watermelon side-clip
and topped off with giant watermelon earrings. 
I carried the color theme through the pink scrunchie in my side pony and
two layers of pink scrunched socks. It could have gone so badly. Thankfully
enough other sixth grade girls were digging watermelon fashion that year, and I
scored a seat at the lunch table.

The one time Matt and I got a cat. That made for a month.

So did the month I volunteered at the horse therapy barn.
I’m allergic to horses, you see. I know this, but I set the knowledge aside (bad
example of putting off). I thought a Benadryl pill would take care of it. It
didn’t, and I took two. When that didn’t work, I added a daily Claritin
followed by a post-barn shower to wash away the horse dander. A puff from my
inhaler preceded a glass of wine. Volunteering shouldn’t require such a bender.
I put off that dream.

“And no one can you say you didn’t try,” Matt concluded.

But Matt’s not always right. Like when he suggested we go to
Vegas on our honeymoon. I put off that idea at first, but then he convinced me
to put it on.

You have to be on the lookout for other people’s tricky
put-ons. Jesse pulled one on me big-time when he was nine months old. New
Year’s Day 2009, and I made like any good Polish mama and fed him his first
big-boy meal of pork, kraut, and Brussels sprouts. He gobbled the latter with
such zeal that I put on some mama pride about my son’s wide dietary range. I didn’t
bring the sprouts back for another year, and by that time, he had put them off.
I insisted he put them on. No, yes, no, yes. Jess finally put one in his mouth
and then puked it all over the table.

“I guess Jesse won that battle,” Matt concluded.

Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.