Be careful what you wish for

If you want to get husband-dear annoyed*, there are several (I could almost say "numerous") ways to approach this. One would be to monitor his every move, act as a narrator to his life if you will. My darling husband can't stand it when he's in the middle of doing something, and you, or anyone ,ambles up to him and says something like, "So, you're greasing your bike chain/ cooking dinner/ folding laundry" or whatever else best describes his current activity. Another thing that one may not want to do around husband-dear, is engage in lengthy relationship-building conversations with people you don't really know, but are only interacting with because you happen to be using one of their services (e.g., the lady at the cellphone store, the terminator man, etc). Moreover, you also may not want to be a dog, sit at his feet, stare at him, and whine incessantly.

In recent weeks, while my parents were visiting, I also discovered one other thing that can get on the love of my life's nerves if engaged in too much, and that is starting a sentence with, "In Dutch we have a saying...". It works best when followed up with a completely bizarre saying, and an incredibly lengthy explanation why this saying is slightly relevant to the current situation.

You should probably know that I come from a family that speaks mainly in sayings, and who have a slew of sayings that seem to have been passed down from generation to generation. And so husband-dear was innundated with explanations about sayings such as "doing something for the cat's violin", "One can cut really small sticks from really thick wood", and something about a slate roof.

Now it's one thing to use sayings like that in a situation where everyone understands them (and in this case, that would be my extended family only), but to have odd sayings about people named Jantje van Leijen, about birds, neighbors, and dogs and their bread which make no sense to you bandied about on an hourly basis, has to be quite the experience, and I have to admit that husband-dear bore it well. He listened, forgot them, mixed them up ("a dog that doesn't like the bread in your hand is better than..no..wait.."), and tried to counter every Dutch saying with an American one.

And so in passing, my parents learned a large number of American sayings, from "like water off a duck's back" to "be careful what you wish for". Interestingly, it seems as though Americans are not half as obsessed with animals as Dutch people (or at least my family) are, and thus lack many of the completely nonsensical sayings our language uses.

The one saying that I wanted to talk about in this post (and yes! I know! It took me -forever- to get there!), is "be careful what you wish for". You see, do you all remember how in my last post, I complained about not wanting to say goodbye to my parents the next day? Well, I didn't have to after all. My mother had apparently caught some sort of summer bug, and got sick that same night. We ended up having to take her to a MedStop the next day, and they weren't able to leave until yesterday. It was nice having them around for a few extra days, I'll be the first to admit that. But still, be careful what you wish for.


*Disclaimer: I, of course, love my husband dearly, and would never engage in any of these behaviors on purpose.