Yeah, but it's a dry heat...

Hello curious reader,

You may be wondering at this point why I have started a blog. Well to tell the truth, that's exactly how I feel. However, I am also wondering why you have decided to read my thought drops. There are those in my life who have told me for several years now that I "should write a book" about my experiences with motherhood and everything I went through to earn the illustrious title of "mommy". Maybe it would be interesting and or enlightening, but maybe not. Either way that is not the subject of this premier posting.

After living in the American midwest for 29 years I now find myself in the Lone Star Republic of Texas. I don't quite know why everyone here is so insistent on adding the whole republic part, but my efforts to begin assimilation require me to follow suit. Along with my husband Matt and our four children (Cooper 6, Wesley 5, Killian 3 1/2, and Murdoch 2) we embarked on this journey together in the very hottest part of the summer Texas has to offer. Now I understand that the climate between Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota differs greatly from Texas, but I was truly unprepared for exactly how needlessly HOT the Dallas area is. I come from a long line (well, at least am third generation) of Dutch women who are surprisingly intolerant of high heat. In truth though I spent every summer, until this one, laughing secretively at my mother and grandmother for their constant sweating and griping about how "frikin" hot it was (frikin courtesy of my mother).

I have a condition called Reynaud's that causes my fingers, toes, lips, etc. to turn blue when they get even the slightest bit chilled. Not bluish or pale, I'm talking totally navy fucking blue, think death. I kid you not, when my mother decided to take me to the pediatrician to see what in the hell was going on with my appendages the well trained and highly educated professional walked into the exam room, glanced over the chart, and exclaimed "Oh my God". I hope my mother got a "WTF" discount on her copay. Anyway, considering my propensity to become zombie like in color in the presence of cold or even temperatures below 80, I never considered the possibility to experience something that I would consider too hot. I have spent weeks frying to a pre-skin cancerous crisp in the full Hawaiian sun while my fellow vacationers huddled and whimpered beneath the safety of their cabana tops to find reprieve from the heat. On those same vacations while my family floated carelessly in the water for hours on end to cool off, I shivered my way out of the water with my famously blue fingers and toes to warm up in the 90 degree embrace of unobstructed heat. Therefore, when told that it was so hot in Texas I should prepare myself I again snorted arrogantly and announced there was no such thing as too hot for this chica.

I was so fucking wrong.

We moved to Texas right at the beginning of a stretch of days over 100 degrees that lasted well over 40 days. Seriously, I began to hate the weather function on my much beloved smart phone for having the audacity to display a temperature of 98 degrees (113 with the heat index) at 9am. How dare you madam! (My phone is a woman, her name is Camille and she is a fickle bitch, but that is for another time) Thankfully our new house has a pool in the backyard which would prove to be the only place I could tolerate outside of the blissfully air conditioned sanctity of my house. In one morning phone call to my husband I announced that I finally realized that we did in fact move to the surface of the sun. He chuckled, I looked out the windows of my back door and shook my fist at the unforgiving, malevolent sunshine (such a light term for such a cruel mistress). I quickly apologized for my gesture, lest the deity of Texas decide to flex his true muscle.

Each afternoon after the rejuvenating period of the day I live for, NAPTIME, I would strip my projeny down and cover their powdery white behinds with various bright colored swim trunks and make a break for the pool like vampires running from the dawn. Of course I avoided any orange swimsuits fearing a Good Morning Vietnam-esque bursting into flames. True with 4 we have several replacement models should one be lost to the elements, but telling the engineer I am married to that one of our children spontaneously combusted due to the color of their swimsuit just seemed like an invitation to receive a lecture about heat transfer properties that I have already heard. 

On the rare occasion where we decided to explore our new surroundings I whined to a degree that my ancestors would have been extremely proud of. I rolled my eyes, I fanned myself with my hand and talked of swooning, I muttered profanities about the temperature exceeding a million degrees. But mostly I was on an almost continuous loop of announcing to others present, whether I knew them or not, that it was needlessly hot. Like this was a personal attack against me and ever other life form and we should band together raising our voices in unison to protest such thermal abuse.

Matt, bless his space captain heart, felt it was best to laugh at me and point out how much I sounded like my mother and grandmother. To that end, I felt it was best to whine louder and find numerous exciting ways to extend a very special finger in his general direction. Seriously, if I had heard one more time "Ha! I never, ever thought YOU would be the one to complain about it being too hot", I would have found a way to build a giant magnifying glass and fry him with the sun's rays and dispose of the charred remains in our creek. Those remains would never be found as I know there is something large that loves scavenging dead critters back there (the armadillo, again another time my pretties).

This senseless heat continued into October. October people! I'm just a girl from the upper midwest who is used to snow showing up in October, not a break from 100 into merely the mid 90's. I doubted my sanity. I doubted the sanity of my husband for taking this new job. I doubted the sanity of those who have lived here their whole lives and never realized that God is trying to kill them. How could I be the only one to realize what was really going on here?

Mercifully, as we are now in the end stretch of November the heat has broken. Daily highs are in the 60's to 70's and overnight temperatures dip into the 40's. Now, rather than huddle in my house rocking back and forth with my knees to my chest dealing with my guaranteed death by vitamin D intake, I take immense joy in galavanting around town in capris and t-shirts while my fellow statesmen dig out jackets and sweaters. I hold my thick blooded head high and revel in the beauty of fall stretching into what is normally solid winter. In the grocery store (another posting about adventures at Kroger later darlings) while the other hens are cackling about turning on the furnaces and preparing for "winter" I butt right in and tell them how much I freaking LOVE having windows open and not locating the nearest shovel.

Who's shuddering now Texas!

Honestly, the evening news starts out the same "Well it was a cooold one out there this morning north Dallas!", Ha! The line at my local opium den (coffee shop) get longer each day as these thin blooded southerners whimper over the hum of the heaters in their oversized pickup trucks. Not me, my windows are down fellow citizens of the republic. And I'll do you one better. I never stopped drinking my hot coffee each morning, not even when my black car with black interior mocked me with a temperature reading of 118 degrees. No one makes me switch to iced lattes, no one.

I plan to continue my affront to Texas winters. I will smirk at those who remark about how cold today is. I don't care if I get to a point where my nipples could cut diamonds, I will not wear a winter coat out of sheer Dutch stubbornness.

I know what you're thinking, isn't that poking the bear of summer that you just spend countless paragraphs sniveling about? Maybe, maybe not. Either way I don't care, I'm representing for Minnesota my lovlies!