Flashback Fridays

I am in the middle of writing three books.  One for the ABA on leadership for women.  Two for me.  A funny parenting book and a book about how our worth, regardless of the good or bad feedback we get from the world, only comes from Christ. 

As a result, I'm in writing overload.  So for the summer I'm introducing "Flashback Fridays."  A look at some of my older blog posts, some of which were written before I even told anyone I had a blog.  I began writing in October 2010, when the kids were one, and wrote about faith, family and some really random stuff.  Today's is one of my most random, but also one of my favorites, because this really is how I think.  It's from December 2010.  It was titled, Banshees (and thank you Grey's Anatomy).  Here you go, enjoy & happy Memorial Day weekend!


So I was going to attempt to describe what occurred over the course of Christmas weekend with my 14 month old triplets entering their first running around simultaneously phase which happened to coincide with our stay at the VERY non-baby proofed family farm house in Louisiana. I felt the best way to describe the experience was to say they were running around all weekend like banshees. I don't know if your family uses this expression but I grew up with it - for example, my mom would say that my brother ran around the house "like a banshee."

But before I posted my hilarious story for the blogosphere I thought it might be prudent to actually look up the word banshee & figure out what the heck a banshee is and why my mom used it. Well, it turns out it's this pretty terrible Irish mythological creature who was an omen of death and wailed. Somehow this word made it into the English lexicon as urban slang for nutty behaviour. Seriously? This is all I could think - seriously? How the heck did my little momma, wife and daughter of a minister, end up using this pretty creepy term to describe hyperactive children's behaviour? I certainly have no interest in using it in my jargon anymore.

This, in my streams of consciousness mentality (which I will not subject you to often because it truly is a train wreck of an experience), led me to think - why was my first thought, "Seriously?" In fact, my first thought was "seriously?" at least a dozen times this weekend. Freely given parenting advice from the in-laws - "seriously, have you had 14 mo old triplets?" My husband deciding after the first day at the farm we'd leave earlier than we'd originally planned - "seriously, what do you think I've been telling you about taking toddling triplets to a very uncontained space?" My youngest laughing so hard during his Christmas Eve bath that he literally laughed the poop right out of himself - "seriously, you are freakin' hysterical!" Quickly followed up with, "seriously, on top of everything now I have to disinfect all our bath toys and bathtub?"

This led me to my above-titled gratitude for Grey's Anatomy. If you are not a fan of the show, then you probably don't utter "seriously" in every other thought you have during the day. Even my mom (also a fan) says it all the time. What did we do before Grey's Anatomy? What word could possibly appropriately capture that emotion if Meredith Grey had not popularized the term, "seriously?" I mean, seriously, what word did I use - I guess I used "really." "Really - have you had 14 mo old triplets?" Do you see what I mean.  This does not have the same ring AT ALL! What else could we use? My mind is a blank. This term is absolutely PERFECT for almost every single emotion that you need to begin with an emphatic punctuation.

So drop the use of the term banshee and start using seriously if you don't already use it regularly. Except, now what will we replace the term banshee with? "Running around like a _________....." "Screaming like a ____________....." Maybe I'll write the creators of Grey's and see if they can come up with a term for that too.