Of Swords and Squirrels

I hesitate to post this just a little because I feel like I have some friends out there who might be just starting to think, "Hey, that Jill-girl is alright. She's not really strange at all" and then they would read this and be like, "Nope." But normality is over-rated and laughing is underrated (yes, even with adages like "laughter is the best medicine" floating around the lexicon, I still feel like laughter is underrated) so I am going to share this silliness because it made me laugh and laughing made me happy.

 Sometimes I think my family is legit crazy--or maybe just really weird.

We had the sister missionaries from our church over for dinner  last night. They are the cutest, sweetest girls and we really enjoyed their company. It was a delicious dinner of pork ribs, apple coleslaw, sweet potato biscuits and baked beans (even if the batch of baked beans I made was ridiculously puny owing to the fact that I couldn't locate the other can of pork and beans I bought last week. It's probably sitting empty under one of my kids' beds. No joke). Afterwards they had a message to share with us as is often their custom. We talked about a story from The Book of Mormon about a people called the Anti-Nephi-Lehis. Short version: they had been a pretty ferocious people, but they saw the light and changed their ways. They made a covenant with God that they wouldn't shed any more blood, so they buried their swords as a witness that they were going to do what it took to change and become better.

The sisters had these cute little paper swords that they had cut out and they asked us to think about something we could give up or change to help us become closer to God and write it on the sword (side note: Three out of four of my boys said they could work on being nicer to their brothers. This is obviously an issue in our home). We talked about our swords for a minute and then someone got the idea that we should actually bury our swords in the back yard. That would be so awesome, right? And then someone else had the thought, did anyone ever finish burying that road kill squirrel that died right in front of our house on Halloween (could that be the reason we had so few trick-or-treaters?)? Someone was sent out to check if the dead squirrel was still there or if the city had cleaned it up yet. Its remains remained.

Thus we found ourselves in our very dark backyard with two shovels and a small flashlight, digging a hole and wondering if the neighbors were going to think we were up to something sinister (all the while cracking jokes and quoting movies: "[It's] a human thigh bone, Ray. I mean, look at the size of this thing. You think this came off a chicken or something?").

Someone remarked "It's cold. Can't we just throw our swords on the ground symbolically and go back inside?" But it wasn't all that cold and the hole was half dug already so my husband finished digging, we threw in the swords, then one of the older boys went and retrieved the road kill with one of the shovels and deposited it on top of the swords and my husband covered the whole mess back up with dirt. We wondered if we should say a few words about the squirrel but none of us really knew him, so we just said we were sorry he had to go out like that.

I remarked on the weirdness of the whole thing and Seth made a comment that his AP Psychology teacher said that personality is only like 10% nurture so our weirdness is mostly a result of nature/genetics.

Where ever it comes from, it totally made me laugh and that was something that I really needed.
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Things I'm Thankful for:
Laughing
Starry skies
Warm weather in November