Speaking Blue

A friend's Facebook status once read, "Blue is NOT hearing Pink." My response, "Really? We speak purple around here." Maybe it should have been lavender.

Anyway, men and women do not speak the same language, that is true. The roughly 842,000 different books in print devoted to that very premise can't be wrong.

For instance, last night I came home from work to Grandma playing with Adam. Fun stuff. I go to the fridge to get the hamburger I am sure I have in order to make my mother the culinary delight that is grilled hamburgers in appreciation for her afternoon of babysitting. There is no hamburger. Not fun stuff.

Ismael walked in shortly afterward and I greeted him with "Please, go to the store and buy hamburger. I already have buns. I just need hamburger."

He harumphed a few times because all he really wanted to do was check his Powerball numbers to see if we could have hamburgers ordered in for the rest of our lives. (We cannot).

After he left, I spoke these prophetic words to my mother, "He will come back with the wrong things, you wait and see." I've only been married a few years, BUT I've learned a thing or two in that time.

I knew when he left that he a.) hadn't really been listening to me and b.) would have been extremely irritated if I had issued the simple statement "We need hamburger," even one more time.

So I shut up and waited. And waited. And waited. Seriously, the store is 1 mile away, how long does it take?

He threw two very full bags on the counter. Two packages of WHOLE WHEAT HAMBURGER BUNS, one package of HOT DOG BUNS, and lemonade.

For God's sake.

How many hamburgers were three people going to eat? Sixteen? That is if I had hamburger.

We don't even have any hot dogs.

And I'm sure glad he got lemonade. It will make a fabulous dinner by itself.

My mother declared that if that was what we were having for dinner, she'd just go on home, thank you very much.

I caught him getting his new bike out to go for a quick pre-lemonade dinner ride and dispatched him back to the store.

He returned with two packages of pre-formed hamburgers (ahhh....what a delight) and a package of hamburger (to prevent future problems).

As we finally ate our fantastic dinner, I reflected on how "blue doesn't always hear pink." (even though pink was PERFECTLY clear in what she was saying)

My husband's version of blue gets tangled up in the translation from thinking in French to speaking in English and in between all the details get left out. I dig details out of him like I'm mining for coal in Appalachia. It's time consuming, difficult, dirty work.

If I want him to hear me correctly, I will have to leave out details like I have bread already and just shout, "Hamburger, hamburger, hamburger," in his ear. I thought leaving out the detail that I wanted the sirloin versus the cheap 73/27 meat was sufficient. I was wrong.

While Ismael did the post dinner dishes (because he is a good, good, good, hearing impaired husband), I did some of my nightly blog surfing and found http://www.dadcentric.com/ which is a site that compiles entries from different daddy bloggers.

What? Daddy bloggers? Yes, it's true.

I found that daddy blogs are quite a bit different from mommy blogs in that they curse a lot more, are highly sarcastic, and are content to refer to their children as Thing 1 and Thing 2 in order to protect their privacy (I can only assume no wife allowed their children to actually be named that. Twice, anyway)

The posts I enjoyed the most were:

I Sit in the Darkness and Say the Law

Po-tate-oe, Po-tat-o

Richard Dreyfuss Would Have Stood His Ground

The second and third ones, in particular, require you to read all the way to the end for the punch-line but they are well worth the wait for the laugh.

I don't think Ismael will start a daddy blog any time soon, but if he did, I sure wonder what his entry from tonight would be?