A real man....

Sometimes real life is so entertaining that there is no need to rent a redbox.  That is how I feel about our ward here.  I have always had church ADD but I never get bored in the Bluefield ward because there is too much to watch and giggle at.  The people here are in the salt of the Earth club.  There is nothing fake about them and they are so good at being them.  I sometimes could get a little intimidated by going to church in my ward in the Highland Utah area because all the moms have better bodies than their daughters and they are rocking the diamond jewels on their designer jeans while they wait in line for a snow cone with their Escalade running while they chat on their iphone.  Let me just say that there is no pressure like that here.  You can wear what you want, be what you want and do what you want.

 Example A: There is a woman in our ward named Betty Hanks.  She has electric red sun glasses that she wears to sacrament meeting no matter what.  She has the best West Virginia accent. She started her talk last week by having all the women yell, "Charity begins at home!" and then she had the men do the same and then we repeated it and then we did it together.  I felt like I was at a pep rally before the big game.  I was laughing so hard I couldn't recite it.  Anyway, her talk was so funny I had to put my head down and my friend April (also from Utah aka the outside world) was crying next to me because she was laughing so hard.

Midway through the talk she said (make sure to say this inside your brain with the thickest accent you have so you can grasp the full effect), "Now I would like to say that there is a problem with men today.  They don't know nothin about babies. Nothin. Some of them think that a diaper is a hat.  Well, I shore tell you that there is a man in this crowd and he is a REAL MAN, I tell you what, a REAL man, cause he sho knows how to take care of his baby girl.  I done told this man what I think of him because he is the REAL man of this ward because I see him always knowing how to help his baby and changing her and loving her and THAT my brothers and sisters is a real man."  The best part is that she was staring at Gar with her laser eyes beneath her red sunglasses the whole time and everyone already knew who she was talking about.  By now my stomach was hurting because I found this whole thing so funny.  It is true though, Betty Hanks even testified of it herself.  My husband is a real man.  He loves Liv so much and she loves him more than anyone else on Earth. Maybe partly because they look identical except for the fact that there are 30 years between them and different genders.  Maybe it's because G is the king kong of all nurturers and has an innate sense for how to care and protect.  Maybe its because G is always the one that thinks of things like putting socks on her or checking on her 10:1 times as much as me during the night.  Maybe it's just because he's a real man, like Betty Hanks shouted from the pulpit.  Either way, I love him more than life. Oh wait, he is my life...

Now as great as Betty Hanks is, she pales in comparison to my personal favorite, Ole' Brother Coombs who brings a coke with the label torn off every week and has his own soft chair set up in the back with a pillow where only he sits with his bug eye/lazy eye and curly eyebrow hairs that look like a  white wiry sea anemone and insists on standing up anytime a lady enters the room. There's nothing like this ward.  I love being around people who are so good at being them and comfortable in their own skin that they don't know how to be anyone or anything else.