This morning, I walked into the bathroom and said, “What are you doing? Stop soodling!”
Soodling, for those of you who did not grow up in a home heavily influenced by Anabaptist culture and the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, means messing around with water and making a mess, or something close to dawdling. Probably depending on who you ask. In our house, it always involved water. I would be playing in the bathroom sink with the water running (for reasons that currently escape me but are probably clear to Levi), and my mother would invoke soodling. Her voice in my head made me both tearful and grateful as I wiped up the bathroom counter.
Some time later, as I was listening to the beginning of a conference call, someone yelled, “MOOOOOOMMMMM! I have poop on my hand!” and two thoughts came into my head:
- Dear God, thank you for the mute button. Amen.
- Sometimes, the responsibilities that come with the different roles I am currently occupying crash up against each other in ways that make me question my life choices. This is one of those times.
Still, the other day Elias and I walked down to get Levi off the bus at the end of the day. One boy played happily in the gravel and chattered general nonsense to me, and moments later another boy bounded happily off the bus and told me how much he loved school.
That’s pretty okay.
Also, cropped appropriately, the end of our driveway looks, at first glance, like a stony beach.
A girl can dream.
Soodling is one of many words from my childhood. I used I think they were made up words my mom inherited from my grandma until I same across a few of them in an Amish book :-/ Guess I’m fluent in German slang. Lol