The difference between us...

I feel like Mike is a great man to have on hand to demonstrate the major differences between men and women because, one, he’s pretty darn manly, and, two, anyone who knows him knows that he’s so amazingly awesome in almost every possible way that anything that may seem like a criticism of him would roll off him like water off a duck. Let me state this clearly, though: this is not a criticism. It’s an observation of something hilarious I’m learning every single day: we are not wired the same way.

This story must begin this way… I am now sitting at home, reading my Kindle and blogging because Mike gave me three options: 1) stay home with both girls while he ran to the store, 2) stay home with one girl while he ran to the store, or 3) stay home alone. And get this… he was serious! See what I mean about being unbelievably awesome?

At one point in this time of relaxation, I got up to pull a cake Mike had baked (Yeah, he baked a cake. I’m not making this stuff up.) out of the oven. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw this white styrofoam-but-not-quite-styrofoam stuff strewn across the floor, and that’s when I realized, once again, that—at many times—we speak a different language.

See, about 20 minutes earlier, I had seen the stuff and, with scrunched up nose, asked, “What IS that all over the floor?” Mike looked around and said, “Oh, that’s stuffing from Kona’s bed.”

Now, to me, when I say something like “Why is my kitchen floor covered with all that crap that sticks to your feet and that our girls could ingest?” and you answer, “It’s the crap from Kona’s old dog bed that you wanted me to throw away roughly four months ago but I didn’t and I just brought it up and now it’s sitting in the corner of the livingroombytheway…”, it means that it would probably be good to bust out the vacuum or broom, you know, to take care of this clear and obvious problem.

This is why, when I retrieved the cake and walked out of the kitchen, feet padded now by white nasty stuff, I laughed. Clearly, when I asked what was on the floor, to Mike, the conversation went a little something more like this:

Heather: “What IS that all over the floor?”

Mike: “Oh, that’s stuffing from Kona’s bed.”

Whose interpretation is more accurate? What’s that famous saying?

Know when to shut up.