Always and Forever (7 QT's)

So... This hasn't been the greatest week for blogging.  In fact, it hasn't been the greatest week for much.  Nothing terrible has happened, and I'm not supposed to be complaining.  It's just been kind of a frustrating time, not the least of which was the amount of time I feel like I've wasted sewing.  But lots of little frustrations + loss of sleep = everything seems dreadful and monumental.  I got more sleep last night (thank You, Lord!) and haven't thrown my sewing machine through the window... yet... and it's almost Friday.  Maybe things are looking up.

Anyhoo.

I thought I'd do a follow-up post to last week's 7 Quick Takes (hosted by Jen) with seven random ways I complete the sentence "I always..."  Here you go. ;-)

1.  I always thought I'd have a farm when I grew up.  You know, a vegetable garden, horses, etc.  Cows and sheep and goats... maybe.  Not chickens, though.  Never chickens.  They kind of scare me.  I think it's mostly their feet, and their wobbly combs and the floppy things under their beaks (whatever they're called) kind of give me the heebie-jeebies, too.  But the horses and vegetables and maybe fruit trees were definitely in my dream.  I think that's a big part of why I try to grow my own vegetables, but the livestock have faded from my vision.  I deal with plenty of poop already between my dogs and babies, and horses... well, they poop a lot.  No, thanks.

2.  I always liked dogs more than cats.  Always.  Which is good because I came to realize that I'm horribly allergic to cats.  My first pet, though, was a... mongoose!  That's what happens when you grow up in the middle of the rice paddies in Bangladesh, in a house where snakes regularly make surprise appearances.  We didn't live in a mud hut, but I have a thick file of Very Scary Snake Stories.  So my parents bought a mongoose, and she (and the two that followed) were some of the best pet companions you could ask for.

3.  I always thought that people who wanted to have lots of kids were a little... well, crazy.  Then I had mine.  This is probably an entire blog post (or ten) of its own, so I'll have to come back to this later.  But after having one, then two and waiting a long time to have my third (almost five years), I realized, Hey, I like this!  I started to understand where that saying "The more the merrier!" came from.  Now people ask me if I'm done at four and to be honest... I don't know.  I don't think I want to be...

4.  I always drink tea in the morning.  Okay, sometimes -- very rarely -- I have coffee.  But coffee, a straight regular cup of it, makes me cuckoo.  A cup of, say, Irish Breakfast tea is just the right amount of caffeine to get me going on my day.  I'll take it sipping-hot, with a splash of soy milk, please.

5.  I always prefer tea hot.  I don't really understand iced tea.  It's okay, I guess, and I do drink it sometimes.  But having grown up where I did, there was a custom of having tea in the afternoons -- going visiting to other women's houses and having hot tea, and it didn't matter if it was 90 degrees outside and 95% humidity.  That was just what you did.  And now that's just what I do too.

6.  I always sing to my kids at night -- three songs and then a blessing song I learned when I worked at a preschool after I got married.  Some nights I'm just too tired.  Some nights I'm out.  But when I'm here, I sing to them.  And the weird thing is, they seem to like it.  They ask me to do it.  It's a good habit I think, to fill their busy little minds with words about God's love, then my love for them at the end of the day.  Bedtime is otherwise more or less anarchy.  So to have those four songs is what I need as much as I think they do.

7.  I always wanted to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.  Or be pretty much any female in the Sound of Music.  But My Fair Lady... The summer I turned eleven, we'd just moved to Thailand.  My parents had started language school, and they left me and my little sister home all day with a housekeeper.  We had a few movies, I think Ben Hur was one, and for some reason, I think The King and I was the other.  But My Fair Lady was by far our favorite.  I don't even know how many times I've watched it.  I had the whole thing memorized pat at one point.  I'm happy with my vocation, but sometimes I still catch myself daydreaming of playing Eliza just once.

How about you?  What do you always do?