love, marriage, and whoopee cushions

A lot has happened here since the last blog entry- Mrs. Pearce and I both had the yearly "odometer roll-over" we call our birthdays, and this past week, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our meeting. The "celebration" took place at a local Cajun restaurant Saturday night (yes, a real Cajun restaurant in Indiana- I passed on the fried alligator, however....), while the Amazing Courtney watched the daughters.

No matter your age, 20 years is a LONG time for pretty much anything. I've often wondered what keeps some people together for "the long term", and in the case of Mrs. Pearce and I, my usual answer to that was "We've been together for 20 years because Mrs. Pearce is incredibly understanding and tolerant of all things Jeff". In the past couple of months, however, I've seen that I've not given myself enough credit for contributing to the "glue" that has kept us in each others lives- specifically in one area.

A few years ago, I asked Mrs. Pearce the big question- "why do you love me?". I had a couple of ideas as to why she might- unfortunately, neither of those were in her answers, which were the following:

"I love you because:

1) you always make me laugh

2) I know that you'd never hurt me- or anyone else for that matter"

.....which are good things, although it puts a little pressure on me to be funny. The third reason caught me off guard, though:

3) you're the most hygienic man I've ever met- you never stink!

I'll admit: there was a SMALL part of my brain that was hoping to hear reasons along the lines of "you're a big slab of manly beefcake" as opposed to "you don't even SMELL like a man!"

After mid-July, however, Mrs. Pearce had a new one to add to her list- and it would be:

4) and I know that you, Jeff Pearce, would NEVER drag me to divorce court because I went on a shopping trip and brought home a whoopee cushion for our daughters to play with.

Yes- a whoopee cushion. I heard it in my dreams for many nights.

About six weeks ago, Mrs. Pearce took a day off to get some shopping done. She went to a mall with some pricey, upscale stores- Sak's Fifth Avenue, the Sony Store, a Mac store- some nice places. And she returned from the mall with some nice clothes for herself. She asked my daughters "were you good while I was gone?" They replied yes, so she handed them this whoopee cushion, with the implied message "I'm giving this to you because you were good in my absence. Now you can be bad".

And it was easy to be bad with this whoopee cushion, because it is a new high-tech one- one that is self inflating, meaning there's no real downtime between explosions. And there were many explosions, followed by HARD laughter from the daughters.

I suppose you can find out a lot about a person based upon their whoopee cushion technique. Daughter #1, normally the more measured, "non-instant gratification" child, favored the loud, fast discharge- and afterwards, she laughed every time.

Daughter #2, on the other hand, favored the slower, more subtle approach- preferring to let the sound trickle on endlessly. She laughed a lot, too.

(the sound that a whoopee cushion makes is one that daughter #2 has had some experience making on her own- sans whoopee cushion. This past winter, upon making such a sound, she declared "oops! I made poop bubbles!" I corrected her and said "what you should say is 'excuse me, I passed gas'". About a week after that, she was running by Mrs. Pearce and myself, let slip of a certain body noise, stopped running and said "excuse me- I....I.... I ran out of gas!". Close enough....)

Fortunately for me, the whoopee cushion is no more. I believe that ours was the only whoopee cushion in history to be broken from over-use, because for about three weeks straight, all that was heard around the Pearce household was (and I'll try to spell this with as much accuracy as possible) "BWAAAAPPPP!" "BWAAAAAP!" "sqeeeeEEEEEEeeeeEEEEEEeeeeEEEE!", followed by two girls laughing hard and the younger one saying "AGAIN! AGAIN AGAIN!!"

If there's any upside to "fart-fest 2006", it's that I now have a little leeway regarding what I buy for the daughters ("were you two good while I was gone? Ok, here you go- super soakers filled with black ink. Go nuts.").