Fortune 500

Joel is a music teacher, and unless you or a family member are music teachers, you probably have no concept of the appalling time commitment required of the position.  But here's a good formula you can use to determine the hours a choir director/band teacher/lesson teacher will often experience.

Cael (2.5 months) visiting Daddy at work

Pick a day of the week.  Got one?  Okay, now pick an hour.  Ready?  Now say your day and time out load.

Yep.  You'd be working then.

Joel's schedule is certainly not ideal, but he is good at his job and the main reason he is successful is because he is willing to put forth the effort needed.  But we need him too, so we've had to become creative in our ways of plugging family time in every nook, cranny and 15 free minutes in his day.  So we've created a tradition of sorts, of meeting for lunch almost every Tuesday at our favorite Asian restaurant, Nomi's, in the town where Joel works.

We catch up, each eat half our body weight in orange and sesame chicken, and crack into our fortune cookies to see what the future holds.  I'm not a superstitious person, so I don't hold the tiny slips of paper in very high regard, but we do like to see what advice the universe wants to pass along to us.  And like many people we know, we add the words "in bed" to the end of our fortune and giggle at the results.

I swear we're mature enough to have children.

We've noticed lately that some of the fortunes haven't been properly translated, leading to confusing and funny results.  Given that my Dad, sisters and I often act as the English language police, I began to collect the mistaken fortunes and added a third to the collection earlier this week.

Now, it's true that my writing is somewhat limited to diapers, toys and timeouts, but it appears as though the fortune cookie people could use some assistance in writing their fortunes.  So I took a few moments to pen some fortunes of my own, based on my experience with parenting, of course.

May your days be long, and may your mornings not begin with a knee to the groin.

Your wealth and your waistband will grow exponentially in the coming year.

You have a keen mind and a strong intellect.  And you have Spaghettios in your hair.

In bed.