So I think life is like 80% about learning to see things from a different perspective.  You see things this way.  I see things another way…  And I am constantly given new opportunities to stretch my ability to give room for misconceptions and let go of knowing everything or anything.  Most importantly, I try to find ways not to judge immediately what I see. 

I find if I take my first impression of anything I experience, note it and then ask questions or change my view and look around for clues…  many times my perspective changes.  One of my favorite stories is of the elephant and the blind men.  If you don’t know the story, they all feel a part of the elephant and end up experiencing “the elephant” from their particular vantage point.  What you experience as the reader is that an elephant is ALL the things the blind men experienced but separately, they were all so different.  However, none of them were actually wrong and none were completely right.  So is this sounding like a sermon yet?  Sorry about that…  BUT I think you’ll see why perspective is SO very important on this one. 

It’s the first morning of spring break 2011, and I wake up later than 6AM, which always makes my pores feel smaller, my mood feel lighter, and my burden in this world—nil!  I’m thrilled and happy, and my two little boys are playing beautifully together in the family room.  The world is a perfect place!  We exchange our little morning hugs, and I tell them they have a couple minutes before we start breakfast.  I saunter over to the computer to pull up my email or the latest news only to find a picture of Maxim’s Hometown Hottie-Andrea.  Well, yeeeeee hawwww!  See, just when you think everything looks normal, look a freaking gain!  Don’t my boys know you’re supposed to clear the cache after you look at naked girls on the internet?  Soooo, first impression…  What the hell is going on here???  My pores are starting to sag, and my mood is turning gray.  But my note that Andrea is still “bottoms up” on my computer screen– tan, naked and wearing a really darling cowboy hat means that no one is hiding the picture I am seeing.  There is no awareness of guilt or wrongdoing here.  I search my world for more clues before I settle on an impression.  Neither one of my boys is looking at me in a sudden strike of fear as if they forgot to empty the computer screen.  So I settle on asking more questions and assuming this is an innocent “find”.  And I am also thinking how proud Andrea’s father must be.  She’s made something of herself and without full frontal.  She’s just showing back—and, mind you, showing off her allegiance to her parent’s family business—the farm.  Good for her, I think.  And I sit down to find the parental controls, look for browsing capabilities and what my son had looked up.  Last week it was pictures of God and now we’re settling for pictures of well, cowgirls in compromising positions—cowgirls who should get their naked little asses back to work!  I can’t help being slightly mad at Andrea for showing no class at—seriously, is she over 14?  Is that legal? 

I calmly ask the google god at our home, my 7 year old, what I was looking at on the screen.  And for any of you who don’t think there’s ever a simple answer to a seemingly awkward or seedy-looking situation—think again.  Any situation can look very wrong, very unwholesome and very disturbing…  But my son’s answer and life answer 322—things are often very innocent and should be treated as so.  Never make an innocent situation in a child’s life seem or feel dirty when it wasn’t meant that way.  You can, however, judge the naked chick, which I did.  Normally, I wouldn’t care if Andrea showed anything anywhere, but I realized my sons were different.  If I could reach Andrea, I would hog tie her and send her off to a damn convent!  As for my son, he had looked up “naked person doing ‘shaky butt’”.  Now the reason this is so innocent is that the ritual at our house, and by this I mean, my kid’s ritual, is to dance about the house, doing a naked shaky butt dance, after bath time.  I asked a few more “defining questions”—just in case I was being too open-minded.  And maybe some 7 year olds would have had less appropriate intentions, but this little boy has never shown signs of sexual prowess early.  So my conclusion and final impression is that he thought little old whorey Andrea, who should be in school—-was a funny and quite comedic young lady.  She had a cute costume and was doing shaky butt.  I can only be so grateful that she had no frontal nudity that would cause the occasion to need a follow-up lecture on the human anatomy.  Because even though they have seen me naked, I’m pretty sure I don’t have boobies like those….   No one my age with two former sucklers probably has a body like Andrea.  And someday Andrea will be 30 something and unable to make cowboy boots look alluring.  And for one, I look forward to that day.  So, I wake up another morning, with another surprise, another new lesson to learn—parental controls—and the hope that the sex talk is not in my immediate future.  I can only hope that the sex talk can wait more than 12 months after we get one out of diapers!  Good night!!!  I quickly made some rules about computer use which had gone from “charming” to “potentially dangerous” in a matter of days.  I told my son we should go back to that search for God and heaven on the computer.  Didn’t we have some unfinished business there?  And to all those hometown hotties out there, put that sh*@# away!!!