Some Of Life's Little Ironies

We make plans and God laughs.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Probably because work has consisted almost solely of cutting out posing trunks. Cutting out posing trunks is a mindless task. You choose the correct pattern, then the correct fabric, pin the pattern to the fabric, cut around the pattern then repeat. It's a task that I could have done at Kindy had we been allowed to use scissors that weren't plastic and didn't have curved ends. (But my Kindy was a little anal about things like sharp scissors, running with knives, running with forks in our mouths and jumping off the roof to see if we really could fly.) Or alternatively it's something that I could train a monkey to do if only Iven would finally let me get a monkey. (Honestly, after 26 years of listening to that man snore you'd think the least he could do for me is get me a monkey.)

Anyway my thoughts have centred a lot on the past. About what I had planned for my life and how my life has panned out so far and that's when I realised just how far my plans have gone awry... since I made my major life plans at the age of ten.

Back when I was ten I decided that I was going to get married, have three children and be a vet. Now to all intents and purposes I've achieved all those goals. But my goals were a little more specific than that. I was going to have three children, yes BUT the first was going to be a boy named either Damien or Heath - I hadn't quite decided. Then I was going to have two daughters, Christie and Hayley (named after child actresses).

And how did I go? FAIL! Three sons - Sam, Josh and Luke. I'd like to point out, though, that this wasn't really my fault. It was totally Iven's fault being that he's the only one that can provide the Y or the second X chromosome. (This is nothing new - things that go wrong here are nearly always Iven's fault whether he did it or not. That's just my rule.) Would I have it any other way? Absolutely not. I've loved having a house full of males - except for the issue of toilets and aiming. And it's taught me so much - like not to store the spare toilet rolls anywhere within a two metre radius of the toilet if you actually want to ever use them.

Then there's the whole vet thing. My plan was that I'd be an exotic animal vet working at a big zoo. The closest that I get to wild animals at the moment is screaming when our resident rat makes a break for freedom from behind the freezer, taking photos of pythons that have come in search of wild rats and fresh chicken eggs and getting the dogs to chase the scrub turkeys out of the back yard. And the closest thing I get to being a vet is shoving a worm tablet down the dogs' throats once a month.

When I had just graduated as a Vet I had a job at a local surgery. One day a girl came in with her dog that had a few lacerations and this girl was allowed to suture them up herself. It turned out that she was a qualified Vet who'd married a man who was threatened by her education so she'd given up her profession and was working as a sewing machinist in a clothing factory. I wondered at the time who would give up all that education just to sew. Well it turns out that I would. Being a Vet didn't work so well with being a mother (the way I wanted to be a mother) so I gave it up and built my own business sewing. I'm thinking that gave God a huge laugh.

But having a sewing business meant that I could be home for my boys. And I got to satisfy the creative side of me that just loves to make stuff. I've gotten to dress everyone from babies all the way through to elite athletes and I've met some incredible, inspiring people.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with this post is that while we might make plans, life has a way of changing them around. It can be incredibly frustrating not to meet the goals that you've set but what you end up with can be better than you could have possibly imagined.