#57 The moment you knew you were no longer a child.

There are a lot of days when I still feel like a child. My friend Shawn and I joke (well, half joke/half truth) that we are terrible at being adults. It is pretty difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I was no longer a child but a time that stands out in my mind is when I stopped sleeping in my parents rooms during thunderstorms. Let me explain. I grew up in the last years of the cold war. Every night when I went to sleep I prayed that there wouldn’t be a nuclear war that would destroy the Earth. I also grew up in a time when little kids were told about the end times in Sunday school so when there was a lightening storm I was pretty much convinced that it was the end of the world. I decided that if the world was going to end, I would meet the end snuggled between my parents in their bed. So, whenever there were “thunderboomers” I would crawl into bed with my mom and dad. This was easy in the early days of my childhood but as the Bakke family grew, the space in my parents bed shrank. When there wasn’t room in their bed I started bringing a pillow and a blanket and sleeping on the floor until the fateful night there wasn’t any room on the floor! So, I did what any normal kid would do, I slept in the doorway with half my body in my parents bedroom and half my body sticking out in the living room. Laying in the doorway, having to move when anyone had to get up to use the bathroom, I decided that the world was’t going to end with a measly thunderstorm and if there was a nuclear war being in my parents bed wasn’t going to save me and wouldn’t we all meet up again in Heaven? So, I started staying in my own bed, covering my heard with a pillow and blanket because EVERYONE knows that is the true protection from all of the evils of the world.

#58 The worst thing that could happen.

If I had a nickel for every time I have been asked or have asked this question I would be a millionaire. When you ask a student what is the worst thing that could happen they usually say, “Zombie Apocalypse!” When people ask me this it is usually to do with something at school so I’ll say, “get fired,” and getting fired isn’t the end of the world. Honestly, the worst thing that could ever happen would be something terrible happening to the people I love. Life is short and life is precious. I would hate for anything to happen that would cut short the life of anyone I hold precious.

#59 The best thing that could happen.

There are so many little things and big things that would make my day or make me incredibly happy. Waking up in a lakeside cottage, next to an incredible husband to find all my student loans paid off would be a terrific start but probably a tad bit selfish. I would love to live in a world where we wouldn’t have to have statements that “Black Lives Matter,” because all lives would matter. A world where people would think before they spoke, considered the feelings of others more and truly treated others the way they would want to be treated. But sometimes the best things that can happen are the little things that can remind you that we all have a place in this world, looking up into the sky seeing the stars and thinking about people who are far away and knowing that they see the same sky and hoping that they have the chance to look at the stars too.