My birthday is in December. Anyone with a December birthday knows just how magical – and how horrible – that can be.

We kind of talked about getting a dog… one day. With three kids and one about to be potty trained, I didn’t need another kid who needed potty training. But that one day came anyway and it came just a few days ago, and now we have a dog.

“Don’t postpone joy.” When I first read it, I couldn’t read it. It was a bumper sticker in scripty font that made me squint really hard to see what it said. It didn’t help that it was on a bright yellow car and the sticker blended in just enough to make it difficult to read in the morning light.

I realized I made a terrible, terrible mistake. Suddenly, and without warning, my eyes were watering, my nose was running, my mouth was tingling, and my chest felt as though I was going to split wide open into a thousand pieces. And it was time to go on air. If only I could take back the previous thirty seconds where I popped a hot and spicy snack mix into my mouth – multiple times.

I like being skinny, but I like eating candy.

Fried okra might be my love language. Not fried okra like you find at a southern cooking restaurant. No, fried “okry,” as my grandmama used to say. That pan-fried, lightly breaded, crispy kind of okra.

Me, on the other hand, that’s a different story. Soccer makes me retreat, retreat, retreat. The kid attacks on the field whereas he normally retreats on the sidelines. I’m the opposite. I am normally a loud, vivacious and opinionated kind of person. But not so much in situations like these.

I'm working on scientific proof of what I call Pavmom's Theory of Conditioning. Maybe you can remember learning something about this scientific theory in school… In the real theory, Pavlov's theory, a bell ringing would cause dogs to salivate in preparation for food. In my theory, kids do the same thing, but with mommy noises.