Here's an Idea

While organizing our home office recently, I came across an old idea notebook. 

This notebook contains a lot of home decorating ideas, suggestions for weekend getaways, and many pages with information about career resources and recruiters. (I must have been anticipating getting fired because I was spending my time at work creating an idea notebook.)

But among all of that was also a list entitled “100 things I want to do before I die.” Based on some of the other things I had written in the notebook, I’m estimating that I authored this about 10 years ago. (And even though it was titled “100 things,” I actually only got to number 31 before I either ran out of ideas or something shiny caught my attention. Perhaps “see tasks through to the end” would have been a wise addition as number 32.)

I obviously added #2 “get married” and #27 “run a marathon” after the fact on both counts, as I had done both of those things prior to creating this list. What can I say? I get a lot of satisfaction from crossing things off.

Number 17 on the list? “Have a work of art on display at an art gallery.” This item is both hilarious and timely. Hilarious because I am no artist and the thought of me creating something at all, much less something worthy of being on display in a gallery was (I thought) a real long shot. However, it was also timely because just this week, I found out that the I created with my partner, Hillary, is going to be on display at Artisphere in Arlington alongside the Washington Post Peeps diorama contest finalists. (Shameless plug: Our diorama is on display through the month of May. Go see it!)

Peeps dioramas shouldn’t count as art, you say? My list. My relaxed rules. It gets a check mark.

Some of the things I actually managed to achieve honestly in the past 10 years, such as #23 “learn to juggle,” and #11 “play the cello again.” Some, such as #31 “travel to all seven continents” will take a while longer to realize. Others I’m waiting to do until I’m older (or just drunk) so they will be considered charmingly eccentric such as #8 “get my nose pierced” and #3 “sky dive.”  

One I found especially interesting is that I listed “have a baby” as #9 on the list. As someone who was admittedly ambivalent about having a child, I found it interesting that I would include this at all, much less so high on the list.

Though it all made sense when I celebrated my sixth Mother’s Day on Sunday. That morning, I went into my daughter’s bedroom to wake her up and my gorgeous little sleepy head opened her eyes, gave me a huge smile and said, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy!”

That’s when I realized it should have been #1.