Wife Rule #33: Take it Easy on the Protien

As part of my continuing efforts to train up my two young sons in the Ways of Manhood, my two boys and I had a Man's Lunch today, while my gorgeous wife got her hair cut. And by a Man's Lunch, I mean that it involved BBQ sauce, something breaded and deep-fried, something greasy on a bun, and a basket of chili-cheese fries. Trans Fat and Protein. Yum.

Okay, the real truth is, that the only essential criteria involved in our lunch choice was that the restaurant contain an indoor jungle gym (my kids have dubbed these "Slide Stores.") Because we all know lunch time isn't for eating anyway; it's for screaming with delight and running across brightly-colored foam mats and through giant plastic tubes. No shoes or food allowed, of course, since we wouldn't want to add any dirt or grease to the pristine, booger-coated, plastic wonderland.

And horror of horrors, I forgot to get the hand sanitizer out of the car.

But disinfectant is really irrelevant, because once they get inside a Slide Store there isn't going to be any eating going on anyway. I think they each ate about five percent of their $5 lunch today. Luckily, despite being a Man, I was still savvy enough to only order one item for them both to share. But eating aside, they had a really good time today, and no one suffered any life-threatening injuries, so lunch was a success.

During the last few minutes of playing at the Slide Store, I noticed a woman seated at a nearby table who was attempting to take an open-book test. This was quite an ambitious goal, considering that her seat was in the geographical center of the the jungle gym, and the noise level surrounding us could only accurately be compared to about a hundred hyperactive howler monkeys sucking helium.

Seeing this undaunted woman press on took me back to when my wife and I were newly married and still attending college. My wife studied Nursing and had a baby during the last year or so of her program, so we knew all about forcing school and studying into less-than-ideal circumstances. But the real reason I bring all of this up is to relate an incident that happened to my wife as part of her clinical rotations as a nurse.

Our college campus was adjacent to one of our church's missionary training centers (MTC's), where departing young missionaries go to learn how to teach, and about the places, people, and languages they will encounter while serving. As part of their preparations, missionaries who are going to certain countries receive a series of immunizations. This is where the College of Nursing comes in, and why my wife was at the MTC giving a variety of shots that day.

One particular 19-year-old young man couldn't keep his wits about him when he saw the needles, some of them gargantuan size. When my wife gave him his shot, he sort of went woozy and then collapsed (he was apparently deficient in Protein--he needed to come to lunch with my boys and me). Luckily, my wife and another nurse caught him on the way down, so he didn't injure himself. He was only out for a few seconds, but when he came to, and found himself lying on his back and looking up into the beautiful face of my twenty-one-year-old wife, all dressed in white, he thought for a second and then timidly asked, "I'm not--I'm not in heaven, am I? Because you look like an angel."

I can't argue with him. I sometimes find myself looking at her and wondering the same thing. She does bear a certain resemblance.

Maybe it's partly because she takes it easy on the Protein.