My daughter saw this sign in a store we were in a few weeks back and it made her laugh so hard, she decided she had to have a picture of it (for the record, she takes photos of EVERYTHING…no, I’m not exaggerating…EVERYTHING!)
I got to thinking about this sign and why it is so funny, because frankly, deception really isn’t all that funny, but the reason we laugh at this sign is because every family has things that make them a unique entity…and not everyone in the world would understand those things. We keep those things to ourselves so we don’t scare people.
Recently, we had a young man staying with us while he worked in a neighboring city. We’ve known his family for years, but there is a big HUGE difference between knowing someone and living with someone (ahem…marriage anyone?) Our family is loud. We laugh a lot. We can frankly be down right obnoxious. Every night, as we said goodnight to our house guest, I wondered what he must think of us.
You see, I imagine life in his family as quiet, calm, and filled with a whole lot more tact and reserve than we manage here in our household. But, if I were looking at this objectively, I would have to admit that his household has a uniqueness all its own that I will never know…unless I go live with them. They are perfectly normal…except for that one thing I don’t know about them. 😉
So, it’s not that we set out to deceive when we look like a normal family, it’s actually that we ARE a normal family because we aren’t all that normal behind the scenes! It’s okay that your family doesn’t look exactly like Susie So-and-so’s family at church, and it’s okay for others not to know every nitty-gritty detail of your family life (Facebook status included, thank you very much!). There isn’t any family mold named NORMAL that you can pour yourselves into and come out squeaky clean. Your family is unique – revel in it!
So, next time you see our family in the supermarket and my husband is loudly singing some Elvis song and my daughter is taking photos of food on the shelves and my son is pretending the bananas are Army sniper rifles, just remember…it’s a whole lot crazier at home!
And this, my friends, is perfectly normal.
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Danielle says
Love this post!! I’m glad our “strange” family is…um…”normal”! lol
Michele says
So glad to see someone else is normal! 😉 Love the post, thanks for sharing. I always wonder what people think after spending a few days with us!
Thanks for the link up opportuniy as well!
Meghan Carver says
Well said, Amy! Thanks for confirming our normalcy. Sharing to FB.
Samantha says
According to Dave Ramsey Normal is Broke. I don’t want to be normal. I don’t want to be like everyone else. I want our family to be just as it is. Growing in love and knowledge for God and for each other. Your family sounds wonderfully abnormally unworldly to me.
Natasha@Mother of Seven says
Just had to laugh when I read this. We have that sign hanging in our kitchen. 🙂 I wrote a blog post not too long ago about “normal”. I’ll have to see if I can find it and post a link to it above.
Jessica Shipman says
This sounds like a great product to try! We often want to sit down to watch a movie with the family but have a hard time picking an appropriate one! Thanks for letting us know!
Melinda says
I am so excited about this software! We are very careful about what we watch at our house. Thankfully there is a church close by that has a fantastic library that we use each and every week. There have been some movies that have scenes that are just not quite age appropriate, although tastefully done, all things considered. Anyway, we don’t have many movies that we are not ok with for the reason that they are not censored. The first one I would censor though is Wreck It Ralph. There is a scene in the beginning where Ralph is at a meeting for bad guys. There is a creepy part in it that we always skip. It would be nice to just have it skipped from the beginning.
Stephanie says
This hits home in so many ways. Having judged some of my friends for keeping their kids up too late or stressed myself out for trying keep my kids on a “perfect” schedule…I appreciate this post…
Amy says
((HUGS)) – what I write here on this blog serves as a reminder to myself more often than I care to admit. 😉
kendra zickafoose says
Just the other week as I was singing in the parking lot of the grocery store, my eight year old daughter asked me if we were really going to be ‘that family’. I assured her that we were :).
Reggie says
I’ll be in the next aisle over with a toddler doing vehicle impersonations, a six-year-old working on her opera voice and the nine and three-year-olds on their hands and knees looking for lost treasure under the shelving units. We surpassed normal quite awhile back.