The Bet

This is SUCH a James & Kristi thing…

So, over the past 2 weeks we’ve logged a lot of hours in the car, hospital, restaurants, funeral home, etc. It has been nice, despite the circumstances, visiting with my family. (One of the highlights: my Grandma had a box of letters, etc. she’d saved through the years. What a treat to read letters my mom wrote before I was born and when I was a baby…back then they didn’t talk on the phone all of the time like we do, so her letters are filled with the mundane-to her, at the time-details of our family’s day-to-day life. 30+ years later, it’s fascinating to read what was important back then, and to read that basically, our personalities haven’t changed since we were babies.) Anyway, I digress. Back to the bet…

Sunday night we were at the nursing home for several hours for the visitation. As you can imagine, we had a lot of time to sit around and talk. Which apparently can only lead to trouble for James and me. I don’t know how it came up, but we began to argue about when we paid off the CRV. I was POSITIVE it was when we moved to Brenham, he was CERTAIN it was when we bought the truck. If you know the two of us, or you read the title of this entry, you know what’s coming. I started it–”let’s bet,” I said. James didn’t want to at first, but of course I kept at him until he finally agreed. But ah, there’s a certain finesse to James and Kristi betting. Usually the one who insists on the bet has an agenda. In this case, sadly, I did not. So, when James said, “Loser takes night feedings for a WEEK,” I didn’t think twice about it because I knew I’d win. Well…Monday night when we got home from the funeral, I asked James to go look it up.

You know what happens next. He won the bet. With very little gloating, which would NOT have been the case had I won. I have not been a gracious loser, I have to say…I was exhausted after all of the traveling, etc. (and stress, yes, I’m sure) and then to have all of the night feedings, well, not the perfect week. So, here we are 4 nights in. James gets lots of cool points–he took the feedings (BOTH of them!) on Tuesday night so I wouldn’t be so tired for Wednesday’s commute. Then yesterday was such a long day because of Noble’s shots, James brought up the bet again–he wanted to let me out of it and help with the night feedings. He was such a gentleman about it, too, saying that we could forget the bet and he wouldn’t hold it against me later. Well, if you know me, you know that I was REALLY tempted–I’m so exhausted, and so far behind in all 4 of my jobs. But, I didn’t accept his offer. Not because I think he’d gloat about it or bring it up later, but because, in all honesty, I don’t know if I could have made such a generous offer if I’d been the victor here. Would I have held him to it, and made him do all 7 nights in a row? I can’t answer that. And also, if I back out now, the next time we bet it won’t mean as much. (We take our bets very seriously, you know).

Last night wasn’t so bad, not nearly as bad as we expected it to be after his shots. Only 4 nights to go…

-Kristi