"Laughter is the best medicine"

My dear friend Mary Dea wrote a wonderful blog post about laughter...and since I read it the other day I have been thinking about the importance of laughter. I just love this quote Mary Dea shared...

“Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them.”- L.M. Montgomery

With the idea of laughing on my mind, I have noticed that I do not laugh as much as I used to. Not in a terribly bad way. I laugh a lot with my students, but I just spend more time alone these days. And this time last year...my afternoons were spent constantly with friends and laughing throughout the day. Now that I spend more time by myself, even doing things I enjoy such as cooking, reading, and drawing, I just do not laugh like I would when I am with friends.

Since I noticed this, I have been blessed with laughter. On Saturday, I spend the day with a friend of a friend's mom in Frankfurt, who turned out to be the most welcoming and kind-hearted lady, whom I think will be my pseudo-mom while I am in Germany. In addition to her taking me grocery shopping and allowing me to relax in her home, we had great conversations full of laughter.

Yesterday, I spent time with my American neighbor who is hilarious, so once again my afternoon was spent laughing.

Today was far from what I expected, but again, a day full of laughter. 

At school, I had planned to take a few of the dragons geocaching. For those of you who aren't familiar, its basically where you put coordinates into a handheld GPS and it leads you to a little treasure. The reason I got roped into this is because the GPS is in English. So, this was a 7-clue cache...meaning me and five little german kids had to walk 4 kilometers in the woods, entering coordinates and solving riddles, just to find a little plastic toy turkey at the end. The kids absolutely loved it and the language barrier combined with their enthusiasm and my cluelessness made for a hilarious day.

As mentioned, I was cat sitting this weekend. But when I came in to feed the kitty this afternoon, he didn't greet me at the door. By the horrible meows I heard, I immediately knew something was wrong. In short, the cat has this four story tower to climb on. There was a YoYo on the second level, and he somehow got his paw caught in it and was dangling from his play tower. I cut the YoYo and freed the cat, but his paw was seriously injured. While the fact that the poor cat was hurt really is not funny, it was funny as I frantically tried to explain what had happened (by actions, broken german, and basic english...) to my co-worker, Katha. When she finally understood, the paw had already swelled up like a balloon. Katha explained it to some others and called my boss, and we ended up having to rush poor Mikosch to the vet. He got a cast on his paw and a shot, but luckily he is going to be fine. There have already been plenty of jokes made about what a bad cat-sitter I am, so I am thinking that maybe the bright spot in this is that I won't turn into a crazy old cat lady? Regardless, after spending almost two hours at the vet and finding out the cat was going to be alright, we had a few good laughs about the strangeness of the whole situation.

Mikosch waiting at the vet...not a happy cat at this moment!

And tonight, as its turned very cold in Germany, I wanted to make some hot chocolate. Not having a microwave, I decided to improvise. Well, the entire apartment smells like smoke and the hot chocolate had an overbearing burnt taste to it. Once again, all I could do was laugh at myself, because I wasn't even able to make a cup of hot chocolate without a near fire.

Though all these instances are just little parts of everyday life, it was such a cool testament to me that as I had laughter on my mind and became concerned about the lake thereof, God put numerous little funny things in my path.

xoxo