When it's ripe, it's ripe.

  Growing up my mom always used to tell us about a time when she and some of her siblings tried to teach their youngest brother about how to tell if a fruit was ripe by it's color. Apparently he was doing pretty well, so they presented themselves to my grandparents to show off his new skill. "Don, how do you tell if a fruit is ripe?" To which he proudly replied, "When it's ripe, it's ripe!"

Isn't that the truth! I am a planning type of person. I like to know when things are going to happen. If it relates to me I can plan it out and know when I am going to do each step and how I will bring each project to completion. Not so when it comes to other people. I can plan things out for them, but I'll be doggon if they do things the right (read that "my") way at the right (read that "planned") time.

My daughter is the worst offender when it comes to following my plans. I suppose she gets it from her daddy, who really does not give a flip about how I've planned for things to go. Alright, so that might not be true, but he definitely gets a kick out of all my planning and things (probably rightly so) that in most instances it's quite silly to keep trying to plan or adjust plans when things are going to change tomorrow. Rachel probably does not think I'm silly, but if she does, at least I do not know about it. She, however, loves to smash up all my timelines. Sitting up, crawling, walking, sleeping through the night... all the physical milestones are just NOT happening the way I plan for them to. She has even confounded my husband with her stubbornness.

All that being said... when it's ripe, it's ripe. Rachel is slow on all her large physical milestones, but when she learns them, it is usually in the span of a couple hours. Sitting up took a bit more practice, but she learned to crawl (like an expert) in a matter of 5 hours. She had waited 10 months for those 5 hours, but 5 hours none-the-less. Climbing onto the couch took her an hour to learn to do well. Getting down probably the same timespan. Walking took her all of 3.5 hours to go from the first solo steps to walking the entire house, but she waited until she was 15 months to try. Sleeping through the night, eh, it's a work in progress, but she's mostly had that mastered since about 14 months.

Other things, they happen when they happen also. Mike did not go through college right after school, but when he decided to do it, he sped through the classes and ended up with a 3.79 GPA. When I was job hunting I applied for months and had no interviews, then all of a sudden I got callback after callback and had at least 1 interview a day for a week. It's true: when it's ripe, it's ripe. I guess that means when my diet happens it will drop all my lbs right away... right?