27 Things About a 27 Year Old Babe

Cerise turned 27 today and I am freaking lucky to have her. She's an incredible person to spend life with and she's a babe. Here are a few things that make Cerise unique:


1. Cerise likes to make everything a surprise. Whenever Cerise goes to the store, she gets me a surprise.

"Honey, I got you a surprise at Albertson's today... a two-pack of Deodorant!"

"Honey, I got you a surprise at the asian market today... bread!!"

In her defense, she gets this really fluffy Japanese white bread and it's insane.


2.  Cerise could eat only bread/rolls for the rest of her life and be extremely happy. This also goes for Panda Express.


3.  Think of a 7 year old who really, really loves cotton candy. Cerise loves cotton candy a lot more than that 7 year old.

Every time we go to an event, Cerise asks, "Will they have cotton candy there?"

Disclaimer: We got free tickets to a clipper game. We are Laker fans.

4.  If it's over 81 degrees, Cerise gets frustrated with everything.


5.  Cerise's parents are both converts to the Mormon church. Her mom got baptized at 15 in Japan when her grandma talked her Shinto Buddhist parents into letting her get baptized seeing as how Christianity would be a "fad". Cerise's father met a Mormon in the US military and threw away his cigarettes and poured out all of his alcohol after the first time he went to a Mormon church. They met in a singles ward when her dad was stationed in Japan. Now they have 8 kids and advertise the Book of Mormon in Comic Sans font with self-made car magnets in the depths of the anti-Mormon Southern Bible Belt.

My father-in-law is a bad mother shut your mouth.

6.  Cerise has amazing endurance for things like long distance running or home workout DVDs (i.e
 Insanity).


7.  Cerise has absolutely no endurance for giving back massages. This is an example of what happens 90% of the time in our house:

Cerise:  "Hey honey, my back is a little tense. I don't know what it's from."

Lynn: "Want me to give you a back massage?"

Cerise:  "That might help. Thanks babe."

(25 minute back massage)

Cerise:  "Oh man, that helped a ton. My lower back feels better and it doesn't hurt when I move my neck now. Thanks so much, honey. Can I give you a back massage?"

Lynn: "Sure. That'd be rad. Thanks babe."

(2 minute back massage)

Lynn: "Honey, are you serious? That was like oooone minute." (laughing really hard)

Cerise: "Are you kidding me? That was at least ten minutes." (Cerise annoyed by me laughing)

Lynn:  "Okay, 2 minutes. You started at 9:18 and it's 9:20."

Cerise:  "I'm exhausted! Your back is so hard to massage!"

8.  When Cerise is tired of giving back massages, she goes really hard for the final 5 seconds and then slaps my back as a not so subtle notification that there will be no more back massage.


9.  When we first got married, I noticed that Cerise wanted to be unified so much to the point that every time I got a new towel that Cerise would change out her towel to match my towel. If I changed to red, green, or tan, she would immediately follow suit. We never talked about this until many months later when I told her, "Honey, it's so cool that you want to be a unified couple so badly that you always match your towel color with mine." Cerise laughed out loud and told me she wanted to make sure our towels matched just in case we had guests use our bathroom.

10.  Cerise loves flan. She usually makes flan in four separate cups and gives me two of the four. I eat one and save one in the fridge. Cerise eats both of hers and saves mine for when I go to work.

"Honey, did you eat my second flan that I was saving?"

"Are you serious? I made the flan. You're lucky you got one of them."


11.  If I'm driving and and ask for a piece of gum, she will unwrap the gum and give me the actual piece of gum so it is as convenient as possible for me. This also goes for taking the cap off of water bottles, unwrapping candy bars, opening the top flap of hot tamales box, etc.


12.  If I vent, it's complaining. When Cerise vents, it's venting.


13.  Cerise thinks she breaks our vertical blinds more than she actually does. Calvin and I break them sometimes when we play teeball in the house when Cerise is gone. I try to hang them up the best I can (not to be sneaky, but just to try to put them back up like a normal human). When she opens or closes the blinds later on sometimes they fall down and Cerise will say something like, "Oh man, I ALWAYS break these!"

14.  Despite a decent number of attempts, Cerise has never won a stuffed animal from one of those crane machines.


15.  Cerise has her own kryptonite. When she is mad at me and wants to stay mad at me, I stop talking and I play Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys after waiting a few minutes. She knows what I'm doing, but she can't resist getting over whatever she is mad about and singing the song (she has the whole thing memorized).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjsXo9l6I8


16.  Cerise loves studying the math portion of GMAT prep books for fun despite not being full-Asian. She and her little brother would study the math portion of her GMAT book all the time when he was living with us last summer. Neither of them were preparing to take the GMAT. Can't make this stuff up.

Don't worry. I'm fully aware how awkward looking white people are when they wear Asian stuff. We stayed at a sweet traditional Ryokan in Hakone, Japan so this was one of my few exceptions to my rule of not wearing Asian stuff.

17.  Cerise feels the responsibility to pull long hairs off of the back of women's clothing for them. I cringe every time and try to convince her not to do it. "No, women appreciate it when other women help them with stuff like this." She thinks she is a lot stealthier than she actually is. One time she pulled a lady's hair and it was a lady's very long ARM HAIR still attached to her arm.


18.  Cerise saw her first shooting star in July 2014 after countless flashing airplane false alarms.


19.  Cerise is the best at taking Vanilla ice cream and looking through the pantry and using whatever she can find as toppings to make it look like an amazing sundae. Some of her go-to toppings are pretzels, chocolate chips, peanut butter, cereal (usually corn flakes or rice crispies), etc.


20.  Two of Cerise's sisters asked her to make their wedding cakes. She did research to figure out how to make fondent and experimented for days on how to make a wedding cake before the first wedding. The second wedding cake request from another younger sister came 4 years after the first one so she basically started from scratch and had to learn how to make a wedding cake again. Her sister requested a "Seashell themed cake with blue and turquoise highlights." Cerise said, "If I'm making your cake, there will be no turquoise highlights." It's challenging enough making a classy seashell themed wedding cake let alone making it in a Residence Inn in Portland, Oregon.

21.  Cerise loves to play Tennis. Cerise especially loves to play Tennis... when I hit it right to her every single time. If I hit it where she isn't, I hear things like, "Honey, you are not being very nice right now!"


22.  There's a 99% chance that Cerise doesn't care what you think about her.


23.  Cerise has this itch to paint our house or completely redecorate a room once a year. She has to paint our walls at every apartment we move to no matter how much the apartments charge us when we move. She is beginning to channel this by redecorating/painting a room each time we visit her parents.

24.  When I'm driving, Cerise is really nice to bad drivers.

This is a pretty standard situation: Some guy drives along the shoulder for a quarter mile during stop and go traffic. He tries to get back in and I block him so he can't go in front of me.

Cerise: "LYNN MARKHAM. You let him in. YOU LET HIM IN NOW."
Me: "But honey, that guy's been passing everyone on the shoulder. I'm not letting him in."
Cerise: "You're being ridiculous."


25.  Cerise eats canned oysters.. right out of the can.

Cerise eats this.

26.  I travel out of the country quite a bit for work and Cerise has never complained once about being home alone with the kids.


27.  Cerise is Christlike in very many ways, but a few of her many strengths are:

- Standing up for people who are not present when being talked about
- Being non-judgmental
- Demonstrating fierce loyalty
- Forgiving and forgetting quickly and regularly
- Having unconditional love for me and our kids