Ghostly Pale?

I know my mother-in-law reads this. Perhaps she will remember a year and a half ago when she and my father in law came over to our house in Portland to watch the kids while Ian and I attended a Women of Vision auction. I was excited. It was my first “auction” as an adult…and I had a new fancy dress to wear.

When I went out into the living room in my new dress, which was black and white and quite fetching as I recall, my father in law took one look at me, and said, “Wow, you are ghostly pale”. Ouch. Even worse is that he was right. I think I had on black nylons, which Erin would probably say was a mistake and not the current style and only further emphasized my whiteness. It’s true, I know. Ian agreed later in the car that I did look really pale. He shouldn’t have agreed.

Anyhow, back to the present. I am being reminded ALOT of how pale I am. I think that if I were standing next to some of you right now, I might actually look tan, but next to most everyone here, I don’t stand a chance. So, the degree of my tanness is not the actual story.

The actual story is the fact that I have never caused someone to scream by how pale I am. Until last Friday. You’ve all read that the whiteness of our skin fascinates them here….the petting and stroking, and arm holding in general. That I don’t mind so much. It kind of makes me feel all celebrity and stuff. So does driving in my car having people yell after me like I’m Jennifer Aniston, or Jennifer Garner (yeh, she’s a better celebrity). This last Friday, not only did one child scream when I approached it, but then more and more babies did in a row. I moved further and further outside of the circle, leaving increasingly loud baby wails behind me. It was the strangest experience. I finally had to hide behind a tall Kenyan woman so the babies would stop screaming. I AM NOT KIDDING. When I peeked out, the babies would wail. The Kenyan women thought it was hilarious. I felt a little like a circus sideshow, but hey, I’m game for a laugh.

Later, our counterpart here at the program, Lena, was holding one of the children, in an attempt to console the child and convince her that I (and Ian too by the way) was not a ghost. The child actually used that word. I think I did I pretty good job of convincing her that we were similiar. We compared tongues, and skin, and nails, and toes. We tried to compare hair, but that didn’t go very far in the department of “sameness”. She still wouldn’t touch me in the end though. Maybe this week.

Anyhow, here is a picture of what I looked like when I was scaring all of the babies with my paleness:
IMG_0835
Yeh, so at first we were looking at this picture to see how white I look. But then Ian, being the awesome husband that he is, noted that my arm was looking pretty buff. I said, “Yeah, it must be all the dishwashing and stuff I’m lifting.” He negated the previous awesome comment by saying, “Or all that flab you’re loosing off your arm.” I think he meant that in a good way.

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