Where have all the Sillies gone?

This is me at about two. It's one of my favorite photos of all time.

It looks like I'm having a whale of of time, doing whatever it is that small girls do to be silly, and really cracking myself up in the process.  (Those are, I'm told, hibiscus buds hung on my ears for 'earrings'.)

By all accounts I was a pretty funny kid.  Always full of things to laugh about, always willing to break out in fits of giggles at the slightest provocation.  Apparently I didn't worry too much about doing things right, like my older brother, and I wasn't particularly defensive about getting bossed around like my younger brother sometimes was.

So here's what I want to know:  when did I lose that?

Been doing a bit of re-reading of my posts, and honestly, they tend to be a bit........serious. I watch myself parenting my kids, sometimes, and wonder where my ability to guffaw out loud went.  I want to know where my willingness to see the silly side of something buggered off to.

Example:  out to dinner with three small ruffians who were hungry, grumpy and wiggly.  (Not in that order.)  Smallest decided to stand up on the table, and in a defensive move intended to deny such atrocious manners, I managed to knock her into my LARGE water glass, which then overturned into MY lap.  With a crotch full of ice water, I was gasping, and she looked up at me with big two year old eyes, points to her Croc, and bursts into tears.  Maaaaaah shooooooooooooeeeeeeeees!!!!!!!!!!!!  she wailed.  There were indeed a few drops dampening the rubber.

And honestly?  It took me until tonight to laugh about it.  It was really really cold! (Did not take the children's grandmother that long to laugh.  My horrible unsympathetic mother was in spasms of giggles throughout the rest of dinner.  She occasionally stopped laughing to ask if I had defrosted.)

I recently talked to my husband about someone we'd met recently.  I told him that this person was really lovely and all, but that I just couldn't put any time into building a friendship there.  You see, I'd detected a tragic absence of any sense of humor.  So my need for humor can't be that far repressed, if I still count it as a deal-breaker for a friendship. 

In fact, I can list a number of suitors through the years that I dated strictly because of their sense of humor.  Turns out, that's not quite enough to build a dream on, as the song goes, but I sure did have a lot of laughs.  The relationship that caused me the very most unhappiness was one where the guy had a -ahem- limited sense of humor, but stunning good looks.

I'm just wondering.  How much of adult life have I spent glowering about injustices, the sheer stupidity of others, the mean letters I keep getting from the MVA when I've done nothing wrong,  the dishes broken by careless dish washers?  There is so little that is truly unhappy.  So little that doesn't have something you can laugh about if you need to.

My favorite quote ever from my grandmother?  It's no laughing matter, but its no matter if you laugh.