Warning: Really Embarrassing Story Alert.

A few years ago, when my husband and I were first dating, I had a plan.  It was the day after our first kiss and it happened to be my birthday.  My plan: I was going to get kissed during the day.  This is the embarrassing part: I had only ever been kissed at night.  I really wanted that to change, hence the plan.

That morning, I didn’t have class (since I always take work and school off on my birthday), so I was going to pick Travis up, take him to this beautiful spot on the roof of the public library and kiss the heck out of him before dropping him off at school.  It was a great idea… in theory.

What actually happened was this:  It was really overcast that day; you couldn’t even tell it was daytime.  I was running late and picked him up 20 minutes before his class.  We didn’t have time to drive to the library, find a parking spot, walk up to the roof, kiss, get back to the car, and drive back to the university to make it to his class.  I didn’t want to wait, or worse, have a rushed kiss before I dropped him off, so we found a quiet park close to the school and plodded through the wet grass (it had rained the night before) to the playground.  When we arrived, we were going to sit on a rock, but it was completely soaked so we had to stand awkwardly.  We look to the left and there he was: DURTY the Triceratops.  He was a giant green plastic dinosaur for kids to jump and play on; he had been graffiti-ed and was currently sporting one normal eye and one completely colored red eye and across his forehead in heavy black lettering was the word: DURTY.

I almost burst into tears.  He was the encapsulation of everything that had gone wrong with my perfect plan and his big fat red eye was going to stare at us through this important moment.  The good news is that once Travis kissed me, none of the unexpected stuff mattered anymore; it didn’t become a “sign” that maybe our new relationship was wrong.  We ended up laughing about it and it has become a great (and now very public) anecdote.

Of course, things like this still happen to me, if only on a much smaller scale.  I imagine these beautiful moments where everything goes according to plan and everything is perfect, then real life happens and now I’m able to shrug it off as a DURTY the Triceratops moment and laugh.

If you do this too, please give yourself a break.  The perfect moments only happen when you least expect them; planned “perfect” moments tend to fall short of expectations.  You can plan things, but be prepared; life has its own plans for you.  DURTY the Triceratops and I can attest to that fact.