Ossify

You know how you don't think of someone for ages and ages and then you do and they show up shortly after?

Or how you don't ever hear a word before and then you hear it more than once in the space of a week?

Well, that happened to me this week. The word was ossify*.  I did not know what it meant. I had never read the word or if I had, I had glossed right over it.

However, the second time hearing it prompted me to look it up. It means *to harden like bone.

These parenting, multitasking days keep me rubbery I tell myself.  I keep thinking this about myself until I encounter a missing shoe, or a pokey child or an unexpected road block and then I ossify like the dickens.

My son pointed out the bird's nests he made on the playground.

Maybe we can catch some birds and bring them home, but we'll need to put the cats in a cage or maybe the birds.

We pick up a glop of grass and sqish it together so that the birds might decide to lay their eggs in one.

I reckon I have ossified a lot more than I am willing to admit.  Those nests could not have sprung from my imagination. Those eggs might get laid. Those birds might just get captured. The ossification blocks me from knowing for sure.  It is sometimes helpful to learn the opposite meaning of a word to understand its true meaning.