There are many famous codes in history: The Code of Hammurabi, Morse code, that Navajo code like in the movie "Windtalkers", The DaVinci Code. Admittedly, that last one is a novel, but the one in Windtalker's was real. Then there are the household codes we use to keep our children and dogs from knowing what we're talking about. We spell things out or use alternate words like r-i-d-e or call it excursion to keep the dogs from going crazy with anticipation, i-c-e c-r-e-a-m or frozen dairy product with children for the same reason. I could have used Spanish words so my children wouldn't understand, but then neither would my husband.
However, having picky eaters forced me to create a visual code for food. Grilled cheese sandwiches became a Saturday lunch staple when the kids were home, but our daughter only liked Velveeta cheese, the boys and I liked cheddar, Reed preferred grilled peanut butter and jelly. The code went like this: the Velveeta sandwiches were cut in half diagonally, cheddar was sliced in half vertically, peanut butter horizontally. That way no one had to touch the sandwiches they didn't want, much less pull them apart to see what kind they were.
That brings me to the celery code. Before they discovered only little kids and uncool adults eat raisins, the preferred method of eating celery at our house was ants on a log style with peanut butter and raisins. But what kind of peanut butter? Reed was, and is, a Jif crunchy gourmand. The kids were fine with non-Jif, as long as it was creamy. I think of peanut butter more like a cooking ingredient than an actual food, so am content with most store brands as long as they are not natural (oily), or low sugar (disgusting). The celery code was all about the ants. Pieces with crunchy peanut butter had three raisins, creamy pieces had two. I have a special serving dish I use for this that keeps the celery at an angle so the ants can't swap logs with other ants.
Since Reed and I are not trying to be too cool to eat raisins, or too cool to do anything for that matter, we still use the celery code to this day. Although it will never be used in school cafeterias where fear of raisins is rampant (kids would rather eat ants), someday my system may become as well known as the "quantum cryptography" code no one has heard of.
Now that both our kids and ability to sleep well have long since left our home, we find it necessary to make a new code. Although my sleep is much improved since my shoulder replacement, it is normal for both of us to wake up multiple times during the night. Besides visiting the bathroom, we often let the dogs out for a mid-night potty break. The problem is, we do not wake up at the same time so there has been no way to know if the dogs need to go outside or have just come in from outside. We needed a code. Not a note that we would require glasses and light to read. And not where we would have to wake up enough to leave the bedroom to find it. The one sure stop on our late night wake up calls is the bathroom, so we needed a symbol we could leave in the bathroom to indicate we let the dogs out. We settled on the baby wipes we keep in the bathroom for makeup removal and . . . other things. If we let the dogs out, we move the baby wipes from the back of the toilet to between our sinks. That way we have wiped out the need to wake a sleeping spouse to ask them.
We will probably need more codes in the future like--you need a toothpick, let someone else talk, turn on your hearing aid, etc. But I am confident that if the years to come hold more confusion, I can get cracking on another Connie code to clear it up.
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