September, in a post

I used to do a bit of camping. Then I got pregnant with Lillian and who wants to sleep on the ground when you're pregnant? Not me. So we quit. Then, everyone told us how easy it was to take babies camping. I didn't believe a word of it, so we never went. Then, Lillian became a really good sleeper, when we had her exact bedtime routine and she was sleeping in her own bed. A woman after my own heart, she does not want to share her bed with anyone. (Remember when we took that road trip to Idaho and no one wanted to share a bed with me because I would kick them and push them in the middle of the night? I very vividly remember trying to push mom out of the bed. When was that... 1993?) Every time I've tried to bring her in bed with me (like when she wakes up at 4:30 and is wide awake and not interested in going back in her bed), she refuses to sleep. Never have I been successful with co-sleeping that one. So, I pictured a similar disaster if we took her camping.

The ward campout was a few weeks ago, and in our quest to make friends and meet new people, we decided to go.


You'll notice I'm wearing a sweatshirt. It was amazing, I was cold for the first time in months. Some members of the ward complained and dramatically shivered. I sat around in my tee-shirt and relished the 45 degree chill until I really was too cold to do it anymore.

And my predictions about Lillian not sleeping... completely valid.


We all slept for maybe an hour before she was up and poking me and poking Tyler and playing with the zippers and singing songs to her animals and taking Bunny and going "boing boing boing" on Tyler's head until Tyler threw Bunny to the foot of the tent and waking me up to tell me that daddy threw Bunny and so on until sunrise.

When we got up, Tyler looked at me and said, "Well, I think I got about 3 hours of sleep total."

I'd be OK with trying again, maybe it was the novelty of sleeping outside in a tent that got her. Maybe the novelty of sleeping next to mom and daddy. Maybe if we got a bigger tent so we could make a little area just for her instead of trying to wedge her inbetween us in our two-man. Over hot chocolate in the morning, I tried to be optimistic when discussing these possiblities with Tyler. For him, this was a one time thing. Never again.



And now for something completely different.


The people Tyler works with are silly; they have dress up days all the time. On Talk Like a Pirate Day, they all dressed up like pirates, except Tyler who is not silly enough for that, and they handed out eye patches and gold earrings. Tyler also tells me that every email had to begin with 'ARRRRRG!'

Lillian caught the vision, except we couldn't get her to put the patch on just one eye.





Also, you never know when one of your stuffed animals will have an accident.


Better to be prepared.

My visit home

That's a picture of my brother-in-law with a gun. Don't mess with him. 'What is a picture of Jason (Tyler's brother) doing on a post titled 'My visit home'?' You may ask. Well, I went into iPhoto to find a picture of my family that I'm going to visit and this picture was oddly stuck in the folder labeled 'Calder Family Pictures.' I thought that was funny, so I put it up.

In a few weeks, I'm going to visit my family in Orange County. I'm so so so excited because my wonderful brother Austin and my beautiful sister-in-law Chantel are going to be there (and their awesome kids).

Here's a list of things I want to do while I'm there:
1. Go to the beach
2. Eat at Wahoo's or that restaurant in Anaheim that Anne took me to (with Anne of course).
3. Sew a purse with Allison
4. Hang out with some old friends. Depending on who calls me back, this could be Mallory, Vanessa, or Tanya, or maybe some combination of them.
5. Go on our kid-friendly adventure as per Allison. Did we decide on the discovery museum?
6. Of course spend time with my family.

Anything else Lillian and I should do?

The baby's due in December so we won't be able to go back to California for a while, although we're really lucky that both mom and Tyler's parents are going to come out in December (for the baby. Did you really think they liked us enough to come on our account? Pfft.)

It's going to be great.

My wildest dreams

Last night, I had a dream. Of all the things I could have dreamed about: Hawaii, being an astronaut, eating chocolate cake, not being pregnant anymore without having to go into labor, I dreamt about cleaning. In my wildest dreams, I started with the kitchen, moved onto the living room, and finished up by mopping the floors. Woot.

Practice makes perfect?

I decided that Lillian was going to be the Morton's salt girl for Halloween. All she needed was a bright yellow dress, white tights, yellow shoes, and an umbrella. I'm a pioneer woman, I can sew a dress, right? I've sewed before.


This dress turned out alright, except it's gigantic. The last things I sewed for Lillian, I made when she was a baby, which makes for easy sewing and fitting. She can't go anywhere and doesn't mind staring into space while I work the machine.


This one I had to work on only while she was napping. I'm fairly happy with how it turned out except for a few minor flaws (the pleats don't really line up on the front and I screwed up on one of the sleeves in the back), except I couldn't size it to her. While sewing, I compared it to one of her existing dresses so the sleeves and the hem are the appropriate length. Otherwise, it's a potato sack.


Good thing she's the cutest sack of potatoes I've ever seen.

Pima Air and Space Museum

We ventured out to the Pima Air and Space Museum a few weekends ago. We took this biplane to get there. Lillian flew.


This is a hobby plane that you can order in a kit. After sitting in it and manipulating all the controls, it reminds me of the inside of mom's piano: held together with shoelaces. And, I'm not entirely sure I want to be up at any distance off the ground with nothing between me and certain death besides shoelaces. So, we won't be buying one of these.


Tyler's an aerospace engineer, so I've heard a few things about airplanes. Above is an engine from an SR-71, what Tyler always described as a "super-secret, super-fast spy plane." (Pictured below) I guess there are only a few in existence... six maybe? He was really excited, talking all about how fast they are, telling me they go mach whatever, explaining to me about how the engine works and how it's essentially a big supercharger. It's pretty interesting, but I'm not an aerospace engineer, so I wasn't really impressed...


... until I saw this plaque. I can't really comprehend how fast mach whatever is but 67 minutes, 54 seconds to cross the whole United States is really, really fast. I couldn't believe it. I called Tyler over so he could look at this and be impressed. He got that look on his face that I assume all husbands get when talking to their wives about things like this (and wives get when talking to their husbands when talking about other things, like when I had to explain to Tyler that if the baby looks like she's going to poop in the tub, take her out and sit her on the toilet) and he says, "What do you think I've been talking about? How fast did you think mach whatever is?" (Wikipedia says they go mach 3, so that's probably what Tyler said.) At any rate... wow, mach 3 is fast.

Kartchner Caverns and Tombstone

Over Labor Day Weekend we decided to drive down to Kartcher Caverns and Tombstone. This is a picture of the largest insect I've ever seen. It's called a Horse Lubber Grasshopper and it was easily the size of a small child.


Perhaps to accommodate the size of the grasshoppers, the people at Kartchner Caverns offer extra-wide parking spaces. I was so impressed, I took a picture.

I don't know what it is about the pregnant body, but I always look like I'm slouching. I even made a mental note to stand up straight right before Tyler took this picture. Perhaps he took it during the time after my brain decided to look poised and before my shoulders responded.

Tyler wanted to take this picture to show that not all of Arizona looks like a dustbowl. It was actually quite pretty here. The caverns were just down a hole, and you're not allowed to take any pictures inside, hence why we don't have any. The pictures probably wouldn't have turned out anyway because they keep the lighting really low so as not to dry up the moisture in the caves. They weren't as big as I remember the Mt. Timponogas caves are (but I haven't been in those for probably 12 years, and you know how big things look when you're young.) Not as big, but still impressive.

Tombstone was less impressive than I had hoped. I think I would have liked it a lot more if I didn't have a cranky two year old who was hankering for a nap in her own bed. We also forgot our Frommers, so I couldn't remember what I had planned for us to do. Below is a picture of me in a saloon pretending to be one of the Earp brothers (the one with the big mustache).

By the time we found the O.K. Corral (you'd think there would be more signs pointing to it), Lillian had pretty much had it. The wall right there closes up the alley where the famous shoot out actually happened and you have to pay money to go see a live reinactmet. I was all for it, but Lillian had other ideas about what she wanted to do with her time.

Hey baby

World, meet Laura Allison. Laura, meet the world.