Ward campout

In August, we geared up for our second ever family ward campout.  If you don't remember, our first attempt at the ward campout was an unmitigated disaster which made it on to my top-10-worst-night's-sleep list.

This time, we pulled out the big guns- we borrowed our neighbor's 8-man tent and brought the port-a-crib.  I think it paid off.  My kids slept all night.  The ward children?  Not so much.

Have I told you about how our ward has over 100 kids in it?  At any given second, at least one of those kids was crying.  All. Night. Long.

I would hear someone crying, wake up thinking it was Ethan, remember that he was sleeping 2 inches from my head and that he would be much louder if indeed he was crying, and then try to fall back asleep.

Repeat 500 times.

Also my kids woke up at 5, hence the only pictures I have are of the sunrise.  We were the only ones awake and out of our tent.

It does give me hope that if we went with just our family, or maybe one other family, we could manage a pretty decent night.  Maybe.

Mt. Lemmon is usually about 10-15 degrees cooler than Tucson proper, which is really nice on normal mid-year days when it's 100 degrees in the city.  However, we went when there was a heat wave and it was 112 in the city, thus 100 on the mountain.  We had planned to hang around and do some hiking, but hiking with our kids is bad enough, there was no way we were going to attempt it with the triple digit heat.

What kind of rash spreads from the groin?

I worked 3 in a row one week in September.  When that happens, I don't see the kids at all for 72 hours.  When I came home on day 2, Tyler told me that Ethan had a little rash in his groin folds.  He described it as mottled and flat.  I guessed it was probably heat or diaper rash (it's still hot here in September, remember?), and to just tell Holley to try to keep him really dry.  By the end of day 3, Tyler called me and told me the rash had spread.  Spread where?  Um, his whole body.

I couldn't get a really good picture of it because he was all squirmy, but the first picture is his back, and this is his belly.  It was all over his trunk and arms and legs, up onto his occiput and ears but not his face, hands, or feet.  It wasn't in his mouth/lips or eyes.  It was splotchy and slightly raised, but it didn't seem to bother him at all; he didn't cry if you touched it and wasn't really extra crabby, just normal crabby.  He didn't seem to be scratching and he didn't have a fever.

I knew it wasn't measles, rubella, impetigo, scarlet fever, or chicken pox.  It probably wasn't dermatitis because we didn't change anything soap-wise.  He hadn't been stung by a bee or eaten anything out of the ordinary, plus he wasn't having any itching or swelling, so I didn't think it was an allergy.

I decided to take him to the doctor to see what they thought.  Because we go to the pediatrics center at the UofAMC, we have to be seen by a resident before we get to see the attending.  I was lucky enough to get a first-year.  (Side note, I'm always amazed at how little the first-year residents know, what they heck do they teach you in medical school?  Also, they are very awkward talking to patients and asking the nurses for things.  Don't they practice that?  Along the same lines, I'm amazed at how "smart" they become by the time they are fourth-years.)  I went through the whole thing about how I didn't think it was A, B, C or X, Y, or Z, but I wanted to come in mostly because it was Friday, and I didn't want it to turn into something crazy over the weekend and have us end up in the ED.

The resident mostly just agreed and said he had no idea what it was.  He brought the attending in, and she was a little smoother in saying that sometimes kids get "little viruses" that manifest like this, but it would be difficult to tell exactly which virus he had.  She predicted that it would spontaneously clear in 48 hours.

And it did.  It went as fast as it came.

Crazy, huh?

De-Lurk Day! Hello? Guys?

I have had this feeling for about a year now.  A feeling that I am no longer funny or interesting.  This may be a by-product or the cause of my lack of regular blogging.  I think it's sort of a self-perpetuating cycle.  Sure, my kids are cute, but there are lots of Mormon Mommy bloggers who have cuter kids, fancier cameras and hours to spend in post-production and coming up with witty captions.  And their kids all have big hair bows.  I can't compete with that.

Anyway, I get the feeling that many of the people who used to read my blog have abandoned ship... hopefully to be replaced with new readers who just don't like commenting.  Right, guys?

Hello?

So, it's time for a new De-Lurk Day!

If you read and never comment, today is day to de-lurk yourself.  Even if you're fairly sure that I know that you're a reader, comment anyway, it makes me feel good about myself.

Sonora Desert Museum

Tyler's parents came to visit for a week some time in September, I think.  During which time, we finally got a proper visit to the Sonora Desert Museum.  We have tried to go on multiple occasions but were foiled every time.

The Desert Museum isn't really a museum, it's like 30% museum, 70% zoo, but with only animals from the Sonoran Desert in it.

Tucson has a lot of bats.  I love bats.

I think it has a lot of fossils too.  Here's the little area where you can discover a dinosaur.

This picture is sideways because I was holding the camera at a funny angle.  Isn't she precious?

Somehow this was the only animal picture I managed to take.  It's a mountain lion.  I think I had my camera out because I was hoping that the mountain lion would pounce on the squirrel that wandered into the pen.  He didn't.  He just watched and watched.

Also at the Desert Museum, you can learn all about the 5,000 different snakes and insects that live here, like the kissing beetle that likes to eat the soft, thin skin on your face and mouth while you sleep.  Welcome to Arizona.

When we first moved here, I was pretty sure that the environment was doing everything in it's power to kill me.  From scorpions to kissing beetles and jumping cholla, I knew I would be dead in 5 minutes if I ever got lost out there.  Now that I've learned a few of her secrets, I think I would last at least 45.

Thanks for visiting Mark and Darlene.  We'll see you at Thanksgiving.

Biblical Birth Order

One of my patients at work started talking to me about birth order and the Bible.  I'm not sure why... as far as I can remember, she told me that she was from California, and I asked what part, and she said that she was from Ojai, which is sort of near Santa Barbara, which is where I went to school for 2 years.  She said her daughter still lived there and that she home schooled her kids.  I said I could never home school, not because I don't want to, but because I'm fairly sure that Lillian and I would just fight and that she benefits from the peer pressure of all the other kids.  So she started in on birth order and personality traits according to the Bible.

Apparently, the oldest child is supposed to be very controlling and bossy.  I don't want to point any fingers, but my oldest sister's job title is Controller.  Just saying.  It's not that Lillian is bossy, she just refuses to be bossed.  She is the boss of herself, and that is final.

The second child is supposed to be very eager to please and sweet.  This fits Nora perfectly.  She is naughty sometimes, but mostly I just want to squeeze her until her head pops off because she is so cute and sweet.

For these first two, she kept coming back to the example of Jacob and Esau.  Which, I'm confused about... was Esau controlling?  Was Jacob sweet?  At face value, I would say that Esau was greedy and that Jacob was tricky.  But, she was so sure of herself, she might as well have said, "The second child is always sweet, like Jacob.  QED."

Moving on.  The third child is supposed to be "happy-go-lucky."  Anyone who has met Ethan knows that this description is the exact opposite of him.  He is not happy or go-lucky.  He mostly cries a lot.  I keep reminding myself that he probably won't cry forever, but some days...  Our conversation got cut short by my Ascom phone beeping, so I didn't get the chance to hear the Biblical evidence for that one.  Any ideas?

Ostrich Farm, Part 2

As promised, the monster truck.  OK, I'm a few days late... see what happened was I was planning on writing Sunday's, Monday's and Tuesday's posts on Sunday, because I worked Monday and Tuesday.  But, actually I worked Sunday and Monday, and so I didn't get a chance.  I was about to promise to post extra, but we'll see.

 There were goats.  Oh my, were there goats.  These were the kind with creepy-looking rectangular irises.  But the kids wanted to stay and feed them all day long, which I think would have been fine by the goats.

We need to get one of these for the backyard.

All right, enough with the goats already.  They also had lorikeets.   Admit it, you didn't see that one coming.

They gave you little cups of something they called nectar to feed them.  The lorikeets are not shy or very nice, and they get very mad if you try to pet them.

If you come visit us, we'll totally take you.

Ostrich Farm!

Last month, Tyler decided we needed to go to the ostrich farm.  It's about 45 minutes away from our house right next to Picacho Peak.  I've driven past it maybe 20 times thinking it would be fun, but I never felt like driving that far.  Then, a family in our ward went and posted pictures on Facebook, and just like that, Tyler decided it was high time we went out there.

 They have many different kinds of animals at the Rooster Cogburn ostrich farm, and you can feed all of them.  You start out with these nice deer.

By the way, Ethan has no fear.  He climbs up the ladder on the big kid slides, the loopy-twisty kind that Lillian isn't even all that keen on, and goes down face first making all the other moms at the park nervous.

  Then you have mini donkeys.  This isn't the first encounter I've had with mini donkeys.  Somehow, I'm really fuzzy on the details, my Chinese friend Patrick's parents, who now live in Hong Kong, lived for a short time in the unspecified past in San Luis Obispo, where I went to school and met Patrick.  During their time there, they somehow befriended a couple who own a mini donkey farm out in the sticks by Templeton, not really all that close to SLO.  They became good enough friends that this couple hosted a BBQ in their honor every time they visited the states.

Being friends with Patrick, I had the privilege of being invited to a few of these occasions, which always left me puzzled and not able to get a straight answer of how this relationship was formed.

But the mini donkeys were always great.  These ones were greedy and nipped at the kids fingers.

Again, Ethan didn't care.

 And then come the ostriches.

 I was not brave enough to feed the ostriches out of my hand.  There were signs all around warning that they bite.  For chickens like me, they had little tubes that went through the fence.

 For those brave enough, the ostriches can get over that fence, no problem.

They also have monster truck tours of the desert.  I'm only posting half our pictures today as a) I have a lot and b) I'm afraid I'm going to run out of things to write about before NaPoBloMo is over.  The point is that I didn't get a picture of the outside of the monster truck until right before we left, so you'll see it tomorrow.

The tour was fun and informative.  I now know more about ostriches than I ever wanted plus, I learned that barrel cactuses tilt SSE.

Yes, this picture is in the running for the worst shot of my family.  But you get to go ostrich fishing on the monster truck tour, which was fun.

Basically, they stick quartered grapefruit on a nail on a rope on a pole, and you tease the ostriches with it.

Then they get it and swallow it whole.  You can watch the lump move all the way down their throat.  Check out that ostrich's neck on the right there.  The kids thought it was great, until Nora dropped her pole.  That was devastating.

48 Roses Dance Party

Untitled from Amanda Ball on Vimeo.

These 29 seconds reveal many things about my life:

1. Ethan loves dancing.  If he hears music anywhere, he'll get up and bob up and down.
2. Tyler is bizarrely in love with this song 48 Roses by a band called Mariachi el Bronx.  I heard a news story on NPR about them, and I'm probably botching the details, but they were/are a punk band called The Bronx (I think).  Somehow they had to appear at an "unplugged" event and they thought it was lame, so they dressed up like a mariachi band and did their music mariachi style.  They liked it so much, that they got way into it and created an alter-ego band.  Now that I've listened to the song 3 or 50 times, I like it too.
3. Notice how he stops dancing mid-way and starts crying.  He makes that noise all. day. long.
4. Also notice how he comes over to maul me.  He must be touching me at all times.  Sometimes, I can distract him and sneak away for a few minutes, but, if I walk back into his line of sight, it's all over.  I'm not sure why he's so crabby.  I'm hoping that his new-found walking skills will increase his autonomy and decrease his need to have his face plastered to mine.

Update Time

 I'm working my way back with the pictures.  I'm not sure why we took these ones, but they are pretty cute, so I'll put them in with a general update.

Amanda:  I'm working full time, which means three 12-hour shifts per week.  I leave the house no later than 6:18 and I come home sometime around 8:15-8:30.  At first, I had a really hard time making my brain work for such a long stretch.  Once, as I was reporting off to the oncoming nurse, I was telling her about the last pain medication I gave.  "I gave it at 18:30 and it's every 4 hours so he can have it again at....   ....   .... uh... can you do the math for me on that one?"

Its getting better and my mind isn't so sloshy by the end of the day, but that doesn't mean that I know what I'm doing or am confident at my job at all.  I'm still afraid of my boss; I'm afraid that she's going to find out that I'm totally just winging it and probably screwing it all up.

The floor I work on is a surgical specialty floor- women's health (which is a lot of gynecologic oncology (cervical cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, etc.), urology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transurethral_resection_of_the_prostate">TURPs, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, urosepsis, etc.), and ear-nose-and-throat (throat cancer, tongue cancer, esophageal cancer). "Wow," you're saying, "that's a lot of cancer patients."  I know, right?  Who knew that's what "surgical specialty" actually meant.

We do get a lot of "medicine overflow" which means the whatever patients who come in through the ED.  I've had several http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIWA">CIWA patients, a guy who had a chronic wound in his scrotum that I swear you could have put a golf ball up inside of it, there was a lady who didn't know there was a sawed-off shotgun in the back seat of her car and it went off and shot her in the buttocks, and the lady who was pregnant and diabetic and decided to fast for Ramadan which put her into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DKA">DKA.

After working there for 5 months, all I can say is that it's my new mission in life never to get cervical cancer and as soon as my girls are old enough, they are totally getting the HPV vaccine.

Tyler:  Tyler still has a job although they've changed his responsibilities around.  Apparently, he gets to use power tools now, or maybe he's just by the power tools, so he's spent the last several days watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-hz1GpFpXA">safety videos.

Ethan: Ethan has been able to walk for several weeks now, but had chosen to continue crawling.  In case you're keeping track, he turned one in July.  Then, on Tuesday, he decided it was the day to make the switch.  He's about 50/50 now which is a big improvement from the 99/1 that he was on Monday.  He only has 4 teeth and is still super crabby.  The doctor asked me at his last check-up how many words he said.  "Uh.... zero?"  He just grunts.  He makes a distinct grunting noise whenever he sees a dog, so I'm going to go ahead and count that.  A mother at the park said that her pediatrician counts signs, in which case we can add bananas and grapes.

Nora: I'm just going to go ahead and say that Nora is the cutest little kid I've ever seen.  She's generally happy and bounces when she walks.  Her little giggle and her chunky baby legs just make me want to eat her.  She sings little songs to herself and like cuddling.  Her current favorite movie is Jumble Book.

Lillian:  Lillian is really learning a lot in kindergarten.  She's one of those kids who will perform for other adults, but will do nothing for me, so it's sort of amazing what her teacher can get her to learn- which is pretty much what I've been trying to teach her for 2 years to no avail.  Her report card showed pretty good marks in everything except "Uses Time Wisely," in which category she got the lowest grade possible.  Yeah, that sounds like her.  She lives life at her own pace and refuses to be rushed.

She is getting to be pretty funny, though.  The other day, I was planting a new flowering vine in our backyard.  It is going to have little purple iris-looking flowers.  "This plant is silly mom.  Why did you want one with purple flowers?" (Also, she questions everything.  "Why did you want this bread?" "Why did you do your hair like that? "Why did you say it was time to go to bed?")

"Because I thought the purple flowers would look pretty."

"Yeah... pretty silly."

The only other question you have is, "what do you do with your kids when you're at work?"  I know this because everyone asks me this question.  A lady I know from church who has kids approximately my kids' ages takes Nora and Ethan all day.  Then a different neighbor picks Lillian up with her school-aged children and hangs on to her until Tyler gets home.  It's kind of a lot of juggling, but we make it work.

Halloween with the Flynn-Fletcher Family

There's 104 days of summer vacation

and school comes along just to end it.

So the annual problem for our generation is finding a good way to spend it.

Our costumes are only funny if you have a child 4 years old or above.  Because if you do, you've probably watched your fair share of Phineas and Ferb.  I'm not going to lie, I love that show.  I think it's hilarious and allllmost as funny as The Simpsons.Certainly it's my favorite of the kid's shows and whenever the kids ask to watch TV, I try to talk it up, or force it on them. "Sorry, Strawberry Shortcake is broken, only Phineas and Ferb works."

Lillian actually made the costume assignments some time in August.  She is Ferb because she's taller, Nora is Phineas, Ethan is Perry the Platapus (we were trying to track down a fedora for him so that he could be Agent P, but it was a FAIL), I am Candace, and Tyler is Jeremy.  The picture doesn't really show my hair, but I spent more time than I'm willing to admit trying to get it to come up in a point.

After the ward trunk-or-treat, where we took the above pictures, we went to an adult Halloween party without the kids.  Because we had lost our accessories, no one knew what we were and quite a few people assumed we weren't even wearing costumes.  I'd like to think that Tyler wouldn't wear white tube socks with shorts like that or that I wouldn't wear a pillowcase turned into a skirt, but you never know.

I had to work on actual Halloween, so I didn't get to go out with the kids, but from the fact that they can't stop talking about how amazing it is that you can knock on someone's door and they will give you candy, I think they had fun.

NaBloPoMo 2.0

I feel like this sometimes.

I wrote a post about jury duty, but it vanished as soon as I hit "Publish."  I'll give you the gist in 4 points.

1. I successfully put off jury duty for 6 months.

2. I finally did have to go.

3. I did not get selected.

4. It was very boring.

I wrote this post because I want to (attempt to) do NaBloPoMo this year.  I make no guarantees that I'll succeed, or that I won't cheat and write multiple posts on one day and then have them appear on consecutive days.  But, seriously, I have been depriving the internet of about 6 month's worth of pictures and I've got to fix that.

What's one or twenty tattoos, he's still my son.

I keep replaying two work moments over and over in my head.

1. I was caring for an elderly woman who had a wound that needed daily dressing changes.  The dressing changes were a little complex and she told me that her daughter was doing them.  "That's nice," I thought.  Later, I walked in and there was a younger woman in there wearing a tube top and daisy dukes.  Her hair was ratted up about 6 inches and she had multiple facial piercings.  I immediately thought that if this was her daughter, there was no way she was stable (or capable) enough to do these dressing changes and that I was going to have to set up home health to come and do it.  In talking with them, I came to see that she was actually very involved in her mother's care and performed the dressing change with a practiced and caring hand.

2.  I got report that I was going to get a new patient from the OR.  He was a 20 year old male with his jaw wired shut after getting it broken in a fight.  He came up by himself and he was what I imagine your typical gangster from South Tucson would look like- old English tattoos, tattoos of naked women, tattoos of guns, miscellaneous scars, etc.  He was polite to me and said thank you when I showed him how to suction his mouth and how to order smoothies from the cafeteria.  Pretty soon his visitors started showing up.  For the next few hours, there was a steady stream of hermanos, tias, sobrinitos, primos, y dos abuelas. The unit clerk asked me if he was really sick and that's why everyone was coming to see him, and I said no, he'd be going home tomorrow.

Prior to getting this job, I was inclined to think that having strong family ties was a good way to make sure that my kids didn't end up wearing tube tops and getting facial piercings, or getting tattoos of naked women on their back (oh I forgot he also had multiple tattoos of kisses on his face). I guess not.  And if they do, it doesn't mean that I should love them any less.

Clinadmycin

"I'll give you the pills because the elixir is really disgusting." Nora has had a boil on the back of her leg for a while. She didn't mind it so much, so I was just kind of waiting for it to go away. She started complaining that it hurt, and Tyler thought it was getting bigger, so we went in today. After popping it like a huge, disgusting zit, the doctor recommended some antibiotics as, he felt, it was probably a staph infection. Being that I am a healthcare worker, he thought maybe it was MRSA. He recommended clindamycin. He was confident that I could just open the pills and mix them in with some pudding or something. I filled the prescription, brought them home, opened it up and mixed it into some applesauce. "Come here, Nora..." Bite. [unintelligible screaming] First, anger. "Get back over here and eat these two bites!" Then, logic. "honey, if you don't eat this, you might get more sores." Then, bribery. "I'll give you a chocolate chip for every bite you take." Last, example. "Look, I'll take a bite to show you it's not so [unintelligible screaming]" Oh. My. Stars. It was like chewing 5 aspirin at once. Even after I've had dinner, I can still taste it.

Sneak attack

When Tyler and I were first married, I discovered that he and I had different concepts of the passage of time.  It became a problem mostly after I had Lillian.  For example, if I knew that Tyler got out of class at 3, we lived 10 minutes away, I would expect him at about 3:20 or 3:30.  Early in the morning, I programmed my patience to last until 3:30.  Then, he would often call at 3:45 to tell me he would be 15 more minutes and I would freak out at him.  I'm fairly sure he thought I was crazy, and I was, because I had used up all my sanity.  I explained to him several times before it stuck that if he would have called me at 2 and told me he was going to be late, I could have reallocated my resources, and then I wouldn't be crazy when he came home.

Now we have the reverse problem: Two Fridays ago, I ended up having to stay a little late because I messed up something right at the end of the day.  I called when I finally left, around 9:00, to tell Tyler I was on my way.  Oh ho ho, I got a talking to.  I'm supposed to be HOME by 9, blah blah blah.  The kids go to bed at 7 or 7:30, so I'm not sure why he was so upset, but I felt really bad about it the whole ride home.  As I pulled up, I was marshaling my arguments/apologies.  I knew that our friend Elizabeth was driving down from Flagstaff and was possibly there already, which would have called for a change in strategy, so I was mentally preparing for that as well.

I walked in the front door, and there were like 10 bags there.  "How long are you staying, Liz?" I asked as I walked around the corner, my eyes still on the bags.  As I turned my head forward, I saw not Liz, but Myriah, who lives in Chicago.  I was so surprised, I dropped everything I was holding and screamed quietly, because the kids were sleeping.

Elizabeth set it all up and was so sneaky.  We had a great weekend which involved me breaking into the dog park (seen above) and other adventures.

Maybe I'll post more pictures if I have time, which seems unlikely.  Sorry.

Done, maybe.

Yesterday, I turned in my last undergraduate assignment, and you can bet I'm going to be putting BSN after my signature. After I hit the "Done" button for the last time, I started mentally reviewing the year. Here are some things people have said to me over the past year:

1. "How do you do it?!" Really, I feel like I didn't have a choice. Of course I wanted to finish my degree one day, but when Tyler almost lost his job and I was pouring my heart and soul into finding one and no one would hire me, I felt like I had no other option but to go back and finish. Specifically how I did it was to sneak off and do homework every spare minute I had; I did homework pretty much every night after my kids went to bed from 8 'till 10; and every Wednesday, I did homework for 5 hours while my neighbor had my kids, then I took his kids for the next 5 hours. Also, and this one took a while to get used to, I said no a lot. I'm sorry, I can't go up to DI to volunteer, I've got a paper due. I'd love to be able to come to the service project, but I've got homework. Going to the zoo/pool/children's museum/your house/movies/etc sounds like so much fun, but I've got to do research.
2. "My husband would never let me do something like that, how did you talk Tyler into it?" I'm sorry, what? The first time a woman said this to me, my jaw about hit the floor. Then another woman asked, and then a third. This is very bizarre to me. How did I "talk" Tyler into it? I said, "I applied and got accepted, and I start in July." Maybe they don't really mean it like it sounds. Here's an example of how things work at my house: Tyler plays on various city-league sports teams (without my "permission"). Last Spring, he played soccer on Wednesday nights... after he had Scouts. So he would work all day, come home to eat really fast, go to Scouts, then go play soccer. On one of those long days, I called a friend to save my sanity. She asked why I allowed Tyler to do this if it was so hard for me. Uhhh, because he loves it? Because he's happier in the long run when he exercises? Because then when I tell him that I'm going back to school full time, he has no problem with it?
3. "You look like you do it all, I'm jealous." I had a lot of help. First, I have really great kids. I was on the fence about Ethan for a while, what with the lack of sleeping and the general colickyness that hung around him for like 9 months, but he's turning out OK. Lillian and Nora are really good helpers, not terribly destructive, good at entertaining themselves, and very forgiving when I let them loose in the backyard while I write papers. Second, Tyler never complained. When we had grilled cheese sandwiches multiple times in one week, he didn't say anything. When the floors got sticky or the laundry piled up, he would quietly get out the mop. Sometimes, he would get a little mopey when I worked night after night on the computer instead of spending time with him, and when he found out how much this whole affair actually cost (as opposed to my beginning estimates), he got a little miffed. But that was it. I also had many friends who invited my kids over for playdates, like the afore mentioned John, the kid swapper. I probably couldn't have done it without him.
4. "It sounds like a lot of work, was it worth it?" I now have a full-time job at a magnet hospital, something I've wanted for 7 years. I agonize about leaving my kids to go to work and it breaks my heart when I have to peel a crying Nora off my leg as she is screaming, "MOM DON'T GO!" But now the time we do spend together is so much sweeter. I now know I'm made of much stronger stuff than I previously thought, I'm more organized, I love my kids and husband more, we're more financially stable, and better prepared for the future. Yes, it was harder than anything I've ever done, but it was very worth it.
5. "Woo Hoo! Now you're done forever!" Um... I may have decided to become a family nurse practitioner. Check back in 3 years to see if I actually do it.

Lost and not found

Tyler in the Sahuarita Sun

For one of my classes, I have to make a portfolio of my accomplishments. They want me to include any degrees, certifications, and professional qualifications in addition to any awards, professional thank you notes, scholarships, and grants. I kept all of these things in one box- a purple shirt box. It had my high school diploma; all my scholarship awards and dean's list notifications; my high school swimming, thespian, and physics awards; notes from nursing professors; notable papers I've written that I was especially proud of; etc. I've looked for this box on and off for the last 2 years to no avail. I wasn't ready to accept that it was lost.

On Sunday, I made a systematic effort to find this box and I have to conclude, after 2 hours of looking, that it was lost in the move. I was surprisingly sad about this, given my complete lack of sentimentality. I think it's the whole assignment part of it- I have to prove that I have a life besides my kids, and I can no longer do it. As far as durable accomplishments go, having 3 adorable kids is not bad, but, you know.

Two things that DID turn up in the search: 1. My goggles. 2. The above newspaper clipping of Tyler playing softball. As you can see, the throw was late and he didn't make the play, but that doesn't mean he's not good at softball.

Picture, not pitcher

I'm writing my Personal and Professional Philosophy, which goes under the heading of "Assignments That I Think Are Useless." Maybe they are useful for people who aren't Mormon or religious at all. But, I've been thinking about my Personal and Professional Philosophy in one form or another my entire life. Which makes this thing pretty easy to knock out... except when I outsmart myself.

Here's one of the prompts: "I believe that my personal and professional philosophies are congruent (not congruent) because..."

Did you mentally translate that 'not' to 'as opposed to' and then spend 2 minutes trying to figure out the difference between 'congruent' and 'congruent'? After concluding that they were spelled the same, did you spend a few seconds trying to think of homonyms for congruent? Did you look it up in the dictionary to see if there were words around it that were spelled almost the same but with wildly different meanings to make sure that you wrote about the congruence the professor was looking for? Like maybe, she misspelled the homonym and accidentally just wrote the same word twice. Then, did you read the sentence 4 or 5 more times before you figured out that you needed to put the emphasis on the 'not' instead of the 'congruent' for it to make sense?

I believe that my personal and professional philosophies are congruent (not CONGRUENT)...

I believe that my personal and professional philosophies are congruent (NOT congruent)...

No? You got it the first time? Yeah. Me too.

Baby Man

Happy birthday Baby Man.

Now that you're one, am I going to have to stop calling you Baby Man?

Crafty Us

My Mom was a kindergarten teacher for a looooong time. She switched to 5th grade shortly before she retired because, as she said, "I can only tie so many shoes, do up so many flies, and deal with Annica gluing her paper to the desk SO MANY TIMES, before..." I'm pretty sure I know what would have happened if she had to deal with Annica one more time, because I feel that way almost every day around 4:45, so I didn't ask her to elaborate.

Anyway, I've been making out like a bandit with all my Mom's kindergarten bric-a-brac. Like this little ironing board.

She apologized for it not having a cover or an iron, items sacrificed to the kindergarten gods. I wasn't worried, because when our powers combine--

Ta Da! I made the cover in about 4 minutes from a scrap of fabric and some elastic. Tyler worked a little harder on the iron, but not much. I'm guessing it took 30 minutes.

He even put little steam holes on the bottom.