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.

Rooourul

My nephew Jack riding in Challis, ID

Tyler and I have disagreed for a long time on how to pronounce the word rural. This question came to a head just now when I read a post from my sister about visiting her in-laws in Idaho. Challis, Idaho- a rural town.

I wish I could record us saying it so you could get a good picture of what exactly is going on, but I'll do my best to replicate it.

Tyler says either "roo-rul" or "rur-al," depending on how he's feeling at the time. (Another word pronunciation he changes depending on the context- route). As for me, I can't quite figure out what's going on in my mouth. Something like "ruh-(r)ul."

I looked it up in the dictionary, and they said that it should be "roouh-ruhl." I can't even make my mouth say that. I wish I was a better writer so that I could explain the look on Tyler's face as he watched me attempt to say it properly. Go ahead. Try it. You'll see what I mean.

How do you say it? Bridget, I'm looking in your direction.

Affordable Care Act

I'm doing a project on the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. The more I read and learn about it, the more baffled I am at the white-hot hatred that the Act inspires.

I get that there were many back-room deals made in getting it passed, especially after Obama said that he was not a back-room deal kind of guy... so he lied about that, or well, maybe he was a little idealistic in thinking that this sort of thing could be done without cutting deals.

Yeah, that's irritating. And that whole Nebraska thing is annoying. But that's not enough to cause this burning fury that people have.

When I first looked at the reforms, I thought that most of them were really good ideas. But people were so hopping mad about it, I thought maybe that I was missing something. Or, maybe there was loophole or extra measure buried in the 2,000 pages that I didn't know about. Now that I'm doing this project, however, I kind of think that I'm more educated about this than the average person, and I still think the reforms are pretty good.

Is it an ideological thing? Like, it's not the purpose of government to meddle in healthcare? Did they think that the private insurance companies really were doing a spectacular job and the government is going to screw up a good thing?

I get that the United States has the best facilities and healthcare options available, and we got that way by having a free market, but we continue to rank in the 30's and 40's for all healthcare markers. What good are all those state-of-the-art MRI machines if they are not making us healthier? Why is President Obama such a villain for trying to fix a system that is obviously broken? I don't get it.

Things that are impossible to explain

Lillian, like any 4-almost-5-year old asks a lot of questions. Most of them I can answer fairly easily. For example, Tyler just left for 4 days to Houston (as in "Houston, we have a problem"). Well, he'll only be in Houston for 3 days, but he's leaving from work this afternoon, so it might as well be 4. Anyway, Lillian was very concerned about where he'll be sleeping as Houston is too far away to come home every night. Except, she calls it Fuse-ton. "Are there enough hotels in Fuse-ton for Daddy to sleep in?"

"Yes, honey. There are plenty of hotels for Daddy."

See, easy. But, sometimes, she asks things that I know the answer to, but I can't come up with a way to explain it in 4-almost-5-year old speak. Like, "Why can those bugs walk on the water?"

Well, you see, there's something called surface tension... and um... molecules... and they're... polarized...?

Other things she's asked- Why can you blow out candles? Why does the sun go down at night? Why do plants need sunlight? Why do we need to breathe? And, the other day she asked Tyler why you lean when you go around corners in the car.

I can tell she's not satisfied with the answer "because the sun needs to go to bed, just like you," but she doesn't even understand the concept of a map, how the heck is she going to understand the idea of the Earth?

Scrubs, right...

Have I told you how freaked out I am to start my new job? Have I even told you that I got a job?

No? Sorry, I've been busy what with school and getting a job and all.

I've wanted to work at The Hospital for some time. Of course, I applied to all the hospitals, including The Hospital, to no avail. I ran into a girl I kind of knew who worked at The Hospital, and she, knowing of my fruitless job search, offered to put in a good word for me with her manager.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, I start July 18th.

I've had to have various meetings with sundry HR people and Security personnel. At one of these meetings, I was made aware of yet another meeting I would have to attend prior to my start date. "But you don't have to wear business clothes, you can just wear your scrubs."

"Scrubs... yeah. Good."

See, I don't own any scrubs, except nursing school ones. I'm supposed to be a nurse, and I don't even own any scrubs. I think this is highly symbolic of my total ambivalence towards working.

Now, I could have just gone to a uniform store and purchased some, but what's the procrastination factor fun in that?

I went to the Wal-Marts to purchase fabric, where I requested uno y tres cuartos of each.

One set down, two to go.

Tyler, He Like Sandwiches

To celebrate Tyler on this Father's Day, I interviewed Nora to find out more about him. I think her answers might have been a little biased by the fact that he had just made her a sandwich.

Untitled from Amanda Ball on Vimeo.

Baby or kid

Lillian often asks me when Ethan is going to grow up and be a kid.





I think it's happening faster than we expected.

Did you...

"Nora, Did you eat the paint?"

"No Mom. It spilled into my mouth."

"I promise."

Bathtime 3.0

CPR Win

Sometimes I think about the people in the Bible or not that have had dreams as visions, and I think "That's not me." Here's one from last night.

Tyler and I were trying to fit a couch in the back of our 4Runner. We were buying it off Craigslist and picking it up at the park. Somehow, we decided I needed to sit in the back and hold on to the couch so it didn't fall out of the open hatch. We tied the hatch down so it was open about half-way, and my feet stuck out the bottom. It's only a few blocks away, and this is Arizona, right? No one actually cares about seat belts, right?

No sooner did we pull out on to the main street, than a motorcycle cop came up behind us and started flashing his lights. I craned my neck to yell at Tyler to stop the car, but I saw that he was driving from the back seat and couldn't stop the car. (Driving from the back seat is a surprisingly common theme in my dreams. This shows up at least once a month, maybe more.)

More and more police men showed up and I started yelling at Tyler to climb into the front seat and stop the car. He finally did, and he pulled off the main road onto a rural street and stopped. Surprisingly, all the police cars just kept on going.

We decided to ditch the car as we were fugitives now, and walk the rest of the way home. We walked down a street that looked remarkably like See Canyon in San Luis Obispo, and as we passed a barn that looked like this:

I saw a lady in a big truck parked out front yelling for help. I ran up there and saw that her son was sprawled across the back seat in V-fib (not sure how I knew that without a monitor, but I just KNEW). I started CPR, even remembering that they changed it to CBA instead of ABC, and totally saved his life.

His parents were so grateful, they bought me a $23,000 Cadillac, which I gave to the neighbor girl Grace to pay for her college.

The end.

Any hidden messages?

Easter

I'm not touching that.

I'm not touching that.

Seriously, this is as close as I'm getting to that guy.

Hidden Message

See if you can spot the exact moment when Nora was no longer interested in taking pictures.

Oh, I love her

Let me tell you why my friend Candie is awesome. I read a book called Candyfreak by Steven Almond. I liked the book: I thought Almond was a funny writer (most of the time) and I like candy, so win-win, right? The problem: the book is about candy that is regional or hard to find. The whole time I was reading the book, I wanted to eat all the things he was talking about, but few of them are available for purchase in my little corner of Arizona. GooGoos? Valomilks? The book needed to come with a sampler.

The biggest problem with the book came when Almond visited the Lake Champlain Chocolate company, makers of the above-pictured 5-Star Bars. I wanted these. Needed them. I went to the website and thought about ordering some, but they are $3.50 each for what looked like something slightly larger than a fun-size Snickers. I couldn't justify it. Saddened, I mourned for my unattainable chocolate fantasy and mailed the book to my friend Candie, because she understands.

The thing about me and Candie is, we shouldn't be friends. We met in high school French class. I was a frumpy awkward pseudo-intellectual geek who liked to knit and and had ugly glasses and braces until my senior year, and she was a tall, tastefully-dressed graceful member of the dance team who went to the kind of parties that high school kids go to in the movies that I didn't think really existed in real life (where are the parents?). We didn't hang out at school. Not because we were embarrassed (at least I *think* she wasn't embarrassed of me), we just knew that I wouldn't like her friends and vice versa. After school and on the weekends, I joked about moving in with her, we spent so much time together.

I still talk to people that I knew before her, but for sure Candie is my best oldest friend.

Sitting on my porch the morning, as a present for Mother's Day, was a 5-Star Bar sampler from Lake Champlain Chocolates, thus solidifying her 1st place in the "Awesomest Friend" category.

(The hazelnut was incredibly delicious and the granola was spectacular. I'm going to have to exercise some self-restraint or else the rest of them will be gone within the hour.)

Silly Poem

I must be starting to lose it. This morning while I was nursing Ethan at 5:30 as I was drifting in and out of sleep, my thoughts started moving to the rhythm of the rocking chair. This was more or less what my half-asleep brain came up with:

Runny noses,

Snotty faces.

Hints of urine waft through

Certain places.

Sticky fingers,

Gummy smiles.

I feel my heart

Stretch out for miles.

Endless cleaning,

PB&J.

At least one person

Crying all day.

The heart is a house

With many rooms.

Look, my children

One for each of you.

To do

To do before midnight, Sunday:

• Create 4-slide presentation on the feasibility of creating a community "victory garden" on the Navajo reservation in partnership with the Indian Diabetic Initiative
• Finish editing paper on providing pictorial-based documents to illiterate diabetics in Tucson
• Finish making what is essentially a power-point scrapbook of "how I spent my semester in my Public Health Nursing class" (I need approximately 10 more slides)
• Write a critical analysis of a mainstream article about Mormonism
• Find a mainstream article about Mormonism to write about
• Contemplate DEEPLY (I loathe my professor's use of caps, and the word "deeply") the issues surrounding how the Church views and treats its history
• Write 200 words about how such views and treatment make it difficult to attract new members (or something).

Also:

• Take care of my children
• Sweep and mop my floors because they are driving me crazy
• Figure out something to cook for the missionaries tomorrow
• Go to the store and buy ingredients for said dinner
• Make some time on Saturday so Tyler can work in the backyard, because I want this thing to get DONE. I'm SOOOooooOOOOooo sick of the dirt.

Bike Ride Fail

Lillian on Christmas day, riding her new bike

Lillian likes the idea of riding a bike. She likes to find her shoes and put on her helmet. She proudly rolls her bike down the driveway, and that's mostly where the bonhomie ends. If I actually make her get on her bike, she starts crying. If I coax her to pedal, she starts to scream.

If you ask her what the problem is, she'll tell you any number of things: the wind is blowing too hard, and she's afraid it will blow her over; a car might come and run her over; the garbage truck will come and hit her (this is a surprisingly strong phobia); she'll forget how to break so she can't go very fast; and so forth.

I got tired of the dramatics, so I told her she couldn't ride her bike until she was over it. We waited a few months and on Friday, she begged and begged to go for a ride. We got on shoes and helmet, marched the bike to the end of the driveway. She got on and biked about 3 houses down, then started freaking out. I told her that she just needed to bike down to the for sale sign a few more houses away, and then she could turn around. That done, she got back to her original 3-houses-down-freak-out spot. She got off her bike, crying that she couldn't do it anymore. I told her that she could get back on her bike and take it home, push it home, or we could just leave it there and someone might steal it, but I wasn't going to take it home. Oh the tears. The stamping of the feet. The hysterics.

My neighbor peeked out of his house to see if I was torturing her. She was screaming so much, she wet her pants, which caused more screaming. She cut such a pitiful picture, I took her home and put her in her bed, and I did, in fact, push her bike home.

We tried to give her a "brave necklace" (courtesy my lovely sister-in-law Chantel), and that worked wonders for a while, but it doesn't work for bike riding.

I guess we'll be walking to kindergarten.

How's your backyard?

This represents about 4 weekends of work. By Tyler. He's nice to have around.

Toy Purge

Lillian likes to explode her toys; she pulls out the bins and dumps them out in rapid succession. I think this is fairly common, but it drives me absolutely crazy.

On Monday, I told Lillian that I would help her clean up the toy room for 30 minutes, and whatever wasn't picked up, we were going to take to DI. "Oh good, let's take them all," came her reply.

No, really. You will never. see. them. again. "I know mom, let's do it! I'll find a box."

I helped her clean up by walking around and saying things like, "OK, let's find all the cars and put them into the car bin. Oh! I see another one over here!" and when the timer went off, she had only picked up about 2/3 of the toys.

So, I did it. It was kind of an empty threat at the time, but I knew I had to follow through. I got a big box and Lillian was very enthusiastic about putting the toys in. I saved a few prized toys and parts of sets (I rescued a few of Handy Manny's tools and some errant puzzle pieces), but everything else went in the box. I tried to make Lillian feel some sort of loss by pointing out the toys as I put them in, but it didn't work. She didn't care, and as far as I can tell, she hasn't missed them.

I like her not having very many toys as it brings out more of her creativity. In the top picture you can see our well-loved Weeble-Wobble tree house. This has alternatively served as a tree house, cash register, carnival ride, doll house, baby crib, grocery store, and stove.

This picture is what remains of the Wonder Pets mobile that Lillian and the neighbor boy made yesterday. It had a sail made out of a triangle of paper and a pen, but I think Nora destroyed that part. I cut out the sail and gave them the tape, and they constructed it all themselves. They were pretending that the afore mentioned Weeble-Wobbles were the Wonder Pets and came up with all sorts of elaborate rescue scenarios. I tend to think that this sort of creativity is good for their brains, thus making the toy purge win-win by forcing more creativity and resulting is less toys for me to clean up.

I do have a problem, but it's not that bad

Have I ever told you I have something like obsessive compulsive disorder. I've been diagnosed, but that was by a doctor who spent all of 3 minutes talking to me. So either I have it so bad that it is completely obvious in 3 minutes of conversation, or he got it wrong. I learned in nursing school that to have a diagnosis of OCD, your compulsions need to take up an hour or more per day, and I don't have that, so I'm thinking that he got it wrong, or just, not quite right.

Let me tell you 3 stories that illustrate my problem.

1. It was my junior year of high school. That was a hard year for me; my parents got divorced and my mom and I moved out of my dad's house on the day that I was scheduled to take the SAT II. I was thinking that the ward members coming over to help were mostly going to move family things: couches, pots and pans, lamps. I was frazzled and I got all the way to school and realized that I forgot my ID, which I needed to take the test. I sped back home and saw that one of the ward ladies had started boxing up MY things in MY room, probably thinking she was being helpful because I had been studying and hadn't started packing. I freaked out. Fighting back hot tears, I told her to stop packing and that I would do it. Then, in the car I started sobbing. I called my mom and in a fit of teenaged self-centeredness I asked her how DARE she let someone touch MY stuff. I felt really bad as soon as the words had left my mouth because the day was undoubtedly stressful and incredibly sad for her as well.

2. When I was 19, I went to the doctor for some problem that I don't remember what it was. The doctor, probably in an effort to be friendly (or maybe it had something to do with my problem) was asking me about my personal life. I was going through a kind of rough patch with my then-boyfriend (not Tyler), and was probably reluctant to talk about it. I dealt with my anxiety by picking at a loose string on my jeans. The medical problem was such that I had to come back a few days later, and it was that visit that the doctor told me he had been thinking about our conversation, and that he strongly felt I had OCD and told me I should go on medication. I took the prescription, but never filled it.

3. Last night. It was the first Monday in the new quarter, so it was flip the bed day. I took off the sheets, flipped the bed, and washed the pillows and mattress cover. I got busy with my day and didn't put the bed back together. After dinner, I sat down to do homework, and I could hear Tyler upstairs putting the sheets on the bed. I like him. (Note: We have a duvet on our bed. It's getting hot here, so we took the comforter out of it, and just put the cover on the bed.) When I came up to bed, I saw that the duvet cover was inside out. On the bed. Inside out on the bed. Made. I had a strong desire to take it off and fix it, but Tyler had put it on, and my keen wife senses told me that it would hurt his feelings (and discourage him from helping out in the future) if I re-did it. So I got into bed. I laid awake, knowing that the cover was on wrong. I tried to convince myself that it was silly, but I had a hard time falling asleep. When I made the bed this morning, I took it off and fixed it.

That's the kind of thing that is sort of funny later; Tyler can't figure out why it would bother me, and I can't figure out how it doesn't bother him.

In short, I realize I have a problem, but it's not that bad.