My son is three, and I hereby take back every judgmental thought I've had about parents who say "Because I said so."
He's asking "Why?" so often these days, reflexively and always in response to my requests that he stop doing something.
Why?
Because I survived on grapes and Saltines for the first three months you lived inside of me, and I gave you proteins from my very own body so that you could make yours, and I labored to release you into this world for 27 hours before my abdomen was cut open (leaving a scar that remains to this day), and my belly and navel will never look the same again because your growing limbs stretched them to their limit. Because my body has already done so much for you, I kindly request that you stop hitting my leg in time with the music of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.
Why?
Because my full-time job is giving you food, helping you to the bathroom, reading you stories, building block towers to your detailed specifications, taking you to the park, and dressing you even when a shirt going over your head is the most terrifying thing that's ever happened. Because I devote far more than eight hours a day to your happiness and well-being, it would be great if you could let me eat this turkey sandwich in peace.
Why?
Because I've had an uninterrupted night's sleep exactly zero times since your little sister was born twelve weeks ago, and because your sleep schedule has continued unaltered, I think you really owe it to me to stop crashing your scooter into the wall and watch Finding Nemo quietly while I power nap for the next fifteen minutes.
I try to be supportive of other parents I come across, knowing that we're each fighting a hard and unique battle with hard and unique kids, but I admit that the phrase "Because I said so" always seemed lazy to me, such a substandard way of addressing your child's attempts to understand this confusing world of rules and expectations. It's still not an expression I enjoy, and I'll use it as little as I can manage. But I think I'm understanding more why a parent might whip out that old standby answer. It's basically shorthand for "I have done everything for you and cared for you in a manner that has completely unraveled my world and put it back together again in a beautiful, exhausting shape; can you not just do as I say in this moment and please stop hitting your toy trains together a mere three inches from my face?"
Because I Said So
Monday, May 16, 2016
A good friend of mine is pregnant right now with her first baby, just as I'm pregnant with my second. She's six weeks ahead of me gestation-wise. Yesterday was her (very fancy and photogenic!) baby shower; her sister-in-law made tiny succulent pots for everyone to take home as party favors.
Ever since I've been well enough in this pregnancy to think about what events I might want to plan to celebrate it, I've felt ambivalent about my options. Ambivalent about doing anything at all, actually. With two months until my due date, I think I've settled on just indulging this impulse toward solitude and reclusiveness. It feels weird, kind of inappropriate, but it's what I'm going with. As much as I usually thrive on friendship, sisterhood, bonding experiences, and so forth, my gut's telling me to lay low and withdraw from a lot of that right now. Maybe after my girl is born I'll feel differently, and there will be opportunities then to plan some kind of get-together. Or maybe I won't want to do that stuff even then. We'll see.
Preparing for this birth has been monumentally different from preparing for my first birth three years ago. I was ravenous for information back then, seeking out birth stories and birth videos and different approaches to pain management and all kinds of stuff in that vein. But this time, all my birth books have been gathering dust. It's easy to superficially blame the difference on being busier this time around than I was during my first pregnancy; the fact of that is true, but that's not really it at all. I'm more nervous about labor and birth (and the postpartum upheaval) than I was my first time through it. I haven't known how to acknowledge that fear, or process it, or eliminate it, so I've kind of ignored it and hoped for some outside intervention to help me make sense of it.
Last night, I cracked open my favorite book about birth, Birthing from Within. In the first chapter, expecting mothers are asked to find their question. "For each woman, the most important thing she needs to know will be different. I would encourage a mother to ask herself, 'What is it I need to know to give birth?' Her answer must be found within, not given to her by an expert. Each mother needs to find her personal, heartfelt question."
Continuing: "Knowing your personal question is central to birth preparation. Whatever your question is, leave no stone unturned: ask your question often and look at it from every angle until your conscious mind is exhausted, and your heart is receptive to answers. Don't limit yourself to a superficial question like, 'What should I expect ...?' If someone else can answer your question -- you're not going deep enough."
I pondered on this idea last night. My first idea was the question How am I going to do this??? With multiple question marks, for sure. Not the most precise question out there, but hey, it's honest. And it's urgent -- this question has no chill.
To make it a little more productive, I've rephrased the How am I going to do this??? question to instead be How am I going to feel safe in labor and birth and afterwards? I think that's the heart of my question and, also, my nervousness about the whole prospect of my second birth. The fact is that I'm not feeling safe. Part of that comes from memories of my son's birth, which was going so so well until it wasn't. I think the bigger thing though, honestly, is that I'm giving birth in a hospital this time around, and no part of me wants to be doing that. It's the only thing that will work financially, so I'm doing it, but other than the money aspect, there's not a single pro I can add to the pro/con list. It's just not what I want.
So my question is this: How am I going to feel safe in labor and birth and afterwards? What can I do?
Ever since I've been well enough in this pregnancy to think about what events I might want to plan to celebrate it, I've felt ambivalent about my options. Ambivalent about doing anything at all, actually. With two months until my due date, I think I've settled on just indulging this impulse toward solitude and reclusiveness. It feels weird, kind of inappropriate, but it's what I'm going with. As much as I usually thrive on friendship, sisterhood, bonding experiences, and so forth, my gut's telling me to lay low and withdraw from a lot of that right now. Maybe after my girl is born I'll feel differently, and there will be opportunities then to plan some kind of get-together. Or maybe I won't want to do that stuff even then. We'll see.
Preparing for this birth has been monumentally different from preparing for my first birth three years ago. I was ravenous for information back then, seeking out birth stories and birth videos and different approaches to pain management and all kinds of stuff in that vein. But this time, all my birth books have been gathering dust. It's easy to superficially blame the difference on being busier this time around than I was during my first pregnancy; the fact of that is true, but that's not really it at all. I'm more nervous about labor and birth (and the postpartum upheaval) than I was my first time through it. I haven't known how to acknowledge that fear, or process it, or eliminate it, so I've kind of ignored it and hoped for some outside intervention to help me make sense of it.
Last night, I cracked open my favorite book about birth, Birthing from Within. In the first chapter, expecting mothers are asked to find their question. "For each woman, the most important thing she needs to know will be different. I would encourage a mother to ask herself, 'What is it I need to know to give birth?' Her answer must be found within, not given to her by an expert. Each mother needs to find her personal, heartfelt question."
Continuing: "Knowing your personal question is central to birth preparation. Whatever your question is, leave no stone unturned: ask your question often and look at it from every angle until your conscious mind is exhausted, and your heart is receptive to answers. Don't limit yourself to a superficial question like, 'What should I expect ...?' If someone else can answer your question -- you're not going deep enough."
I pondered on this idea last night. My first idea was the question How am I going to do this??? With multiple question marks, for sure. Not the most precise question out there, but hey, it's honest. And it's urgent -- this question has no chill.
To make it a little more productive, I've rephrased the How am I going to do this??? question to instead be How am I going to feel safe in labor and birth and afterwards? I think that's the heart of my question and, also, my nervousness about the whole prospect of my second birth. The fact is that I'm not feeling safe. Part of that comes from memories of my son's birth, which was going so so well until it wasn't. I think the bigger thing though, honestly, is that I'm giving birth in a hospital this time around, and no part of me wants to be doing that. It's the only thing that will work financially, so I'm doing it, but other than the money aspect, there's not a single pro I can add to the pro/con list. It's just not what I want.
So my question is this: How am I going to feel safe in labor and birth and afterwards? What can I do?
Monday, March 28, 2016
My first "blog" type thing was the one that came with my MySpace account. I started writing in it during the summer of 2005, right after I'd graduated from high school, musing about my brief first romance (SS+KB, rest in peace) and my job at the family catering company and my expectations for college. And I just wrote these little posts, these ridiculous and embarrassing little posts, with primitive emojis. I couldn't know how cringe-inducing those posts would be someday, but the point was just that I had things on my mind and I had a place to write those things down while simultaneously sharing them with my curated group of MySpace friends. There was something about that combo -- the self-reflection + mild publicity -- that really appealed to me, and for the few years that I stayed with MySpace and wrote my assorted posts, that blog became the most consistent record of my life that I've ever kept.
Concurrent with and then following the MySpace days, I'm sure I've started ten to fifty other blogs. Most of them are completely lost from my memory now; I have no idea what I called them or what I thought I'd use them for. But, you know, that writing impulse was still there. It's always been there for me, in some iteration, and there are rare moments in my life when said impulse wins out over laziness and forgetfulness. Most notably, I had a daily style blog for a while *more cringe, more cringe* and I've contributed pretty faithfully to a group blog for the past two years and change.
This blog -- skish -- is something I think about waaaaaay more than one could surmise from looking at the post frequency. I think about what goals I have with it, how to structure it in the future, what topics to focus on, what vibe I want it to have, how I can find the time to write and pre-write and promote and network (and do I even want to network? me, the all-time introvert?). I get it all worked out in my brain, and then the follow-through is crap. And that gets me to wondering, does a blog (this blog) need to be something polished and branded? Does it need to be that way in order to have merit? Does it need to be that way for me to feel like I'm doing it right?
I don't remotely have the expertise to wax poetic about how blogging has changed over the past however many years. It has, obviously, but other people who are more well-equipped to talk about that change and who witnessed it up close have written a whole lotta stuff about how that transpired and what it means and what it says. My experience of being a blog reader has been really inspiring at times, very aspirational (in a good way). Putting together a solid blog, with a vision and valuable content and beautiful images, is a lot of work, and I benefit from that work as a reader. Don't change, professional/highly-skilled-amateur bloggers. You do you. But is that the approach for me?
I'm not tidy or polished. Just look at my hair on literally any day of the year -- it is messy, and that messiness is an accurate outer reflection of my inner world. Honestly, I like it that way. Somehow, though, I feel like my unkempt way of writing and planning and being in the world isn't quite ... right ... in terms of how blogs operate now. This isn't my random MySpace page anymore, is it? I mean, I spent $10 of good PayPal money for my blog theme, I've can't just spew whatever random thoughts all over it. (Note to future Sara: in case you're note sure, that last sentence was sarcastic, yes.)
My Monday night navel-gazing is making it super clear that I'm being a weirdo about this. Geez louise, lady, you don't need a business plan or a posting schedule -- just write what you feel like and relax. It's allowed. There are no blog police out there waiting to slap you with a citation. Write about the way the baby in your belly makes weird swimming motions that are very unsettling as you try to fall asleep at night. Write about the latest episode of "Girls" and how amazing it was (because it so was). Write about sex, write about the artificial Christmas tree parts you just inherited from your sister-in-law, write about extended family gatherings and how you feel like such a misfit, write about how you have a theft problem in your neighborhood and you imagine a roving band of burglars haunting the streets at night. It's fine. And maybe the blog will morph over time into something more focused, and maybe not, but you'll be writing. You'll be recording your life, and that was the point of all of it.
Concurrent with and then following the MySpace days, I'm sure I've started ten to fifty other blogs. Most of them are completely lost from my memory now; I have no idea what I called them or what I thought I'd use them for. But, you know, that writing impulse was still there. It's always been there for me, in some iteration, and there are rare moments in my life when said impulse wins out over laziness and forgetfulness. Most notably, I had a daily style blog for a while *more cringe, more cringe* and I've contributed pretty faithfully to a group blog for the past two years and change.
This blog -- skish -- is something I think about waaaaaay more than one could surmise from looking at the post frequency. I think about what goals I have with it, how to structure it in the future, what topics to focus on, what vibe I want it to have, how I can find the time to write and pre-write and promote and network (and do I even want to network? me, the all-time introvert?). I get it all worked out in my brain, and then the follow-through is crap. And that gets me to wondering, does a blog (this blog) need to be something polished and branded? Does it need to be that way in order to have merit? Does it need to be that way for me to feel like I'm doing it right?
I don't remotely have the expertise to wax poetic about how blogging has changed over the past however many years. It has, obviously, but other people who are more well-equipped to talk about that change and who witnessed it up close have written a whole lotta stuff about how that transpired and what it means and what it says. My experience of being a blog reader has been really inspiring at times, very aspirational (in a good way). Putting together a solid blog, with a vision and valuable content and beautiful images, is a lot of work, and I benefit from that work as a reader. Don't change, professional/highly-skilled-amateur bloggers. You do you. But is that the approach for me?
I'm not tidy or polished. Just look at my hair on literally any day of the year -- it is messy, and that messiness is an accurate outer reflection of my inner world. Honestly, I like it that way. Somehow, though, I feel like my unkempt way of writing and planning and being in the world isn't quite ... right ... in terms of how blogs operate now. This isn't my random MySpace page anymore, is it? I mean, I spent $10 of good PayPal money for my blog theme, I've can't just spew whatever random thoughts all over it. (Note to future Sara: in case you're note sure, that last sentence was sarcastic, yes.)
My Monday night navel-gazing is making it super clear that I'm being a weirdo about this. Geez louise, lady, you don't need a business plan or a posting schedule -- just write what you feel like and relax. It's allowed. There are no blog police out there waiting to slap you with a citation. Write about the way the baby in your belly makes weird swimming motions that are very unsettling as you try to fall asleep at night. Write about the latest episode of "Girls" and how amazing it was (because it so was). Write about sex, write about the artificial Christmas tree parts you just inherited from your sister-in-law, write about extended family gatherings and how you feel like such a misfit, write about how you have a theft problem in your neighborhood and you imagine a roving band of burglars haunting the streets at night. It's fine. And maybe the blog will morph over time into something more focused, and maybe not, but you'll be writing. You'll be recording your life, and that was the point of all of it.
Friday, February 12, 2016
This song was released in 2007, but weirdly enough, I associate it with a time (and a relationship) that came before that. I don't know how that happened. Did some wires get crossed in my head? But there it is -- one of my favorite songs, connected with a period in my life when I never heard it.
"The Story" is fantastic and timeless. Pretty sure I'll be listening to it still in 30 years and singing along just as loud.
Friday, February 5, 2016
I just read Sarah Bessey's latest book, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith. It's a beautiful work, complex and sincere and able to tap into a wide number of concerns with great honesty. Friends are hearing about this book nonstop from me; I'm recommending it over and over again. Perhaps it's just come into my life at the perfect magic moment -- whatever it is, I kind of can't get over the way this book has spoken to me and given masterful language to all the things my heart is feeling.
Part of my sorting process, my faith transition, has been the constant question, "Why do I have to do this?" I know oodles and oodles of good people who are not the questioning kind, at least not to the extent that I am, and I've wondered why God has pushed me to pursue this topsy-turvy path laden with doubts and frustration. Why couldn't it just have been simple for me -- straightforward faith, unrelenting in its consistency? I've gotten some answers to this question. None of them have been conclusive, but they've all helped me understand some possibilities, reasons why this path is the one I'm asked to walk.
Reading on page 84-85 of Out of Sorts, I encountered a new answer to this question, one so basic that I'm stunned I haven't thought of it before.
Bessey writes, "Jesus isn't only in your tradition. You get to love Jesus without being an evangelical or a Pentecostal or a Presbyterian or whatever new label you've acquired these days or old label that just doesn't fit anymore.
"Your pet gatekeeper isn't the sole arbitrator of the Christian faith: there is more complexity and beauty and diversity of voices and experiences within followers of the Way than you know. Remember, your view of Christians, your personal experience with Christians, is a rather small sample: there are a lot more of us out here than you might think. A lot of us on the other side of that faith shift -- eschewing labels and fear tactics, boundary markers and tribalist thinking.
"The Church is sorting and casting off, renewing and reestablishing in the postmodern age, and this is a good thing. The old will remain -- it always does -- but something new is being born too. If it is being born in the Church, it is first being born in the hearts, minds, and lives of us, the Body."
"... Our particular tradition doesn't get our loyalty: that fidelity is for our Jesus."
That fidelity is for our Jesus.
Out of Sorts is, as the subtitle suggests, all about the way a person's faith can change over their lives; it's about how tough those changes can be, how earth-shaking and scary they can feel. Sarah's family became entranced and energized by a local charismatic Christian church when she was a child, and she grew up enfolded in the safe, loving worldview that church espoused. Transitioning into her adult life brought questions, and some disillusionment, and intense loss, all of which impacted her faith.
And so this metaphor weaves through the book, a metaphor of sorting through one's possessions -- a house full of them -- and deciding what to keep, what to trash, what to linger over, what to hang onto for now even though you know you will discard it eventually (because this just isn't the right moment to say goodbye). Sarah Bessey compares this sorting process to being "out of sorts," which she defines this way: "a state of being in one's heart or mind or body. Often used to describe one's sense of self at a time when one feels like everything one once knew 'for sure' has to be figured out all over again."
Writes Sarah, "We sort on the threshold of change; it's how we gather the courage to eventually walk through the door and out into the new day's light. Of course there is grief in this process, whether it's from the death of a loved one or the death of an old way of life. Of course there is.
"Whether it's in our relationship with God or with our own families, at some point we find that it is time to sort. It's time to figure out what we need to keep, what we need to toss, and what we need to reclaim. And we need to tell our stories in order to move forward.
"Every ending is also a new beginning."
I love how she expresses this, because it rings so achingly true. And that's why faith transition takes such an awfully long time -- there are piles of boxes and beliefs to sort through, then to reorganize. You can't exactly throw out a whole box at one time (or at least, I can't), not without checking all the contents. And so when your faith isn't tidy anymore, and you have to clean it up, there's a lot of work to do. Painstaking work.
This sorting-things-out process is something I've done with my own faith, for maybe seven or eight years now. Well ... actually, I think some of those years were less sorting-things-out, more insisting-I-could-keep-all-these-items-if-I-could-just-reorganized-them-correctly. I was none too eager to downsize my collections of beliefs or get rid of things that were broken. But anyway, regardless of when I've stayed on task and when I've let my mind wander, I've been out of sorts for a while. And I've been sorting through the remains. My dilemmas have been thoroughly Mormon, which makes them different in some ways from the dilemmas Sarah Bessey describes in her book (she deals with mainstream Christianity). But at the same time, the dilemmas are not so very different, at least not as she approaches them. This book isn't about solving the specific problems or answering the specific questions; it's about lending peace to the process and giving a vote of confidence to the reader, saying, Hey, you can do this. I know it's hard. Give yourself all the time you need, but be brave -- God is with us.
There are a wide variety of resources out there for Mormons encountering some kind of faith crisis or transition; I've read and listened to many of them, and they've helped, absolutely. There's something I really love, though, about seeing this matter handled from a Christian angle that is not specifically (or even tangentially) Mormon. It means I have to stay on my toes. In Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey is writing about familiar topics in unfamiliar (to me) language, causing me to read more carefully and think through her suggestions instead of shifting into an auto-pilot mode. Even the fact that she doesn't quote the King James Version of the Bible, preferring other translations instead, is just different enough that it keeps me paying attention.
Take this alternative version of James 1:5, a verse familiar to most Mormons as the one that prompted Joseph Smith to ask God which church he should join: "If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and He will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking."
Gives a slightly different flavor.
If I may get personal for a moment ("on your own blog, Sara? okay, fine."), I'd like to share one insight that came at me like ... well, not like a ton of bricks, but like a very forceful breeze or scent -- an insight that came as I was flipping through Out of Sorts after I'd finished reading it, checking out the things I'd underlined.
Reading on page 84-85 of Out of Sorts, I encountered a new answer to this question, one so basic that I'm stunned I haven't thought of it before.
Bessey writes, "Jesus isn't only in your tradition. You get to love Jesus without being an evangelical or a Pentecostal or a Presbyterian or whatever new label you've acquired these days or old label that just doesn't fit anymore.
"Your pet gatekeeper isn't the sole arbitrator of the Christian faith: there is more complexity and beauty and diversity of voices and experiences within followers of the Way than you know. Remember, your view of Christians, your personal experience with Christians, is a rather small sample: there are a lot more of us out here than you might think. A lot of us on the other side of that faith shift -- eschewing labels and fear tactics, boundary markers and tribalist thinking.
"The Church is sorting and casting off, renewing and reestablishing in the postmodern age, and this is a good thing. The old will remain -- it always does -- but something new is being born too. If it is being born in the Church, it is first being born in the hearts, minds, and lives of us, the Body."
"... Our particular tradition doesn't get our loyalty: that fidelity is for our Jesus."
That fidelity is for our Jesus.
It didn't quite occur to me on the first read-through, but flipping back through the book a second time, I realized something when I saw these words. And I wrote it out in soft red pencil at the bottom of pages 84 and 85.
the church was more important to me than Jesus was
Why did I need to sort out my faith? Why have I needed to walk down this path? Because the church (of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) was more important to me than Jesus was. No question about that -- my testimony was of the church and the good things it brought into my life, not of my Savior. I believed in him, yes I did, but that didn't seem to ... matter very much. It was secondary. Jesus was secondary. And I think on that fact now and how not okay it is, and how far I still have to go in coming to know and follow Jesus Christ, and how much I want to go that distance ... and I think, perhaps this is why. If church had continued to be the wonderfully comfortable place of belonging and validation it had been for me when I was younger, I probably wouldn't have been motivated to seek out Jesus more sincerely.
I'll close it out with some more words from Sarah Bessey, and I hope this excerpt and the others I've shared have conveyed some of the warmth and humility with which she writes, because that as much as anything else really makes this a special, necessary book, in my opinion.
"I wanted to follow Jesus: not a way of thinking or a doctrine, not a sermon or a list of rules, not political affiliations and church denominations or a path to a shiny-happy life or anything like that. I wanted to follow Him and love Him, right to the end, wherever He led. It occurred to me on that day that if I got to know Him -- really, truly know Him -- I could perhaps begin to spot counterfeit Jesuses. There are Jesuses out there who are co-opted for every cause and argument, and these false Jesuses bastardize the message and misrepresent a man who none of us really understands -- and we all do the co-opting, for everything from power to money to the smug feeling of being right while everyone else is wrong. We all do it, progressives and conservatives alike. Jesus isn't our mascot and he isn't the magic word.
"I found His words in Luke 6:43-44: 'You don't get wormy apples off a healthy tree, nor good apples off a diseased tree. The health of the apple tells the health of the tree. You must begin with your own life-giving lives. It's who you are, not what you say and do, that counts. Your true being brims over into true words and deeds.'
"I read those words -- 'You must begin with your own life-giving lives' -- and suddenly I understood why Mary spilled her most precious perfumes and soaked His feet with her tears, drying them with her hair. No wonder the Bible uses the word 'immediately' to describe how quickly fishermen dropped their nets and livelihoods to follow the man from Galilee. One of the biggest gifts of that season of my life was revisiting the stories I thought I knew and discovering that really, I didn't know them at all.
"The more I read the Gospels, the more I got it: no wonder we love the real Him when we meet Him."
Monday, February 1, 2016
What I Look Like Today:
What I Want to Eat:
You know, I could so go for a bowl or two of really delicious clam chowder. The best I've had was at a restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. It was a pretty spendy place, and the clam chowder I had as an appetizer was so much better than whatever the main dish was. Should've just ordered four servings of the chowder for the same price as the rest of the meal.
What I Want to Watch:
With it being awards season and all, I'm really wishing I could block out a weekend to watch all the movies I planned on seeing in the theaters this year but never got around to (along with some that I'm seeing nominated all over the place). Top of the list would be Suffragette, Spotlight, and Straight Outta Compton (... a surprising amount of S's there ...), and Room. And actually, even though I already saw it, I want to see Mad Max: Fury Road in a theater again.
My Favorite Item of Clothing:
I recently got this purple-gray cable-knit sweater at Nordstrom Rack, and it is so cozy. I wore it three times in the first five days after I got it. And I am more than willing to wear it again tomorrow.
My Favorite Piece of Jewelry:
Really loving my big turquoise ring right now.
The Last Time I Cried:
I was driving home from Target on Saturday and listening to an episode of This American Life, and there was an interview with an advertising/marketing guy who worked on a campaign in Colombia to convince guerrilla fighters to defect from their group and return home. There were a few really touching phases in the campaign, but the one that got my tears goin' featured authentic pictures of some of the guerrillas when they were children, along with messages from their mothers saying, "Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child." And then inviting them to come home, with assurances that they were still loved and wanted. Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child. I mean, that choked me right up, thinking of a parent's love. It never loses sight of the fact that, whatever a child may grow up to be (good or bad), before any of those things, that person is and always was and always will be your child.
What I'm Reading:
Close to finishing Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey. Everything she writes feels like the warmest blanket, with candlelight and hot chocolate by the mug full.
Mom Life Lately:
Pretty dang good! Soren is at the height of cuteness these days and getting more and more verbal. He invented a new game yesterday, where he sits in a box, asks me to countdown, and then pretends he's blasting off in a rocket ship. When I get tired of counting down, he'll do it, except it goes like this: "Five, four, six, seven, BLASTOFF!"
Latest Fav on Pinterest:
Top 10 Storybook Magical Places on Earth (specifically the picture of Schwarzwald in Germany, although Mount Roraima in Venezuela looks pretty impressive, dude)
Weird Thing I've Been Thinking About:
Did you ever watch The Hills? Do you remember Justin-Bobby? That all happened, and I was 100% there for it. Let it never be said that I am too good for bad TV, because I am most assuredly not.
What I Want to Eat:
You know, I could so go for a bowl or two of really delicious clam chowder. The best I've had was at a restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. It was a pretty spendy place, and the clam chowder I had as an appetizer was so much better than whatever the main dish was. Should've just ordered four servings of the chowder for the same price as the rest of the meal.
What I Want to Watch:
With it being awards season and all, I'm really wishing I could block out a weekend to watch all the movies I planned on seeing in the theaters this year but never got around to (along with some that I'm seeing nominated all over the place). Top of the list would be Suffragette, Spotlight, and Straight Outta Compton (... a surprising amount of S's there ...), and Room. And actually, even though I already saw it, I want to see Mad Max: Fury Road in a theater again.
My Favorite Item of Clothing:
I recently got this purple-gray cable-knit sweater at Nordstrom Rack, and it is so cozy. I wore it three times in the first five days after I got it. And I am more than willing to wear it again tomorrow.
My Favorite Piece of Jewelry:
Really loving my big turquoise ring right now.
The Last Time I Cried:
I was driving home from Target on Saturday and listening to an episode of This American Life, and there was an interview with an advertising/marketing guy who worked on a campaign in Colombia to convince guerrilla fighters to defect from their group and return home. There were a few really touching phases in the campaign, but the one that got my tears goin' featured authentic pictures of some of the guerrillas when they were children, along with messages from their mothers saying, "Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child." And then inviting them to come home, with assurances that they were still loved and wanted. Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child. I mean, that choked me right up, thinking of a parent's love. It never loses sight of the fact that, whatever a child may grow up to be (good or bad), before any of those things, that person is and always was and always will be your child.
What I'm Reading:
Close to finishing Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey. Everything she writes feels like the warmest blanket, with candlelight and hot chocolate by the mug full.
Mom Life Lately:
Pretty dang good! Soren is at the height of cuteness these days and getting more and more verbal. He invented a new game yesterday, where he sits in a box, asks me to countdown, and then pretends he's blasting off in a rocket ship. When I get tired of counting down, he'll do it, except it goes like this: "Five, four, six, seven, BLASTOFF!"
Latest Fav on Pinterest:
Top 10 Storybook Magical Places on Earth (specifically the picture of Schwarzwald in Germany, although Mount Roraima in Venezuela looks pretty impressive, dude)
Weird Thing I've Been Thinking About:
Did you ever watch The Hills? Do you remember Justin-Bobby? That all happened, and I was 100% there for it. Let it never be said that I am too good for bad TV, because I am most assuredly not.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
I don't know what's come over me, but suddenly family history is fun? I kept thinking and thinking about buying a fifteen generation pedigree chart, for only like a dollar at Deseret Book, and it just seemed necessary. So I finally bought one last Friday and have been filling it up with this weird, nerdy gusto. I completed the front side (9 generations) in a few days, and before deciding which ancestral lines to map out on the back (there's limited space), I went ahead and color coded each person by place of birth (see above picture).
Then I added highlighter lines to each person who emigrated.
Then I added green stickers to each fellow who was a practicing polygamist (Mormon ancestral cred -- I haz it).
And now I'm adding purple stickers to the people who converted to Mormonism, along with the year of baptism.
I unfold the big sheet every so often to take a look at my progress; there's something immensely satisfying about this project. And dangit if I don't feel more connected to these people than I ever have before.
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