Yellow Wallpaper

If I had been blogging at 10 this morning I would have told you that my day so far had been fantastic. I got up and rode the exercise bike for a while, then helped the kids with breakfast, and started cleaning. I vacuumed the entire upstairs, did some laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and then swept and mopped the kitchen floor after the baby went to bed. Oh, and I make bread this morning. If I had been blogging at 2 this afternoon I would have told you about whiny the baby was. And I would have told you about how I gave in to Little Dude's pleading to make a volcano like the one in the Super Science Book . It's an extra special volcano where you add some red Jell-O powder to make it look cool. It was a lot of fun until I foolishly left the room for a few minutes to change the baby's diaper and came back to a giant puddle of sticky red gelatin-infused vinegar dripping all over my cabinets and freshly washed floor. If I had been blogging at 4 I would have shared my excitement ab

I always seem to hit the wall on Friday afternoons. I've been so busy all week that I just feel done. Right now the kids are watching cartoons and I don't care. We got a projector a few weeks ago and they still love the novelty of watching stuff on the wall. Their favorite game right now is 'movie theater' where they make tickets and pretend refreshments and invite us down to the basement to watch DVDs. It's fun for the whole family. This past week Mr. Fob and I have been re-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy; it's fun to see them on the big screen (or wall, as it were). Now I'm anxiously waiting for someone to turn Return of the King in to the library so we can complete our experience. This week I feel like I've been doing a good job trying to stick with my motto of 'use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without' when it comes to food. I thought I my budget was doing great until I realized that for some reason in Excel it wasn't ad

The other day I noticed a link to a post on a blog that I don't normally read and I really liked it. She writes about the last decade and sums up her life during those years. I realized the other day that we have already spent one decade in the 2000s, and my brain keeps thinking it is still 1998. A decade went by fast, but it was one-third of my life so I think it is interesting to look back. The year 2000 started for me on my mission in Spain. I spent that entire year in Spain and came back early in 2001. I lived with my parents in Maryland for a few months, then came back to school at BYU in Provo. My husband and I got married at the end of 2001 and spent a few more years in Utah. We moved to Seattle and then to California before coming back to buy a house in Utah. When this last decade started my parents lived in Maryland but they have moved closer to us in Las Vegas. My mother-in-law lived in Hawaii during the first few years of marriage but she has also moved to Utah. My husb

Remember how last week I said that I would be very surprised if P. Bibby didn't have craniosynostosis ? Well, according to the doctors she doesn't. That's a relief since I spent the last week pouring a lot of mental energy into figuring out how to work major surgery for my baby into my life. I'm very glad that we won't have to do anything major to fix it. I do admit still feeling a little worry simply because we just have to wait for the problem to correct itself and I hope it does. The CT scan showed normal bone growth in her head and so the doctor feels that the problem is plagiocephaly , or distortion cause by her sleeping position. That often shows up as a flat head, but there are other manifestations such as P. Bibby's case where her head has apparently been pushed from the side so much that the right said has been pushed forward and the left hasn't caught up yet. Considering how much she sleeps and the fact that she sucks the fingers on the right side,

I don't actually remember seeing Kindergarten Cop when I was young, but for some reason the "it's not a tumor" line (in Arnold's voice) was a popular saying around my house. It's come to mind during the last few months as we have been trying to figure out what is going on with P. Bibby's eye. When she was about six months old we noticed that her left eyelid was looking somewhat droopy and the skin around her eye was red. I mentioned this at a checkup she had with the doctor, but she had an ear infection at the time and he thought it might be related to that. It seemed to be getting worse, and was definitely not getting better, so I asked again at her nine-month appointment. This time the pediatrician gave me the name and number of a pediatric ophthalmologist . When I called I was disappointed to find out that their closest appointment was in February, but I scheduled it anyways. Her eye was still bothering me and I decided to call back and plead for a bet

(click here for 2007 , 2008 , and 2009 ) This year I read 86 books; I thought I had read fewer than I had in previous years, but it was more than both 2008 and 2009 . Since having a baby at the beginning of this year and then starting to work part-time I feel much more pressed for time than I used to; it doesn't look like my reading time has suffered nearly as much as I think it has. 59 books were fiction and 27 were nonfiction; I thought I had been reading plenty of nonfiction, but I guess I was wrong. Several of those nonfiction books were memoirs; this must have been a year for narrative. I do like nonfiction and maybe next year I'll read more. In 2007 and 2008 the numbers were almost evenly split between fiction and nonfiction, but the last two years have been heavily weighted towards fiction. 48 books were written by women and 38 by men, nearly an even split. This seems to continue a trend that I've seen over the past few year.I also read a lot of LDS books, something

The Orchard: A Memoir by Adele Crockett Robertson This is a beautiful little book; it is an incomplete manuscript discovered and published by the author's daughter after her death. I wish she had finished it during her lifetime because her writing is keenly observant and very beautiful. The author has the kind of voice that really sticks with you for long after reading the book and leaves you feeling like you really know her. When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka This book surprised me; it is a novel about the internment of Japanese-Americans, and yet takes such a unique approach that I found myself deeply touched in a way I had not been by other novels about the same subject. Each chapter focuses on a different member of a California family (that remains unnamed) and a different aspect of the journey to the camp and back. I think the spare prose and the focus on small details really made the story so much more poignant and vivid to me. Raven Stole the Moon by Garth Stein

Everyone is compiling their yearly highlights and reviewing their accomplishments (or failures) from the last year. I have been contemplating what I would like to do for the past few days and still have not reached any firm conclusions. On the one hand, I feel ready to make some resolutions and attempt changes. Last year I gave myself a pass because the stress of moving and having a baby pretty much destroyed my sanity and I didn't need any more pressure on myself. Now we have had a year of stability in our home, family, and job situations and things feel much better. I still hesitate to make resolutions because they never seem to happen. As I look back on posts labelled 'goals' I see many of the same themes: read my scriptures, lose weight, eat fewer treats, and so on. I want to change many of the things I've been failing at for years and so I feel rather daunted by the fact that I've been trying for nearly a decade to change the same things about myself. I think w