Category: Random

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Kids/Parenting Random

Happy birthday to me!

I take it all back. Ryan surprised me by taking the day off work (one of his employees also happens to work at the gym’s day care and gave Ryan a call when we arrived) to come home and straighten up and make me a cake.

And as I picked Hayden up from the gym day care, I happened to look in his mouth—and he has another new tooth. I think it must’ve come in yesterday. We missed it partially because we were expecting his next tooth to come in on the top. But no, it’s his bottom left lateral incisor. Surprises all ’round!

Happy birthday to me!

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Kids/Parenting Random

A bit of a slump

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Hayden 13 months 097.jpgIt’s my birthday. I want to go back to bed. I’m tired. Hayden’s not up yet.

I keep promising myself that for my birthday, I’ll go to bed early. We shall see.

It’s funny that just a couple days ago, I was thinking “This is a great age” (about Hayden, not me), and now I’m wishing he’d hurry up and grow up (again). It seems like every stage has a “hurry up and grow up” aspect to it.

The most frustrating part of this phase is the screaming/whining. Hayden still doesn’t speak and doesn’t gesture in a particularly helpful manner most of the time. He gets frustrated when I don’t know what he wants (or just won’t let him have it) and I get frustrated with the insatiable whining, wailing and screaming. I’m a little scared to get him out of bed this morning.

But sleep has dimmed the memory of yesterday and his general grumpiness and as he calls out to me from his crib in his “man voice,” he sounds happy. Maybe today will be better. It had better be. It’s my birthday, darn it!

On the plus side, I’m excited to be 24. I like even numbers.

I think I’ll go to the gym and read something uplifting. Sigh.

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Random

Six of one, half a dozen of the other III

First, the news: Hayden got tooth #5 today! Right top lateral incisor. Hurray!

Now, my meme. Since I got to go hear Jane Clayson Johnson speak at BYU yesterday, I was thinking about how nice it is to live close to a university. So, we’ll look at this from both sides.

Six of the Worst Things about Living in/near a College Town
Traffic. With 30,000 students 8 months out of the year (and 12,000 the other four months), you can really tell when school’s in session. I’m not happy in traffic.
Scary drivers. Maybe this is especially bad here, since a lot of local students are from California 😉 .
Late night noise. BYU isn’t exactly a party school (understatement), but I imagine that late night noise is a problem at other places.
Games. No, I’m not anti sports. But as I mentioned before, I’m not happy in traffic and game days = traffic. Major traffic. Especially when playing a rival.
Tempting fruit. I really want a graduate degree. I haven’t exactly decided what in (Creative Writing or American History, I think), but with a well-regarded university so close, it’s always tempting to apply again.
The campus is our world. Although I know there are a lot of things going on in our community, but it seems like most things are happening on campus. This is more prevalent when you’re actually a student, but sometimes I just don’t want to make the 20 minute trek down there just to get something done.

Half a Dozen of the Best Things about Living in/near a College Town
Speakers. It’s a bit controversial here, but the vice president is speaking at BYU’s commencement. Who cares if it’s Dick Cheney—the vice president is speaking at commencement!
Other cultural events. In addition to the on-campus plays, concerts and shows, universities tend to attract the same kinds of activities off campus.
Games. Yeah, I know it’s up there, too, but they’re fun. Ryan and I started hanging out by going to basketball games together.
Classes. Again, it’s up there, but how cool is it to be able to study something whenever you want (and have the time and money)?
Family. It gets my sisters out here, almost 2000 miles away from our home and parents. If I didn’t have them, I’d be pretty much alone. 🙁
Library. I can’t check things out for free, even though I’m an alumna, but the BYU library is one of the top 3 in the nation. If I need books and other resources on just about any subject imaginable, I know where I can get them.

I suppose this won’t really be a meme until I tag people and other people start doing it, but… I don’t feel like it today. Besides, it’s tough to come up with six arguments on both sides of an issue. I won’t wish this on anyone else (yet).

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Random

Notes on ‘Faith’

In high school, as part of the IB program(me), we had to take a class called Theory of Knowledge.  As you might guess from the title, that’s an epistemology (study of knowledge) class.  We talked about and tried to hammer out working definitions of lots of words relating to knowledge, among them, faith.

Among the dozen or so members of this class were several faiths, including Christian (Baptist, nondenominational and LDS), Muslim, Buddhist and I believe Hindu.  (Sigh. I miss diversity.)

Anyway, the discussion on the definition of faith became interesting when I insisted that there is room in faith for doubt.  Most people in the class, especially those very active in their religions (as I am), strenuously disagreed.

Today in church our lesson was on faith, and I finally (six years later) found the words to accurately explain what I meant.

Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things.  It’s not to have a sure knowledge.  Faith isn’t certain.  (If you’re certain, which I do believe you can be when it comes to religion, then you know.)

However, faith has conviction.  You believe something to be true, you hope for something to be true, but you do not know it.  And even though you do not know, you act upon your faith (that is absolutely necessary for true faith).

But you don’t know.  You don’t always know what might happen to you when you do the things that your faith requires of you.  You may lose friends, you may “lose” 10% of your income, you may lose your life.  You are uncertain because you don’t know what the consequences of your faithful actions might be.  Ultimately, you do believe they’ll be good, but until you reach the final judgement, you might have to suffer every day for acting upon what you believe.

And you do it anyway.   You step out into the darkness, a few steps ahead of the light, believing and hoping the light will follow.  Doubt might be too strong a word, but uncertainty isn’t.

Faith is acting with hope in the face of uncertainty.

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Six of one, half a dozen of the other II

Yes, once again we’re playing with my very own meme. Will it catch on? I don’t care.

Six of the Best Things about Migrating My Blog
I like it. Mm hm.
Professional strength! I just feel like I really mean it now that I’m on my own domain and using WordPress.
FeedBurner. My handful of RSS subscribers (hi guys!) won’t have to update their subscriptions. Thank you, FeedBurner.
Blogger RSS Import. This handy WordPress plugin made it SOOOO easy to migrate. In fact, I was so excited that it was going to be so easy (after reading the scariest, most convoluted methods to import) that I jumped the gun and went live on mamablogga.com a little ahead of schedule. (Note that the site is a little touch-and-go; keep trying, you’ll get it.)
Learning. Switching has been a learning experience: I got to dabble in lots of things and experiment in a lot more. To be honest, although I work in a highly technical field, I don’t have very much technical knowledge in webmastering, etc. I knew how to register domains and sign up for hosting, bu I didn’t know how to go from there to a “real” website. I feel a lot more competent. Now I’ve played with 301 redirects, Apache, PHP, MySQL and more.
Get down to business. I’ve been meaning to use my search engine marketing knowledge to start driving more traffic to my blog (though I haven’t decided on if/how I’ll do advertising). I’ve had all these ideas for linkbait and fun features, but I kept saying, “No, wait till you’re on your own domain. You don’t want to have to try to change all those links.” Guess what, I’m here!

Six of the Reasons I Should Have Waited a Little Longer
Style. I still have a few things to update, including a few minor changes to my stylesheet (like changing bulleted lists to show footprints instead of bullets… I think it’s cute; do you?)
Moving links. I’ve moved Technorati, MyBlogLog and I’m e-mailing the few people who’ve linked to my site to get the links fixed.
Moving internal links. I’ll have to go through and change all of my internal links in old posts.
Moving pictures. I’m told that once it registers with Blogger that I’ve “stolen” my old pictures, they’ll stop displaying them. So I’ll have to update all those, too. Sheesh.
Customizing. I meant to hold off on migrating until I made sure I had all the bugs worked out. I got a little over excited and jumped the gun there.
Brain melt. I really like the background color, but I’m scared it’s going to melt people’s brains.

So yeah, I jumped the gun a little, but I’m still pretty excited.

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How NOT to homeschool

Note: I probably won’t be homeschooling my children, but I see lots of successful examples of homeschooling around me. This post talks about one thing that bugged me about a minority of homeschoolers.

As a teenager, two of my best friends were homeschooled. They both happened to be the oldest of five children and daughters. It seemed to me, that each of these girls did a great deal around the house, essentially schooling their younger siblings and doing much of the housekeeping. They were both tasked with preparing their family’s dinners multiple times a week. I think one of them might have even been the “head chef” of her household (ie providing most or all of their dinners).

I was only slightly disturbed by this until today, when I found a quotation from a couple that have published a guide to a certain homeschooling program. “If you have older children and you are still cooking and cleaning,” they say, “then you have missed your promotion.”

Ah. I see. My promotion. Yes, that’s why I had my son, so I could further my career within my home. I’m training my replacement so I can have a promotion. . . . Right.

Y’know, for my friends, this was okay. It worked for their families, I don’t think it interfered with their homeschooling too terribly much (well, for one of them anyway) and now each of them are thoroughly prepared to feed their future families.

But you know what? I can feed my family, too, and my parents let me have time to have skilled professionals teach me (in and out of school), to attend church youth group and orchestra and music lessons, take more than a dozen college prep classes, hang out with my friends, and oh yeah, be a teenager.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important for my children to learn skills like these. I want them to be able to cook, clean, and manage their time and their houses. But I don’t need them to manage mine, and especially not so I can feel as though I’ve gotten “a promotion.” In my opinion, the only promotions a mother should get in the home are “mother-in-law,” “grandmother” and “great grandmother” (hopefully all in that order).