A Reminder for Me

I've been having a lot of trouble feeling as confident in my spiritual life as I did when I was a teenager/college student.  It's left a hole in me, which in turn has left me more unhappy than I normally am.  Unfortunately, this unhappiness has manifested itself very much in the form of uncontrollable anger mixed with short but intense crying jags.  I knew I was having a hard time, but I didn't realize that I was harboring so much anger in my heart until I read the scripture now featured on my sidebar thing and thought, "Wow, no wonder I feel like crap."  It's just is this constant, aimless irritation that ATTACKS the first thing that crosses it and then EXPLODES like a nuclear bomb.  Ask Will and my kids, it's been awful, and while I believe pregnancy hormones are a big part of it, I can do much better.

I don't want anyone reading this to worry, because while it's true that I have rough moments more often than I'd like, I still have many moments of contentment and joy.  Anyway, the reason I posted a scripture on my blog is because I check it all the time to see if anyone else has blogged recently, so it's not meant to be advice for anyone but me, and I'm putting it there like some people put sticky notes on the bathroom mirror: so I can see it  and remind myself that if I want to feel good, I need to try harder to let go of my anger.

Note I can't avoid because I heart sharing: The scripture from the Book of Mormon.  As always, if you'd like to read it let me or that one Mormon friend of yours know and one of us will totally hook you up.

Īnsomnis

It's getting close to 11pm and I would like to get to bed, except Joci is blinking at me sleepily from my pillow while I sit with my pregnant butt going numb on the bottom corner of my bed.  Also Will is snoring like the fate of the world depends on his loudness.  If we ever have another kid (probably not) I'm waiting until we're rich enough to afford a guest room so I have somewhere to crash on nights like this.

Oh, and as far as pregnancy news goes, all is well.  I talked to my doctor and am tentatively scheduled for induction.  I know not everyone approves, but I'm miserable enough already that I don't care.  Plus my doctor won't induce me unless my Bishop score is 10 or more, at which point there is no larger risk for C-section than there would be if I went into labor naturally.

The Busiest Week of my Life

I posted last Saturday about how we were moving.  Yeah, that glucose test (which I passed, by the way) was the last few minutes I had to rest for about four days.  However, even though we were busy and I had to sleep on an air mattress (also known as The Mattress from Pregnancy Hell), we finished everything up thanks to help from some awesome volunteers (THANK YOU to Rosalie, Dustin, and Chrissy) and were in our new place by noon on Tuesday... at which point we had a kitchen FULL of furniture that we had to move around the house.  I'll never know how Will managed after all the moving we did over the weekend, but he did.  He is amazing.  He has also started working 12+ hours per day again, so the fact that he had enough energy to do everything AND not fall behind in school was even more incredible.

So we spent last Wednesday and Thursday moving/reassembling furniture and I woke up on Friday... and realized it was my birthday.  And the ground was covered in snow.  Under most circumstances, this would have been lame.  For us, though, it meant that Will didn't have work, so that was nice.  To be honest, it was the most uneventful birthday I've had in a long time.  Oh well.  Twenty-seven is kind of a "meh" age anyway.

The best part of the day was Will and Chaela decorating the giant cookie I made.  Aren't they talented?  Yes.

So then Saturday comes and Will has to spend most of the day at his friend's house doing homework because we didn't have the internet.  I realized at about 7pm that we hadn't colored eggs yet, so we did that... and totally forgot to get anything for each other!  Sigh.  Life and children, what can I say?  Will went to the grocery store late that night and got us some chocolate, but I definitely owe him something.  The next day we had Will's parent's and grandma over for church and lunch, which was fun and delicious!

Decorating eggs together!

Easter morning.  Good thing church wasn't until 11:30!

That brings us to this week.  Pretty much all I've had the energy to do is hang out outside with the neighbors and keep the house (which is twice as big as I'm used to) moderately clean.  Here are some pictures!!

The kitchen is HUGE!  About 3x the size of our old one.

Living room complete with children watching Lilo and Stitch (Joci's new favorite).

Not a very good picture of our bedroom.  There just weren't any good places to take a picture from.

The girls' room... already a mess.  The two extra rooms are teeny.

The extra room (currently my sewing room) is still in the organizational stage.

The outside of our place!  It also has an awesome back yard, but  there just weren't any good angles to take pictures from.

The duplex is on a dead end, which is great.  You guys should see all the kids that run around here during the day.  Chaela and Joci and I have already made a ton of new friends!

And the girls.  Not that this picture is a good example of it, but they LOVE our new place.

Moving Day!

I am awake right now because my arm hurts too much for me to sleep.  I spent about 9 hours yesterday scrubbing kid  "art," greasy fingerprints, and random scuff marks off my walls, not to mention all the other cleaning in the bathroom and kitchen and vacuuming pretty much every square inch of this place and packing all the miscellaneous objects that didn't make it into boxes the first time around (one of which happened to be our bottle of Tylenol, the only pain killer we own that my pregnant self can take).  So I'm typing this blog right-handed and creeping on a neighbor I know to be an early riser until I see her light come on, at which point I will text her.  Failing that, the closest drug store opens at 8am.  Happy moving day to me!  I guess this bag of frozen vegetables I've been using as an ice pack is no longer coming with us.

Speaking of moving day, up until this thing with my arm everything has been going well, mostly thanks to the awesome friends who helped us over the weekend (you know who you are Rosalie, Chrissy, and Dustin).  Without them, it would have been downright impossible to do this!

We're so grateful to be getting out of this place, and since the carpet cleaners finally came to the new one yesterday, we can get over there and start moving our stuff from the kitchen to the rest of the house!  Seriously, I don't know how the people who helped us last year fit all of our stuff into that trailer, because our new kitchen is much larger than that and completely overflowing.

Well anyway, time to see if my neighbor is awake again!

Since I have a minute... or 180

I hate needle pokes.  After finishing up the whole pediatric vaccine regimen thing as a teenager, I figured I was done until I was old.  Ha ha!  Silly me, then I got pregnant.  Of course, this being my third baby, I was pretty well prepared.  I knew all those blood draws were coming.  That doesn't mean I have to like it.  So here I sit at the hospital on a brown plastic couch, having already gotten my blood drawn twice and waiting for two more.  Don't fail your one-hour glucose tolerance test, ladies, because the three-hour test is more than three times as inconvenient.  

On the bright side, the hospital has windows that are letting in the sun, wi-fi, and a very nice lady drawing my blood who has yet to "search" for a vein, so things could definitely be worse.

Anyway, since I'm a slacker, I thought I'd use this time to post a little update.  I need practice writing anyway, because I'm starting to feel like I should be working on something again but not quite sure where to put my creative energy.  Also my first two attempts at writing fiction since October were so bad I wanted to cry.  So here's what's going on:

We're moving!  I can't lie, I'm very excited.  Our relationship with our landlords has never been comfortable and we seriously dislike the apartment we're in right now (we only moved in there in the first place because the place we were going to move into fell through one week before our family moved from Ohio to Utah).  I'm sure it would be a great apartment for someone who is single, newlyweds, or a couple with only one (baby) kid, but for us it's been cramped and depressing to say the least.  Luckily our contract is almost up and this next week we're moving to a duplex down in Provo that has three bedrooms, a great landlady, a yard, a dishwasher, and about twice the square-footage of our current place.  We looked at it once, but went back again yesterday to check it out again (the first time there was still some furniture) and while we were hanging out in our new yard, we met no less than three new neighbors who all have kids the girls' ages!  Yay!  This new place will also be amazing because we aren't expected to let our neighbors into our kitchen to do their laundry, we control our own thermostat, and our internet hookups will be in our own apartment, meaning no upstairs neighbors can A) unplug it randomly or B) use it without paying.  Also the new duplex is a legal rental property, unlike our current one.  Yes, our current apartment is that great.

Anyway, even though it's General Conference weekend (a bi-annual Mormon holiday where we feast on elaborate breakfasts and the Spirit) we're trying to get out of our old place because we hate it so that our landlords can get some other gullible fool renter ASAP and reimburse us for the rest of April's rent.  We're hoping to be completely moved in to the new place by Tuesday.  It would be sooner, but unfortunately the carpets aren't being cleaned until Monday.  In the meantime, our landlady has given us permission to move things into the kitchen, where there is no carpet, because she is great.

So it's going to be a busy weekend for us, which sucks for Will because he has a cold.  If you're in the area we'd love to have you come help, and if not, send healthy thoughts and prayers Will's way (and mine, I don't want to catch it!)

That's pretty much all, except I'm trying to get into this writing thing again.  I'm sort of at a standstill right now because I want to rewrite my old story but I need to do "world building" before I can.  I am the opposite of most fantasy writers (who get "world builder's disease" and never get around to the story itself), instead of getting caught up in the world I keep skittering away from it.  Apparently I'm waiting for it to spring-fully formed into my mind, and my mind is not cooperating.  Sad.

Anyway I think this post is long enough.  Happy Conference weekend everyone!

Writing for Charity 2012

I went to my first-ever writing conference today!  I think it was an amazing choice for a first conference; it was pretty informal and not too massive... probably 250-300 people.  Unfortunately I'm not one to put myself out there, so I only took one sneaky picture when the authors weren't looking.

My sneaky picture of the Fantasy Panel authors:
Mette Ivie Harrison, Brandon Sanderson, and Tracy and Laura Hickman
Not to be overly ecstatic, but *swoon.*

Here's how my day went:

I got there at 9am when registration opened.  I registered, got assigned to Laura Hickman's critique group (she co-writes a lot of things with her husband, Tracy Hickman, who is best known by me for his Dragonlance books, which are great), then proceeded to run around like a chicken with its head cut off because my printer ran out of EVERYTHING at midnight last night and I was three copies short of the manuscript excerpt I needed to participate in said group.  I have to say that the only reason I brought anything to share was because my mom and my friend Diane insisted, but even as I made those copies, I had no intention of having anything of mine read in front of a real author or a bunch of strangers.

At 9:30 the conference officially started off with a huge author panel led by Shannon Hale.  She is hilarious, and I'm grateful that came before the critique sessions, as it gave me a little bit of time to get used to the idea of being in a room with so many famous people and unwind.

Next were critiques.  Lucky for me, I felt a great deal of social pressure to pass my pages when everyone else did.  And you know what?  It wasn't so bad.  Everyone was really nice and I got a lot of constructive comments.  Long story short, I did not pass out.  I also really enjoyed being able to hear snippets from other aspiring authors.  There's a lot of talent out there.

I ate lunch with some girls from my critique group (which was all girls, by the way, and so was about 80% of the conference).  It was amazing to be able to talk to other writers.  Lunch may actually have been the most beneficial part of conference, as me and a few of the other girls exchanged contact info to form a critique group!  Yay!

After lunch were the workshops, which were great, especially considering that I've never taken a creative writing class in my life.  There were four, and even though they were an hour each the time went by fast because the speakers were so good. Also they gave us cookies in between, so that helped.  Then they wrapped up all the official stuff and had a book signing.  Of course, I'm too broke to buy the twenty hardcovers I wanted, but I took my Kindle instead and asked a few of them to sign the case.

Have fun deciphering!  Just kidding.  Starting at the center top and going counterclockwise:
Brandon Sanderson, Bree Despain, Lisa Mangum, Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman, and Shannon Hale.

All in all, I had an awesome time.  Perhaps it was due to the fact that yesterday my children were the devil and I just needed a break, but I think that was only part of it.  Being able to talk about writing all day and (the most of the awesome of all) meeting people, both aspiring writers like me and well-established authors, made it unforgettable.  Seriously, it was a lot of fun, and I can't wait to go to my next conference!

One last thought: if you live in Utah and want to be a writer (or meet a bunch of awesome ones) you should go to this!  I'm pretty sure they do it every year and it's well worth the registration fee!  Here's a link to the official site and 100% of the registration money goes towards buying books for kids who don't have any!

It's a Girl! Again!

Well, as Kristin pointed out in the comments of my last post, I definitely didn't update my blog "tomorrow."  Probably because, to be completely honest, I was dealing with a bit of disappointment.  I've said that if this baby was girl #3 we'd be done having kids but if the baby were a boy I'd be open to trying again to see if we could give him a brother (and we'd end up with three girls maximum anyway).  

My entire life I have expected to be the mother of both daughters and sons, or at least one of each.  If I had two boys, I would have hoped that baby #3 would be a girl.  I know that raising boys is different from raising girls, and I desperately wanted both experiences.  At the same time, I've always known that I am not meant to be the mother of a large number of children (my definition of "a large number" is  "more than four").

So when we got the ultrasound and found out that we were having our third girl, I didn't really want to talk about it.  I found that I was actually grieving for the son I will never have (barring accidents), which was weird, since he'd never existed in the first place.  At the same time, I have to emphasize that I was never sad about the baby herself.  I never questioned that I would love her, and I will never resent any of my girls for not being boys.  They are each their own person, and I love them for who they are.  I should also mention that Will thought I was silly for being sad about having three girls, since I get a lot of questions about it.  He's never cared about the gender of our kids, only that they're healthy.

Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there to explain why It's been such a long time since I've blogged.  Now, of course, I'm excited at the idea of another daughter and I can't wait to meet her.  Having three girls will be crazy and amazing!

-------------------------

On a related note: after much deliberation, HOURS combing through baby name websites, and nagging Will within an inch of his life, we've decided to name her Kairi Jordan (KYE-ree).  We're still trying to decide between Jordan and Jordyn.  Jordan is a family name, but Will thinks Jordyn is more feminine.  I agree, but I worry that since her first name is already going to be... difficult (I'm sure she'll go through life being called "Carrie") I wonder if we should mess with interesting spellings.  Also I worry that the "y" might make her seem a little... fluffy to people who read her name before they know her.  There's a poll up, so vote on which you like best!

Tomorrow, tomorrow!

That was me singing "Annie" in my head, because tomorrow is the day we find out the sex of baby #3!  I'm getting excited and really, really hoping the baby cooperates, because I can't wait 20 more weeks to find out (no matter how fun you say it is, Jana)!  If it's a boy, there are some sales I need to start hitting...

Anyway, that's all.  Just a quick post because I'm procrastinating going to the grocery store, which I really shouldn't put off any longer.  I'll post tomorrow and let you all know how things turn out!

Things I've said to Joci

Some things I've said or shouted at my 1 and 3/4 year old daughter:

Regarding her creative development:

"Everything in the house is NOT your canvas!"

"No 'pop pop' dances on the table!"

Regarding exercise:

"The top bunk is not for base jumping or running track!"

Regarding cuisine and dining:

"We don't eat money.  Not literally."

"Get out of the toilet!"

"Please don't spit that on the ground."

"No thank you, you eat your ramen with root beer broth.  Mommy is full."

"Lincoln logs are not for eating."

Regarding ownership:

"Seeing/touching/hiding/shouting "mine!" fifty times at something does not make it yours."

Is there anything you've said to someone lately that you never thought you'd say?

Mess maker, mess maker, make me a mess!

Since becoming a mom, I often sing those words to the tune of "Matchmaker" from Fiddler on the Roof.  It helps keep me cheerful while doing something I hate (cleaning).  My kids love it so much that they make sure I have an opportunity to sing it at least a dozen times every day.

Motherhood is full of joys.  Last night was so joyful that Will and I both decided not to sleep!  Thank you, fever, for making Joci so much fun!  She was so much fun that she didn't go to bed until 7am!  Then when she woke up at noon, she was even more fun!  Her laughter sounded so much like continuous, angry screaming that our neighbors were probably very confused!  Blogging with no sleep is amazing!

Sigh.  Oh well, now she's feeling better.  She's wearing one of Will's shoes and has his hat on backwards and is talking to herself in the mirror.  Now she's sticking her face into a bowl and talking.  I would totally take a picture for you guys, but I can't find my camera battery charger and the thing has been dead for over a month.  It's so weird how something can be so difficult and yet so beyond description awesome as parenthood.  Sorry this post is so bizarre.  I'm going to put it up anyway!