I Miss My Husband

Brent has been working 12 hour days lately. He gets up, drags himself to the office, works straight through all the daylight hours, then comes home, grabs a quick dinner, reads me the scriptures, and goes to bed. He's also had to work a few hours on weekends as well.

Last night he came home at 6:45! That is the earliest I've seen him in a long time. Of course, the only reason he was home that early is because he had to teach a merit badge to the scouts at 7:00. Drat those scouts! I think I'm finally rid of them plaguing my life and stinking up my house, and they're back. Plus they steal my husband from me the one night he manages to get home at a reasonable hour.

He will leave on Sunday afternoon for NYC where he will be for three weeks, coming home late Friday nights and leaving again Sunday afternoons. At least I'll see him then. My poor, overworked husband.

I am caught between two emotions: self-pity and sympathy. I feel lonely in the evenings and wait anxiously for his return. I am so exhausted by the end of the day that I just want him to walk in the door and take charge of the baby and clean the kitchen for me. Of course I realize that he's been hard at work all day and would probably like nothing better than to walk in the door to a yummy dinner, a clean house, a loving wife and a happy baby. I try to give that to him, but I don't always succeed.

While I could wallow in the melancholia that this situation often produces in me, I am trying to have a different outlook. I should be grateful that I have a husband that I want to be with. I'm grateful that we love each other enough and have such a good relationship that we miss each other. I'm grateful that he has such a well paying job so that I can stay home with the baby. I'm grateful that he's hardworking and willing to do what's necessary for me to stay home, rather than being an unemployed or underemployed sloth who plays Halo all day long. I am richly blessed, and with that focus I'll get through the next few weeks and potentially months that this will continue.

In the meantime, drop me an email or come visit me so I'm not so lonely, okay?

Book Review: Peter Pan & Wendy

We all know the play or the movie, right? There have been lots of productions of it, and it is a familiar tale. However familiar it is, I had never read the book. The author, J.M. Barrie, wrote the play first and later turned it into a novel. I read it for fun, and it was.

Peter Pan is not my favourite of stories, but it is Brent's. Gee, can you think why he would like a story about a little boy who didn't want to grow up? Any guesses? Hmm, I wonder . . . .

Anyway, it was charming and a quick read. I surprised myself by weeping at the ending. We know that Wendy went back to her parents, and though they offered to adopt Peter, he refused. They settled on an agreement that Wendy would visit Peter once a year to do his Spring cleaning. The next year he came for her. Then he missed a year, and when he did come back to pick her up he had no idea that he had missed the previous time. Then many years went by and the next time Peter showed up at her window, expecting to fly away with her, Wendy was all grown up. Or, as she puts it, was "ever so much more than twenty" and had a daughter of her own.

Peter, as we know is enthralled with this new young girl, Jane, and teaches her to fly and she leaves to do his Spring cleaning. The final paragraph reads thus:

"As you look at Wendy you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring-cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless."

I suppose it hit me so hard because I am now all grown up with a daughter of my own. I remember having an imagination so vivid it was almost real. Eventually, alas, the illusions of youth faded, and now I look forward to seeing them be reborn in Jenny. I hope that she too will have a vivid imagination, and that her childhood will be joyous and magical and that she'll believe in fairies.

Favourite Hero

Darcy is inscrutable. Cullen is dangerous. Blythe is the sweetest ever. But Knightly is perfection itself. He's rich, kind, generous, wise, friendly, good, and oh so handsome. I guess that's why he won the poll.

Hey, he reminds me of my own husband! (Especially the oh so handsome part.)

P-Day Fun

Look carefully at the pictures hanging in the apartment and at the haircuts of these four guys. Does this look like four elders having fun on a p-day or what?

Happy Valentine's Day Everyone!

I can't tell you how wonderful it is to be in love on this day and to have that person love me back. I never cared much about Valentine's Day until that glorious one three years ago.

Brent and I had been dating about two weeks. We were both still playing our cards close to the chest, if you know what I mean. That day Brent had tried to plan a special date for us. It was just one disaster after another and was a horribly memorable evening. But in the end it was one of the best nights ever as I read his Valentine to me. In it he translated this Italian poem:

La Vita Nuova

In that book which is my memory
On the first page -
That is the chapter when I first met you -
Appear the words
"Here begins a new life"

- Dante Alighieri

I bet all you girlies reading this are thinking "Ohhhhhhhhhh! How sweet!"

I guess you could say at that point I finally knew how he felt about me and suddenly felt rather embarrassed by the very unromantic and unsentimental book I gave him.

That moment was topped by the next when I leaned over to give him a thank you kiss, and he knocked over the flute of bubbly on the table, dumping it on my dress and shattering the glass all over the place. I screamed and jumped up, and he with chagrin said something like: "Well, at least this disastrous evening will make a good story for our grandchildren." He was just laying it all on the line, wasn't he! Thank heavens he was so open; it was such a refreshing change from all the other guys I'd dated who "just [were]n't that into [me]". (For all you single gals, check out the book "He's just not that into you" from the library. Changed my dating life.)

Well, three years later, I woke up to a pretty pink package on the dining table. Guess what it was?



Yep. He gave me the marauder's map and a set of 5 ornaments: the Hogwarts crest, and the coat of arms for each house. What a sweetie. Anyone who is interested can come over to my house and play with the map. Oh, how I wish it were real!

Hinckley Challenge

There are a bunch of members of the LDS church who are honoring their beloved prophet, President Hinckley, who died at age 97, by reading the Book of Mormon in 97 days. The challenge began on Feb. 4th, to end on May 10th. Even if you are behind, you can still do this! If you want to check it out, go to www.hinckleychallenge.com

Brent & I just started yesterday, so we're a bit behind, but we are excited about the motivation this gives us to read the scriptures more consistently together. It reminds me of when President Hinckley asked the members of the church to read the Book of Mormon before the end of the year. Do you remember the power that we all felt as we joined together as a world-wide membership to accept his challenge?

Here's my chart from the website, to give you an idea of how you can track your progress. Hope you join!

Debate Over (for now)

Does Baby Jenny look more like mommy or daddy? I hear arguments on both sides, but Brent and I have thought she's a pretty good blend of the two of us. Now that has been confirmed by technology!

MyHeritage: Look-alike Meter - Family names - Old pictures

What if Barack Obama and J.K. Rowling were married?

I saw this cool celebrity morph on Jenni's blog of her daugher Emily turning into Tiffani Thiessen and it was so cool! So I went to the website to find my celebrity look-a-likes, and I was disappointed. I didn't get a very high match with anyone particularly flattering (David Hasselhoff, anyone?) so I just picked some for fun. Go check it out, it is so much fun! Here are some examples of the hour I wasted:

Quasimodo

That is about what I looked like Sunday morning. All night Jenny had woken up every hour. At 3:30 she woke up and stayed awake. At about 4:30 I had given up hope of going back to bed and was in the basement watching a movie while Jenny played on the floor as wide awake as could be. I, naturally, was rubbing my eyes, when suddenly it felt like my left eyeball had been dislocated.

I checked it out in the mirror and noticed a gelatinous material oozing around the bottom of my eye. It hurt too bad to open it. I woke up Brent to give him baby duty while I went back to bed and fretted about my eye. When I got up a couple of hours later my eyelids had swollen shut. They were like sausages up to my eyebrow and down to my cheekbone. The white of my eyeball had swollen to the point where it protruded out past my iris. Gross.

Brent took one look at me and said "Two words: Rocky I." I was not looking well, you might say.

We spent the morning in the urgent care facility around the corner from our house. The doctor came in and said "Whoa." Not very comforting. He examined me with several different machines, and the end was basically stumped. He gave me some eye drops and told me to wait 24 hours.

Well, I'm better now. I didn't go blind and I didn't have to have surgery. Both things I was worried about. I, being a classic worrier, immediately jumped to these conclusions. Brent, however, being calm and rational kept me sane in those few scary hours. It's nice to have someone like him to depend on.

Music Time

I just started teaching Kindermusik classes again, and today was my first class. I had a bunch of kids from my neighborhood in it, plus my childhood friend Becca Hodgkinson enrolled her toddler. It was so fun to see her there with her son.

I had a basement full of moms and kids running around. We sang songs, played instruments, danced, played pretend trains, etc. The children adjusted much quicker than I thought they would, and it was a successful class. I'm looking forward to the rest of the semester.

Baby Jenny was angelic the whole time. I put her in her play saucer and she just watched and was perfectly content. That was a bit of a relief, because I wasn't sure how she would respond and if she'd let me teach. She's great during piano lessons, but that's just one kid sitting still, not eight children running around.

Tomorrow I teach an older class, and my niece Noelle will be there. It is so fun to have her and Shelley come for music time on a regular basis. I hadn't realized how much I've missed it, since I stopped teaching once I was too pregnant to get up and down, on and off the floor several times in succession.

It sure is nice finally to be more mobile. The baby is getting more independent, which frees me up. And my body is back to normal (normal for me, anyway) so I have the energy and flexibility I need to teach these classes. I'm grateful for the blessing of falling into a new routine. I thrive under structure, and these classes help with that. There's probably some great metaphor for life in that: something about how keeping the commandments is freeing rather than restricting. Something to ponder another time.