"sublime"d Cool Whip and stale(r) croutons

We had Thanksgiving with a huge group of friends this year. One of the things we signed up for was the salad (because even though nobody really eats salad for Thanksgiving, you still to have one or it would feel kind of weird). Salads for holiday dinners need to be nice, so of course we bought some croutons to put on the salad. Croutons from Costco. So we now have a huge bag of croutons.

When I was growing up, croutons were for very special occasions. I always wanted to just get a handful of croutons and just eat them plain, but my mom generally said I couldn't. Croutons are for salad. Not just any salad--special salad.

So now I have a huge bag of croutons, but I feel like I can't just eat them plain even though I'd like to. Croutons are for salad. Special salad. So I feel like I need to save them for special salads.

I explained this to Ryan, and he said, "I know. That's why I'm eating them. Because if we don't eat them, then they'll just sit in the pantry and go staler than they already are."

This led to a comparison to what happens to Cool Whip in families that don't use it very often and save it for special occasions. The special occasion just never comes up because they don't use Cool Whip, and then several months later there is freezer burned Cool Whip in the freezer and it gets thrown away. Or there's a mysteriously empty container of Cool Whip that still has the plastic seal around the lid. (This is a process called sublimation, where solids go directly to the gaseous phase. It really happens--watch the snow disappear even when it's never gotten warm enough for it to melt.)

So we made an executive decision, and the executive decision was that we are going to eat our croutons--plain, on our salads at dinner every night, whatever. It will be hard. We may feel guilty at first for being too casual with our croutons. But that seems better than letting perfectly good croutons go stale(r).

True story: My mineralogy professor accidentally dropped a white board marker on his white sweater and then in his frustration he rubbed the eraser all over it (for dramatic effect, I think). Next time we were in class, he informed us that the sweater had been ruined. So then it occurred to me to send an email to him with the subject line "saving your sweater" and suggest that he try rubbing alcohol, hairspray, or oxyclean. He thought it was so hilarious that he was receiving laundry advice from a student (and said he would try it). What can I say--I'm not just a student, I'm also a mother.

I think I'm finally starting to get a better perspective about why I'm really supposed to be in school. I've been a straight A student since 9th grade, and I largely attribute this to all the effort that I put into studying and doing my schoolwork. But this semester I am starting to find that straight A's may not be a possibility for me anymore. It's been really tough this semester to not have a lot of time to study. It's really hard to get much done when Kevin is awake, and by the time he's in bed I don't have a lot of mind power left to study. I'm also taking some really hard classes, and a good portion of the rest of the classes I will have to take are also very difficult classes. It's also been very frustrating to walk out of tests feeling very confident that I got a good grade, only to get the test back and find that I didn't get a very good grade, and all the points I lost were due to dumb mistakes, not because I don't understand the material.

But one thing I'm finally starting to realize is that it doesn't really matter if I get perfect grades in my classes. Even if I don't get A's this semester, that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. Honestly, I think this semester has been the most uplifting one of my college career, and I have never learned as much in any semester as I have learned this semester. And because of that, breaking my 4.0 isn't as devastating as I thought it would be. I'm still an intelligent person, I still understand the material, I still did my best, and I'm still getting a lot out of my education.

The other reason it doesn't bother me is that I have a better understanding of what this life is about, and even though it's important to learn as much as I can while I am here, my grades are not going to be a factor in whether I receive exaltation. Maybe the world cares about that kind of thing, but God doesn't because he knows what the desires and intentions of my heart are. He knows how to judge me fairly and impartially and he sees me as a person of worth.

Something I hear all the time is, "You're so lucky to get to go to school right now. I miss being in school so much. If I could go back to school, I would really treasure the opportunity. I would work really hard to get good grades and get as much out of my classes as I could."

It's a very good point. It really is a blessing to be able to go to school, to have an opportunity to keep my mind bright and to prepare to get a good job if I were to ever need to work and to learn more about the way this earth works.

I have a hard time keeping that in mind. Honestly, I'm really tired of being in school. This is my fifth year of being in college, and by the time I'm done I will have been working on a bachelor's degree for at least seven years. I'm tired of deadlines and going to lectures and having tons of homework and readings to do all the time. I'm tired of having to put studying before having a clean house and clean laundry. I would really prefer to be simply a stay at home mom, not a mom who's trying really hard to live like a stay at home mom even though I'm actually a mom going back to school. And then I would have time to pursue other interests I have, like music and sewing and cooking and reading.

But despite my frustrations, I do still feel I need to keep going. I have some really great opportunities right now. I get to do things I never would have expected, like look at very thin slices of rocks through a microscope and learn how to identify the minerals that way. Those are things I probably couldn't learn on my own--I just don't have access to that kind of equipment. And as stressful as all the homework deadlines and tests are, I know that if I were to try to learn these things on my own time I would not move through them nearly so fast. I'm learning a lot more in a smaller amount of time than I would if I were just doing it independently. And even though I complain, I do like it. It is making me a better person, and I have felt the Spirit as I study. I will sure treasure my degree when I have finally graduated.

It's been a while since I blogged, but now that I've got a couple of tests out of the way I'm going to make an attempt to catch up--I have five recent blog posts that I started but never finished.

Here's a really long post about what Kevin's been doing lately. I wonder if our future children's lives will get even a fraction of the documentation that Kevin's life has had.

Kevin learned that trick where you use your fingers to pluck your lips and make that Bbbbb, Bbbbb, Bbbbb sound. I am doing a horrible job of describing it, but I have no idea what it's called.

He will also sometimes "tell" us that his diaper needs changed. Or, if he has access to his diaper, he will even try to do it himself. Which is why I love jeans on toddlers.

His favorite book is Moo, Baa, La La La by Sandra Boynton. He loves the animal sounds and asks us to read the book again and again. It didn't take too long for us to memorize it. Any book with animal sounds is interesting to him. He doesn't repeat the sounds, but he does like to hear them. He also asks for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Big Red Barn multiple times a day.

Kevin likes to pick up books and "read" them aloud, which is very cute. Once I let him go to bed with a book, and when he woke up I heard him reading to himself in bed. And, knowing that most people do not get the privilege of enjoying Kevin's cuteness as I do, I was even thoughtful enough to do a video of it. (You do not need to watch the whole thing. A couple of minutes will be enough to see him read and jump on the bed a couple of times.)

He is becoming more interested in the process of getting dressed. He will try to put on shirts or shoes and socks.

He knows where his nose, ears, mouth, and head are. I didn't even know he could understand that, but Ryan taught him how and he learned quickly.

Here is a long video. Do not watch it all the way through. It is seven minutes long and mostly consists of boring stuff. But here are some cute parts to skip to:

• The beginning where he is bouncing the ball is cute. Running towards the door and then bouncing the ball off of it is one of his favorite games.
• At about 1:43 he suddenly figures out how to spin in circles.
• At about 4:25 he asks to go to bed.
• At about 5:10 you can hear one of his latest and favoritest vocalizations: "Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh!"
• And the rest of the time he plays with the broom, which might be interesting for a little while, but not for nearly two minutes. (He had been doing so many cute things, I was waiting to see if there was anything else!)

And some cute photos:

(He climbed in himself.)

This was Kevin's Halloween costume. He was very cute. We had very grand plans to make a ragged lab coat from an old button up shirt and spike his hair, and he would be a mad scientist or something and we would be his minions. But I got tired and didn't feel up to driving to the PTA thrift shop to try to find a button up shirt, so this was our backup, and we got lots of comments about the cute Krispy Kreme boy. Kevin did a little trick or treating at the ward trunk or treat party, but he got tired early, so we didn't do any actual trick or treating on the day before Halloween, when several friends in our apartment complex had arranged to have trick-or-treating since Halloween was on Sunday this year. (Besides, I was alone with Kevin because RT had gone to be with his family.) I wasn't really planning on taking him trick or treating anyway. I mean, when you have someone knock on your door holding up a 16-month-old, you know perfectly well that the candy is for the parent, not the child. If I want a bucket of candy, I'm going to buy a bag of candy bars, not go around getting a huge collection of hard candy, which I hate.

You know, I could keep our house a lot cleaner if it weren't for Kevin. Back in my premotherhood days, it was so much easier to clean up after a meal. It consisted of maybe wiping some crumbs or a little bit of sauce off the table, and then dishes and such. But now, after every meal, there's so much cleaning to do! There's the high chair tray, there's his seat where a lot of his food fell, there's the chair that the booster seat rests on, there's the plastic mat under his chair, there's the area that the mat doesn't cover, there's the dishes Kevin got dirty, and then of course there's Kevin's entire body and his clothes. By the time I've cooked dinner, I do not have the energy to clean all of that up as well. And then there's the rest of the living room, where Kevin is not content to play unless he's sitting in a pile of books, paper, cords, and toys. And the amount of time spent on any cleaning endeavor is at least tripled if he is around. I've been giving myself a lot of grief over the last few months over having a hard time keeping up with it all, but thinking a little harder about it, maybe I need to give myself a little slack considering how much my housework load has increased (and that I'm also taking two difficult classes). I still need to keep trying, but I guess all that cleaning, after every. single. meal. would be a little intimidating to most people.

Another thing that has been on my mind is all the food that is wasted by children. At any given meal, a good portion of Kevin's food ends up on his clothes or thrown on the floor and can't be rescued. And then there's also the food that I cooked but then couldn't eat because of food aversions when I was pregnant with Kevin. Then again, Kevin also does a very good job of disposing of leftovers.

Kevin's vocabulary has really grown lately. He knows several signs now: eat, drink, more, nurse/milk, all done, and hot. When he signs hot he also blows on his food, which is very cute. It's very convenient that he understands the concept of hot now, because he realizes you have to wait for the food to cool down or it will hurt to eat it.  He has also started saying a couple of new words (which are not terribly recognizable if you don't hear him saying them all the time). He will say thank you when we give him something or put him to bed, and also sometimes if he gives something to us. He will also point up at the shelf where we keep our Scripture Stories books and say "scriptures" (we read to him from those every night--I guess he is getting something from it after all!). He also says Mama and more, and has started saying uh-oh. You probably wouldn't recognize it as uh-oh because he is actually saying mmm-mmm, but he copies the pitches of the sounds and regularly says it when he drops something or he falls. Saying words has been a very recent development and kind of caught me off guard because I didn't think he was interested in that yet. It has been very helpful for him to be able to communicate most of his basic needs to us.

Kevin has been very interested in fine motor activities lately. For example, the other day he was trying to put a lid on a bottle of baby lotion that he had found (it was still sealed, so spilling it wasn't a concern). It was very frustrating for him if he couldn't hold the bottle still and get the lid on just right, but when he got it on he was very pleased with himself and would clap and grin. He also tries to put together the edging tools on the vacuum. It's fun to see the things that he is learning to do, but it's also hard sometimes because when he can't do the things that he wants to do, he gets really mad and yells and screams. But he's also perseverant, and he will generally calm down and try again and again.