On Tuesday night we found out that our niece, Allison, passed away after being hit by a car while she was riding her bike. It came as quite a shock, and all of us are feeling very sad about it. It's hard to believe it. You never expect that kind of thing to happen. Even though our families are spread throughout the country, I think we all still feel each other's love and support for each other, and especially for Allison's family. I've been doing a lot of pondering about the Atonement of Jesus Christ since we heard the news. I thought about what Elder Oaks said in his talk in General Conference in May. When we heard that she had been in the accident, I know all of us had enough faith that God could heal her. But for some reason that wasn't what was supposed to happen. Sometimes we have to suffer in this life, because if it was all happy and easy we wouldn't be able to learn and grow from our trials and sorrows. I thought about Alma 40:11: "the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body . . . are taken home to that God who gave them life." Allison's parents were married in the temple and their family is sealed together, and I know that one day they will be reunited with her, never more to part. And I know that Christ has the power to raise Allison from the dead through resurrection, and that one day he will do it. I know that Christ loves Allison, and all of us. That is why he suffered in Gethsemane, and that is why he died and was resurrected--because he loved us so much that he was willing to make that sacrifice so that we would have repentance and forgiveness available to us and so that we could all be resurrected. I have no doubt that these things are true. It makes a lot of things seem much less important when you remember what this life is really about, and what we have the potential to become.

another haircut

No, sadly, I still haven't gotten a haircut.

Saturday I cut Ryan's hair for the first time. Following the instructions that came with the clippers, I began with a 6 on the bottom near his neck, then tried the 7 a little higher up. All I could think was that it looked really strange and I had no idea what I was doing. Then we realized how long Ryan's hair was on top and decided to do an 8 there. I ended up doing an 8 all over his head, and then redoing the 6 and 7 and doing things around the ears and taking off the neck hair. Next time I'm going to ignore the instructions and just start with the 8 in the first place. Once it was all a manageable length, it was much easier. Considering that it was my first time giving a haircut, I think it turned out pretty nicely. And, best of all, he didn't go to the barbershop and get his hair cut 1/8 of an inch long like he normally does (which is why we bought the clippers).

Ryan is great. There was no worrying about me messing up his hair or not doing a good job. I guess we figured that the worst thing that could happen would be that we would have to just cut it all 1/8 of an inch long, which is what he would have asked the barber to do anyway. I'm grateful that he's so supportive. Honestly, it wasn't me saying I wanted to try cutting his hair and Ryan being reluctant. It was Ryan saying it was time for a haircut and me being scared to death that I'd ruin it and he'd hate it.

Tiny hairs all over the bathroom counter provided a good excuse to clean the counter. I'm always amazed at how little time it takes if I just make myself do it.

Ryan refuses to cut my hair. If people are impressed by my long hair, maybe they don't realize that I haven't had it cut at all since a month before Kevin was born. Other things just seem more important, and I still need to find somewhere better than Supercuts without spending more than $30.

I also managed to vacuum on Saturday. It would be a much faster process if I didn't have to deal with Kevin throwing toys all over the floor as fast as I try to pick them up, because then I could clear the floor and vacuum it and be done.

In a Don Aslett book I read a long time ago, he talked about how you should clean your bathroom and vacuum the floor every day. In some ways it makes sense because if you do it every day it would be a quick process. I learned pretty quickly when I worked as a custodian at BYU that you don't have to mow the carpet every time you vacuum--most days you can just get the visible stuff. But I still feel like I would be a slave to the housework if I tried to do it that way.

God sees things differently

During my senior year of high school, I had a lot of great experiences and opportunities. I was very busy. To name a few things, I was preparing for a senior recital, taking oboe lessons (which was made possible by a scholarship that paid for my lessons, books, and reeds), playing in a community symphony, learning an oboe piece for the Idaho state solo event, applying for scholarships, and taking the most difficult classes my high school offered. So I knew it was a little crazy when for some reason I felt like I should also participate in the Miss Kimberly scholarship pageant. I knew it would be a big time commitment. But looking back I think there was some encouragement from the Holy Ghost involved. So I did the Miss Kimberly pageant too. I worked very hard to prepare for it. The night of the pageant came, and all of us girls had a really good time presenting it all.

I didn't get a single award. All of us had become good friends and we had such a good time that I drove home feeling happy because it had been a good experience and a fun evening. But I was trying really hard not to feel disappointed. I had kind of been expecting to get the Talent award, and I was really confused when another girl's performance of the first page of Fur Elise was more impressive to the judges than my piano piece, which was more difficult than Fur Elise. But like I said, we had all become friends, and I wasn't bitter against any of the girls who had won awards. Mostly I was wondering if it had been pointless to even participate. I was wondering why I had bothered to do the pageant, especially when I was working on so many other things that I felt were more valuable experiences to me (largely because I had been given so many amazing opportunities to develop my talents on the oboe and piano that year).

And here is where I am reminded of the men in Zion's camp, who walked miles and miles every day  and got sick and endured hunger and fatigue, expecting to be able to fight to save the people in Missouri, and then when they arrived Joseph Smith received a revelation and learned that they were not to fight. Well, was it worth it to go? Yes. Many of the men that were faithful during Zion's camp became leaders of the church with strong testimonies. They did not take back Zion, but it was a training experience and a test to see who would be faithful despite those hardships. So in the Lord's eyes, yes, Zion's camp was worth it.

I don't want to compare the Miss Kimberly pageant to Zion's camp, because my experience wasn't nearly as difficult as Zion's camp. But what I gradually realized was that even though I didn't get any awards and didn't even feel that I had learned very much from the experience, God saw things differently. Just as for Zion's camp, he had different motives for me than what I had expected.

Soon after the pageant was over, I realized that things had changed between me and one of the other girls who had participated. We had silently been rivals for several years, probably since elementary school. We were both very good students and also talented musically. It didn't make a lot of sense, because she was a singer, and I played the piano and oboe. How can you have a competition to see if one person is better at singing than the other is at playing the piano? It's not that we hated each other. We never fought or gossiped about each other. It was just this silent tension that I often felt. If the choir teacher asked me to sing a part for the alto section, I sensed that this girl was feeling a little resentful towards me over in the soprano section. But somehow, working together and spending time together as we got ready for the Miss Kimberly pageant changed our feelings towards each other. We enjoyed talking to each other, and I didn't feel like I had to write a better essay than she did for AP English.

So the reason it was worthwhile for me to be in the Miss Kimberly pageant was because it helped this girl and me to forgive each other and become friends. All of that effort and memorizing and practicing was not so I could become more confident or be a better public speaker or become passionate about my platform topic. It was so that this girl and I could have an opportunity to change our relationship.

Overcoming this problem also helped prepare me to go to BYU. I remember when I arrived there, it seemed like everyone thought they were talented. They had been in 20 AP classes and had received such and such award for playing the piano and they were in the madrigal choir at their high school and had played the lead in the school play and on and on. And then after a few weeks, a lot of these people were devastated because they realized that everybody else did the same thing and is just as talented. Well, I think that learning to respect my friend from the Miss Kimberly pageant, and being able to wish her well in her musical career without having to compare myself to her, prepared me to go to BYU with a more humble attitude. It didn't matter so much to me if I was better at the piano, or if I was a better singer, or if I got a better grade than someone else. My worth doesn't depend on being better than someone else, and I didn't feel a need to prove to people that I was smart or talented.

So even though at the end of the pageant I was asking myself if it was worth it to participate, God knew how to make it a valuable experience for me. It wasn't awards or admiration or getting skills of some kind that made it valuable to me. God had more eternal lessons in mind for me to learn. "The world" might look at the time I spent on the pageant and say, "Look, you didn't get anything. You didn't get any awards, you didn't learn anything, and in the end it cost you a lot of time that you could have spent applying for scholarships or doing homework." But God looks at all that hard work and says, "Look at the results of your labors. You forgave someone. You learned to want her to succeed. You learned to be humble and recognize that you don't have to compare yourself to other people to feel good about yourself." In God's perspective, those lessons are truly valuable and worth the effort I put into the pageant.

a website I like

Project Vote Smart

I used this website for the last election to help me make educated votes. My favorite tool on the website is the Political Courage Test. Candidates are given questions about their positions on key issues. If they respond with definite answers, they get a good score on the political courage test. I find it very useful because it requires candidates to be straightforward about their positions. Many people who run for political positions are so vague about issues that are really important, so I love that this is a way for me to see if a candidate is willing to give a definite opinion and find out what that opinion is. The candidates will also sometimes have comments to explain why they have a certain opinion or how they would solve a specific problem.

Project Vote Smart also provides other information, such as how a candidate voted on a bill, statements a candidate has made, and which interest groups they support or don't support.

For the last election, once I had a sample ballot from the Daily Tar Heel (with all of the Democrats' bubbles already filled in--thanks, but I'll think for myself on this one), I looked up all of the people on Project Vote Smart. For the people who weren't on Project Vote Smart (or who declined to take the political courage test), I googled their name to find their website and other resources about them. I ended up voting for some Democrats and some Republicans, and for some I didn't vote. It felt good to cast my vote and know that I had put some effort into my choices. The political courage test on Project Vote Smart was helpful in speeding up the process because a lot of the information I wanted about the candidate was right there on one page.

I think it's interesting and really annoying that UNC and NCSU both send me spam. They've passed my email address on to all the apartment complexes and stores around. I can't think of any other way that those people could have gotten my email address.

There's a girl and a guy in my mineralogy class who act like they're dating, or at least working toward that point. I personally wish they would stop sitting by me so that I could actually get a partner to work with on the in class exercises (because they obviously always pick each other).

Sunday we found out that our stake is changing the boundaries for several wards, including ours. I was very sad to find that many wise and kind people who I admire are no longer going to be in our ward. We will be more of a student ward than ever now. One thing that is very positive about this is that it sounds like one of the reasons they felt they needed to change the boundaries was because the church is growing here. That is great news.

I remember when I was at BYU it seemed so weird when people in my classes were married and they would talk about their husbands. Now I'm on the other side and I'm the weird married person talking about my husband and my son. I'm sure it's even less common here for undergraduate students to be married, so it's probably really strange when people in my classes find out that I'm married. The other day I was on the bus with Kevin, and a guy from my mineralogy class got on the bus with a friend. He was really surprised to see Kevin on my lap. He said, "You . . . you have a child! Where did he come from?" (At which point his friend slapped his forehead.) I told him he's mine. I always feel like I need to clarify that I'm married and that we were married before we decided to have kids. I probably don't have to feel obligated to explain anything, but I don't like the idea of people making assumptions about me that are completely untrue.

Kevin has recently started trying to feed me. He thinks it's a very fun game. It started a couple of Sundays ago when he started offering me pieces of a blueberry muffin. One day I got to eat some stale cheerios covered in pears and blueberry yogurt. Um . . . yum? At any rate, it's very sweet of him. Sometimes I am very pleased to find that he is "sharing" food that he stole from me.

Kevin is starting to sign "eat." I had practically given up on him ever doing any signs because he just wasn't interested in repeating them, but I guess he finally realized it would be a useful skill in order to communicate his most desperate needs, which of course are food and cheerios. Now he signs "eat" whenever he thinks about it, and I find myself wondering if he's been starving all along or if he just thinks it's fun to be able to ask for food and then actually get it. He also will do the sign for "more," but he kind of seems to think that "more" means cheerios. "All done" looks the same as when he waves hi. He does the sign for "eat" and "drink" the same way, which I guess is understandable because when your hands are that small the signs do kind of look the same. It's fun that he has a way of communicating without whining, though. I think he will like it. Lately I kind of figured it wouldn't be too long before he started saying words or signing, because it's been getting very frustrating for him to not be able to tell us what he wants.

The things he is learning lately have been really amazing. He has really developed a lot both physically and mentally in the last couple of months.

Kevin loves to bang on the keyboard and click with the mouse, and somehow he actually seems to manage to do things . . . like make my emails disappear. A few weeks ago he somehow changed the language on the computer to Finnish. He also discovered a neat trick for us. We already knew that if you press Ctrl+F then you can search for words on a page. But if you want to close that bar on the bottom of the page you have to click the X. But there is a Quick Find, which you bring up by pressing the / button and then typing what you want to search for. And if you don't type anything for a while, it just disappears. Kevin figured out how to do that for us, just by banging on the computer.

On Sunday morning Kevin sat on my lap and ate my oatmeal with me. It was a sweet moment. I found myself thinking we were experiencing a bit of Heaven. Things got sweeter when he got his hand in the brown sugar and ate a handful.

Then I came in here to add that little moment to this post, and as I typed it, Kevin stood here right beside me drawing on the desk with a permanent green marker. So sneaky. I had no idea he was doing that. (By the way, rubbing alcohol works great for removing permanent marker from surfaces.)

When Kevin goes to sleep at night he likes to suck his left thumb and hold a blanket with the same hand. Sometimes he goes and gets his blanket and asks to be put to bed. Okay, Linus.

I've been trying to implement a new rule where we only eat at the table. We always eat meals at the table. I've been finding lately that even though it may be convenient to just hand Kevin a cracker and let him loose, or give him a bowl of something to eat by the kitchen gate so he's happy while I'm trying to make dinner, it seems to cause a lot of hassle. At least if Kevin throws his food at the table, it's only at the table. This afternoon we came in from playing at the playground and I was going to give Kevin some Cheerios as a snack, but he threw the Cheerios all over the floor, and then as I was trying to pick them up he got ahold of the box and dumped the entire box all over the floor and was running his hands all through those trying to scatter them everywhere. Well, I decided he had earned a time out in his crib. And I picked up the Cheerios and put them back in the box. It was a pain. Every time I forget and let Kevin eat somewhere other than the table, I regret it. So even if it's just to eat a cracker, I've decided that it's got to happen at the table. If he really is hungry, then it shouldn't bother him to eat in his seat.

on working really hard without having much to show for it

Written yesterday:

I accomplished a lot today. But for some reason I just feel discouraged. I had a lot of things I needed to do today. I had my mineralogy class this morning, which was fun, and then I had an appointment half an hour away in Hillsborough, after which I wanted to go to the library, see if there was anything good at the PTA thrift shop, get some money out of my bank account, get some things that were on sale at Kroger and Harris Teeter, and then try to catch up on my Calculus and make some bread before bedtime. We got to Hillsborough, the library, the bank, and Harris Teeter, but by the time we were done at Harris Teeter I knew we had to come home. Kevin was bored to tears and kept throwing the frozen vegetables on the floor, and he screamed much of the way home. At the library he was throwing books everywhere, faster than I could put them away, and in my head I was feeling like such a hypocrite because I was a library aide in fifth grade and eighth grade and I hated it when people just stuffed books wherever instead of putting them where they belong or at least giving them to a librarian to reshelf. That's how books disappear. At least they were still on the right shelf, right? And all of that was for me to pick up one book on CD to listen to in the car. At the bank he kept trying to run out the doors. It's kind of odd, because normally I know better than to try to get that much done when I've brought Kevin with me. For some reason I just planned out the whole trip and figured all the little stops wouldn't make much difference, but of course they did. Before Kevin was born I could do that. I could stop at the PTA thrift shop, then Goodwill, then Kroger, then the library, then the bank, and so on. And then when he was born I would very carefully plan my grocery shopping trips. I knew that I had to get everything planned and packed and ready while he was napping so that I could feed him as soon as he woke up and then go straight to the store, and I knew that I had about an hour to get it all done before he couldn't stand it anymore. It's better now because he can be awake for longer than that, but now the problem is that he won't hold still because he's bored. I may have to start getting groceries late at night after Ryan gets home and we have dinner so that I don't have to bring Kevin, but I don't want to because it's dark and it's late and I'd rather be with Ryan and all the good deals are out of stock.

I came home and felt like complaining that I didn't get anything done today.

It makes me think of something a friend of mine blogged about recently. She talked about how the best things are not convenient. Being a mother isn't terribly convenient, but it's still worth the effort and the challenges.

Continued today:

One of the reasons I was so disappointed that I didn't get everything done was because I had been planning to buy milk at Kroger (oh, and also Butterfingers). We've been going without milk for four or five days because I didn't have time to go grocery shopping between conference and Sunday and having class all afternoon on Monday. It was a lesson for us about what we would do in an emergency where we couldn't go to the store for a while, and it kind of makes me think that maybe we should try to get used to drinking powdered milk so that eating cold cereal with powdered milk will be possible (which it isn't right now, at least not for me).

So this morning I woke up and realized that we had no milk, so we couldn't have cereal for breakfast, and we had no bread because we finished it off yesterday and I didn't have time to make more because of the other errands. So I made muffins, and they were yummy. It made me feel good because muffins require milk and eggs, and yet I didn't have to use a single perishable item to make the muffins. Everyday emergencies happen. Store powdered milk and powdered eggs.

I had no measuring cups except a 1/3 cup and a 1/4 cup to use to make the muffins. But fortunately, I am somewhat advanced in math and I know how to make 2 1/2 cups from 1/3 and 1/4 cups.

To my credit, we did a lot of baking this weekend and the measuring cups were all in the dishwasher, but the dishwasher wasn't quite full yet so we hadn't started it. So we actually are doing something right. But I do generally feel that for some reason I just can't keep up with the dishes, and the scarier the pile is, the harder it is to bring myself to attack it. Even if I just cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom yesterday, there always seems to be a pile of dishes waiting to be washed. Those dishes are my mortal enemy that won't die. Maybe they're slowly working on me, getting me tireder and tireder so that one day they can attack and easily defeat me.

Well, this morning I finished up those muffins and popped them in the oven, and then I turned and stared at that pile in the sink, and I thought, "Okay, this is just wrong. I just used that bowl for popcorn, so why did I let it sit there and get filled with spaghetti sauce water?" This is a perfect example of a little word that I learned from Don Aslett: "procrustination." [sic] [or sick] It would have taken me ten seconds to wash that bowl, but because I decided that it could wait, I ended up have to spend much longer and use much more soap because it was so procrustinated. [sic/sick] So, as I often do when situations like this arise, I attacked those dishes with a vengeance, and by the time the muffins had cooked, I had managed to get them to retreat. Maybe what those dishes need is to be beaten into submission.

I often think that it would be a very good idea to make a rule for myself that the dishes must be washed or else in the dishwasher ready to be washed before I go to bed at night. Think of the freedom I would experience every morning if I woke up to an empty sink.

You probably fall into one of two groups of people. The first group is rolling their eyes and can't believe how silly I am. The second group is secretly thinking, "I can totally relate." The first group may be thinking that also. I hope both are still my friends.

In my defense, sometimes it's hard to get to the dishes when you know that if you focus on the dishes the rest of the house will be trashed while you're up to your elbows in soapy water. Sometimes I find myself washing dishes while Kevin is strewing all the clean dishes from the lower cupboards all over the floor. Seems a little counterproductive . . . which is an interesting word for me to use in this context since I'm being productive at the level of the counter while Kevin is making a mess at the ground level.