Finishing up the year

And, just like that, 2014 is over.

It went fast. Well, at least December did. This is probably because December can be summed up as follows:
First week: Celebrate Kevin's birthday. Finish getting ready for creche exhibit/concert. Finish organizing and arranging musical numbers. Set up for the concert. Say goodbye to Kevin while he goes off to Montreal. Execute the production. This is how it looked, by the way. So it worked pretty well, and I think it had pretty good turnout, and I don't really know how much I've explained how much went on with it on the blog and I'm not sure that I ever will. (Basically it just followed me around for more than three months and I gradually found myself in charge of everything and really not into delegating since that meant just as much work and waiting.)

Second week: Kevin is gone at his week long conference. I am tired a lot. I have very few memories about this week, but somehow Joseph and I both made it through. The night before I am supposed to accompany the ward choir in church, Joseph spends a few hours throwing up.  I hear that I am not needed after all, but then ten minutes later I find out I am needed after all. The whole episode is so funny to me that I don't even mind having to accompany even though I would have liked to sleep instead.

Third week: Kevin comes home Sunday afternoon right after Joseph threw up for the last time. Hooray for help. We spend the week slowly doing laundry, finishing up take home tests (Kevin, not me), helping with voice recitals (me, not Kevin), getting Christmas plates full of cookies we have no  chance to reciprocate, and packing for our trip beginning Friday to San Diego!

Fourth week: It is sunny and warm in San Diego! We have crazy nonstop fun with Kevin's family visiting beaches, theme parks, zoos, etc. and staying securely on Eastern Time until the last day. (I will probably talk about this more later since it deserves its own blog post.)

Fourth and a half week: We come back home Saturday. Slowly slowly slowly do lots of laundry. Go shopping most every day for one missing item, of course picking up more at the store. Rent our first Redbox movie in more than a year. Disappoint our son daily by not eating restaurant food anymore (although he pretty much only ate tortillas at the restaurants anyway).

And . . . then, here we are. At the end of 2014.

It's been real, yo.

Bring it on, 2015.

Contact

I was recently in charge of a concert/créche exhibit for my ward. There's a lot to say about it that I'll probably talk about in another post, but the thing that was most amusing and frustrating to me throughout it all was how hard it was to get in contact with people.

Gone are the days where you would simply call someone's home phone, count on them answering, and be done with it. Instead, I compiled this list of ways to contact someone and acquire information:

• Email
• Google chat
• Google docs
• Call a home phone
• Call a cell phone
• Text
• Call the spouse's cell phone
• Email the spouse
• Call a home phone and leave a message, when it turns out they were listening to the message all along and then answer as soon as you're done talking
• Send out emails to find someone's home phone number (this was for people who weren't in the ward anymore)
• More google docs
• When trying to submit the event online, create an entire account with the event website simply to send an email into the void
• When trying to track a package, call several different plausible numbers for businesses in a nearby town, only to get redirected multiple times to a completely useless 800 number and a printing company in Virginia
• Talking in person (probably the most effective method, but it also required tracking the person down)

And so on. I generally found that one or two of these methods worked for contacting a given person -- the trick was knowing the most effective method.

(Or, I suppose I could have been like Joseph's dentist's office, which just does them all multiple times. I have gotten at least two emails, one postcard, and two texts. I guess they really don't want me missing his appointment tomorrow.)

At any rate, I think it's safe to say that any phobia I've ever had of calling or emailing people has been entirely eradicated.

Although, I do still have social anxiety about google docs. Don't let me down, anonymous loris.

So much gratitude

With Thanksgiving swiftly approaching, I realized it was time to share what I'm grateful for. Since it's the 26th, I decided to do 26 items -- one per day of November. Because that's when gratitude matters the most.

1. I am grateful I have never mixed up the chili powder and the cinnamon.

2. I am grateful for masking tape.

3. I am grateful Elsa made such a beautiful ice palace.

4. I am grateful Daniel Tiger likes carrots.

5. I am grateful for people who respond to emails, for they shall inherit the earth.

6. I am grateful for people who don't, because it reminds me to respond to emails.

7. I am grateful I have never had a traumatic experience in an elevator, just lots of slow ones.

8. I am grateful there are other fonts besides Comic Sans and Papyrus.

9. I am grateful I haven't played Red Rover in years.

10. I am grateful for penne rigate.

11. I am grateful for clickbait articles, because instead of clicking on them I can just bask in my incredulity. I will never believe what happened next.

12. I am grateful for all of the consonants except C, G, W, and Y because they ruin phonetics.  Q and X are sort of dumb, too.

13. I am grateful I've still made it this far as a parent without buying any Goldfish crackers.

14. I am grateful for sweet potatoes.

15. I am grateful Kevin and I can forgive each other when we lose each other's games of Hearts on the computer.

16. I am grateful the last time I did a group project movie about DNA was never.

17. I am grateful I have never gotten injured curling ribbon with scissors.

18. I am grateful that there are books in the library about construction vehicles, because I was starting to get embarrassed that I was calling everything a bulldozer.

19. I am grateful that Joseph has learned the names quickly, because hearing him say, "Look, there's a trackhoe" or "Is that a compactor?" is kind of the best thing ever.

20. I am grateful for Internet that does not hog the phone line.

21. I am grateful that tie-dye isn't part of my life.

22. I am grateful for tupperware that is all the same size so I don't have to worry if the lids are going to fit.

23. I am grateful my keyboard doesn't have scroll lock.

24. I am grateful that Wikipedia has synopses of TV shows and movies I never plan to see so I can stay well versed in pop culture.

25. I am grateful for ligaments. And other parts of the body too.

26. I am grateful for Thanksgiving, so I can remember all these things I am grateful for.

A couple of Joseph quotes

Sorry I haven't posted much here lately. It's been pretty stressful (most of it self-inflicted, but some of it not . . . long story). So, I've got lots to catch up on at some point.

But in the meantime, here are a couple of things Joseph has said lately to keep us smiling:

K: "Joseph, what does your shirt say?"
J: "You need to go potty." I asked him again a couple of other times, and each time that's what he said. I have no clue why. His shirt actually said "Boy Genius."

(While walking home in the cold)
J: "It needs to stop winding. It needs to slow down." I totally agreed.

(While playing with hangers and having them interact with each other)
J: "The blue hanger is a good friend."

(While watching this old Divine Comedy video)
J: "We don't run in roads."

(I've let myself get worked up over most everything lately, and I think it shows)
J: (kisses me on the cheek) "Now you feel better, right?"

(While just Joseph and I were home)
J: "It's snowing outside, right Daddy? Right Kevin?" (In a low voice) "Right."

(Pretty much daily . . .)
J: "He (some stuffed animal, or his hands, or something else) needs to go into time out! He needs to take a nap!" Incidentally, neither Kevin nor I can even remember the last time he had a time out, so we have no idea where this game is coming from.
.
And . . . there are so many other great quotes all the time. He is astonishingly good at playing by himself right now, and I love hearing the simple stories he makes up. Last night, his hands were interacting with each other, reminding each other to share.

It's also cute how he is a little self-conscious about it, as any self-respecting child would be. "Stop smiling at me!" "Stop looking at me!" Can't say I blame him.

Pretty much, he is just great.

A hymn I wrote

Today, the ward choir performed "Let the Glory of the Lord," a song I wrote. It has been so exciting to hear people practice it and perform it. I decided that it would be sort of fun to explain the story of the song.

First, here are the lyrics:

Let the glory of the Lord

Enter in my seeking soul

Let it bring a mighty change

May it heal and make me whole.

Let the blood which from thee flowed

Cleanse my hands, refine my heart.

Let thy grief upon the cross

Give my soul a joyous start.

Let my heart be free of pride,

Meek enough to follow thee,

Let me cast off all my sins,

Leave no darkness found in me

Let my soul be filled with love,

Growing in thy truth and grace,

Let thy light in me abide

Show thy image in my face.

Let thy glory clothe my soul,

May it cover and protect,

Let me know thy love’s embrace

May I feel its full effect.

Let me then be one with thee

Safe in thee from sin’s demands,

Let this sealing be secure,

Etched into thy holy hands.

Q: Why did you write this hymn?
A: I think there were a lot of things that contributed to its creation. I think the first was one time in March when Kevin and I were driving back from the temple and I basically said that I didn't understand the temple any better than I did within a few months of being endowed. Because we weren't able to make it as often as we did when we were childless and 5 minutes away, I had sort of lost the ability to consistently get new insights the way I had previously. And, I wanted that back.

The next thing was the General Women's Meeting at the end of March. There were lots of talks about covenants, and I felt like I was missing something. I actually took the question to Facebook and got a lot of awesome responses, and those helped.

Another thing that influenced me was hearing a recent convert speak at an "I'm a Mormon" devotional. She described how being baptized had brought God into her heart. I loved that imagery, and I wondered how that fit into covenants.

The final thing happened in May when my friend Sarah, the music chair, told me that if I ever wrote a song she would use it as a musical number. That day, as soon as I got home from church and got Joseph down for a nap, I sat on the couch with my laptop, and all the ideas that had been swimming around for a few months just spilled out onto the screen. Just like that, it was there. Over the next few weeks and months, I tweaked things here and there, trying to get rid of cliches while creating a stronger narrative, but the main idea came back in May. In a lot of ways, writing the song gave me answers both about covenants and about what the temple means to me.

Q: What do the lyrics mean?
A: I don't know if I could parse it line by line, but here are some scriptures and ideas that influenced me. You can probably see where they fit in.
D&C 93 (basically all of it)
Psalms 24:3-4
Romans 5 (basically all of it)
Alma 5 (particularly verses 14, 19, and 26-28)
Kafar
D&C 88:50
Isaiah 49:16


Q: How did you come up with the melody?
A: I originally was planning on using an old hymn tune from here. I mean, why reinvent the wheel when there are so many great melodies we don't use?

But after looking through some of them, I realized that I needed to make it my own. For a while I was stuck here because the only melody I could come up with that I liked was from Lord of the Rings -- the gorgeous Shire song. I tried to make different melodies, but when I played them back they didn't work. Finally I decided I could still use a melody somewhat similar to the Lord of the Rings one, and once I had that the rest of the song basically fell into place.

This isn't exactly related to the lyrics or the melody, but this old talk by President Packer influenced me a fair amount in setting the mood for the hymn as well as providing motivation for writing it. (It also reminds me to not be a temperamental musician, which I often become without constant vigilance.)

Q: Is there anything you would change about it?
A: There are notes within the harmonies that I would tweak, chords that I would rearrange, etc. I like the words now, but it wouldn't surprise me if I came up with something better here or there if I thought about it more. Kevin pointed out to me that people whose music makes it into the hymnbook probably feel the same way.

I do wish there was a bit more of an outward focus in the song. It's about bringing God into our hearts, but not really about what we do once He's there. At one point I did have a half a verse that was more outward focused:

Let me then join in thy work

Bringing souls into thy care

Let me succor as thou would

Make me ever more aware.

It didn't fit with the rest of the song, and I couldn't adapt it to fit, so it's not currently part of it, but maybe it will make it back in.

Q: Why are there so many key changes in the choir version?
A: I feel like certain keys bring out certain moods, and I needed to get back to those keys to capture those moods. But to get there, sometimes you have to go around the circle of fifths a bit. In retrospect, I don't know that going from D to F to E to E flat is the best, because you have to fit in 4 or 5 other keys to make the transitions work. But it was cool. I felt like I was channeling my inner Mack Wilberg.

So, there you have it. My first big choir number. Feel free to use it (or any of the versions of it [no promise of no typos]) for noncommercial church or home use.

Covert Operation

The other night, Joseph was playing downstairs while Kevin and I finished dinner, and we noticed something. He was having a conversation with himself!

Except, of course, it wasn't just himself who was having the conversation. It was him with all of his cars, chatting about who knows what, all of it very politely.

Ever since then, I've been dying to catch it on camera. But it's not something you can exactly stage. In fact, no kid ever would perform like this on command. So I've had to be sneaky about it.

And today, I finally got a video! It's pretty much Joseph's favorite video now, so it's safe to say he appreciates my sneaky efforts. (In all seriousness, I do wonder when things like this will need to stop because they'll be too embarrassing for him. Hopefully not for a few more months.)

And, here it is, in all of its closed-captioned glory. Enjoy!

(oh, ps -- the closed captioning only works if you click on the title which takes you to YouTube.)

Haunted bedroom

As I've mentioned before, Halloween is one of those holidays that matters less and less to me each year. I think that will change as Joseph gets more excited about it, but for now it's still one which is more annoying than fun what with rounding up costumes and buying candy, which is surprisingly expensive. (It's also a little discouraging . . . I thought Tootsie Rolls would be a safe candy for me to buy, but it turns out I like them a lot better than I should.)

But there was one year where I really got into Halloween. I decided that my bedroom needed a haunted house theme. Since my bedroom was in the basement, it always had a sort of haunted house feel to it anyway -- you never knew if the blouse you tossed carelessly on the ground would have a wolf spider attached to it the next time you picked it up. But this year I wanted it to be really haunted. I had glorious plans for the decorations, the thrills, and the chills that would await any who dared enter.

I got started immediately, gathering construction paper and hunting down an empty boombox and tape cassette. When the rest of my family was elsewhere, I hurried and recorded myself screaming like a banshee for several seconds. I then propped up the boombox behind my door, attached an unsharpened pencil to my door via masking tape, and made it so that the pencil would hit the pause button whenever the door was open, unleashing my warbling fury on the world. After a bit of adjusting, it worked!

I then found a flesh-colored glove and filled it with water the best that I could. I stuck it in the freezer, preparing it for its life as the icy hand of death which would grab any intruders. I forgot about it for a while and busied myself cutting out construction paper pumpkins and witch silhouettes.

It was probably my dad who was the first to discover the terrors of my terrain. Instead of jumping when he heard my banshee cry, he just furrowed his brow for a moment, then peeked behind my door to see my little contraption. "This is cute," he probably said.

Over the next few weeks, there really weren't that many people who came into my bedroom. My siblings had some fun at first opening and closing my door to get the pause button to compress and release, making the screaming come in brief spurts. But that got old, and soon I was the only one to enter my room and hear the screams. And to be honest, it got kind of annoying. But I had to keep it there on principle. It was for Halloween, after all.

Thankfully, Halloween eventually came, and down came the decorations and banshee screaming. Time to decorate for Christmas.

A few months later, while I was sitting on my bed doing homework, my dad came in waving something hideous and icy. "Did you want this for anything? I found it in the freezer."

Come to think of it, I don't know how that icy hand of death would have fared in my bedroom anyway.

New family photographer

This evening, Joseph was bursting with joy. He was dancing and jumping and grinning and laughing so much that bedtime was the last thing on our minds. While Kevin and Joseph were playing downstairs, I was upstairs playing the piano. Joseph hurried up the stairs, did a ten-second duet with me, then hurried back down the stairs and told his dad:

"I am happy now."
"Why are you happy?"
"Because I play the piano."

He later said,
"I was sad, but now I'm happy."

This was such a proud parent moment for me that I had to record it. So down I went with the camera to capture it on film.

After I made this video,

Joseph decided it was his turn to have the camera. And so we began a mini photo shoot in our messy basement, punctuated by the occasional shot of his feet:

because awkward kissing pictures are just the best

Once Joseph noticed our silly faces, he giggled so much that we had to keep making them

Dentist face. His, not mine. 

Joseph was in hysterics over Kevin's tongue

Cheesin' it up

We were so happy to have our own personal photographer. I felt like Joseph finally understood how to use a camera.

But then it was bedtime for real. As I started to get Joseph ready (i.e. take off his pants), he started to sing.

Well, the camera was still right there, so I pulled it out again and made another video.

Naturally, it was his turn next. So he then made this video.

. . . actually, the camera didn't really survive that aerial shot. 5 years of hard work and a fall onto soft carpet did it in.

So I think our family photographer plans are done now too.

Our super duper Upper Peninsula adventure

I don't know if Kevin and I necessarily come across this way, but we kind of do things on a whim. Unless the activity we're doing needs a babysitter, we just kind of do things.

Although our success rate is generally low when it comes to recruiting people to join our last-minute escapades, we were lucky enough to find friends willing to join us in seeing the major sights of the Upper Peninsula in a day (even after we changed the plans on them a couple of times). I chalk it all up to my skills in persuasion -- "If you come with us, you get to spend about twelve hours in the car with . . . . us."

By some miracle, they agreed to it! And so we found ourselves Friday night buying snacks, looking at dozens of tourism websites, making sandwiches, and having trouble falling asleep in anticipation for our adventures that would begin in about 5 hours.

The next morning, we all met at the church and headed north. A couple of hours into the drive, Kevin noticed the sunrise in the rear view mirror. 

And that's when things got really good. Suddenly, we were enveloped in a world of vibrant reds and oranges and gliding through dense golden forests. As far as we could see there were tunnels and rolling hills of color.

Not, of course, that my camera could capture it.

I definitely tried though.

We arrived in Mackinaw City a little after 9 and decided to see the McGulpin lighthouse. Maybe it's just that I'm a bit taller than I was the last time I saw lighthouses, but this one was significantly shorter than I remembered those lighthouses being. They told us it still worked great, and since we saw it lit up later that night, I suppose they were right.

Chelsie and Lyndon! . . . and Kevin's shadow and Joseph.

Just us and our shadows.

We all liked throwing rocks in the water (especially at a big rock because they would break), but Joseph threw the biggest one.

No lighthouse is complete without an organ. How else would you play songs like this?

Don't get vertigo.

The view from the lighthouse.

After swinging past another lighthouse and a colonial thing that cost money, it was time to cross the bridge! It didn't collapse while we were on it, so we made it to the Upper Peninsula! At this point, I would have been content to turn around -- we had seen fall colors and we had set foot in the UP, but we figured that since we were here, we may as well actually see it.

And so we continued on. To our amazement, Joseph hardly protested being in his car seat so much of the day. I suppose when you've got two humans, one bear, one elephant, one gecko, one giraffe, and one meerkat to keep you company, drives aren't nearly as boring as they are usually. 

Our first stop was the Tahquemenon Falls. Joseph's primary concern here was that he could throw rocks and sticks into the waterfall. He got to throw them into the water, at least, if not the waterfalls themselves. 

For some reason, all these colors remind me of Skittles.

We ran into the Teicherts! Twice! Great minds think alike.

They say the brown color comes from tannin, whatever that is, but I think this must just be the runoff of some root beer float supply, complete with foam. 

I think there was something cool in this picture. That big stick, maybe.

At the Upper Falls. These pictures seriously take me back to my fast food days of soft drink dispenser spills.

He was probably protesting the stroller.

Looks steep.

By this point, it was mid afternoon, and we weren't sure what to do next. Although it wasn't on the itinerary, we figured we may as well see Pictured Rocks since we were sort of close. So off we went again, all of us jamming to the ultra-cool music we had brought along (the coolest being Garretts'  Mulan music). Joseph was pretty stoic about it all. Although the landscape as we drove had a lot more half-dead coniferous forests than I was expecting, there were still some glorious colors, especially as we approached Pictured Rocks.

Once there, we walked around, saw water, saw rocks, took pictures, tried to avoid landing in people's wedding photos (we seriously need to stop running into weddings), and then decided we were hungry.

A hoodoo! Looking out at it was just like Bryce Canyon. Only blue.

and a little green.

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.

Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.

Sunshine on the water looks so pretty.

Sunshine almost always makes me high.

After eating some exceptionally healthy pizza (grease is good for you nowadays, right?), it was time to head home. By this time, the early morning wake-up was getting to us (well, maybe mostly me), and we found ourselves singing louder and louder and acting sillier and sillier, especially when "One Day More" from Les Mis came on. When I checked on Joseph, he had a look of concern on his face. Within about a minute that concern was replaced by full on sobbing. Oops.

Incidentally, out of the blue the next morning he said, "I was sad."
"Why were you sad?"
"Because I wanted you to turn off your singing."

He sure did, and it took a long time and a lot of silence to calm him down after that. He had one more meltdown after that, but the rest of the drive home went fairly smoothly. For all my talk of "I need to stay awake to help prevent drowsy driving and I don't have the life skills to fall asleep in the car (which is generally true)," I was the only one who slept at all on the way back. Go figure.

A little after 1, we pulled back into church parking lot. Our super duper Upper Peninsula adventure had come to an end.

And I'm almost caught up on sleep.

it's time to come on out.

The first Friday in October, I picked Leslie up from the airport for General Conference weekend. Like other times we had visitors, I had a mental checklist of things I hoped she would experience, including:

• Good weather. Well, after a week of glorious weather here and cold weather in Utah, the weather swapped so our weekend was pretty cold and windy! So we didn't spend much time outside, especially Saturday. But we still got to go on a nice walk Sunday and go to a cider mill Monday, so I guess it wasn't too bad.

• Good night's sleep. Finally, the truth came out -- sleeping on the futon was "a little more comfortable than sleeping on the floor." Everyone else who's slept there was just being tactful, or really tired.
  
• Good food. I had dropped Joseph off at a friend's house while I was picking Leslie up, and on our way to her house I ran into a Muslim neighbor of mine who was getting ready for their holy weekend. "It's kind of our holy weekend too," Leslie said, though I don't think he heard her. Anyway, we sort of forgot about the Hajj until we were driving to a Syrian place for lunch the next day. As we were pulling in, I said, "Wouldn't it be funny if this were closed for their holy weekend?" And then it was. But with a little bit more searching, we managed to find some falafels and shawarma for her to try. So I suppose it was a success.



Here is some other food at the ward conference brunch. I think it was also good.

• Good foliage. When Leslie came for Thanksgiving two years ago, I felt so bad that she had come after all the leaves had fallen. This year I was determined that she would get to see vivid colors. Since the leaves had already started changing by the beginning of August, I was afraid that General Conference was going to be too late. But then September was warm, so most of the trees were still green. To steer her mind away from this disappointment, I was sure to point out each and every tree that had non-green leaves. I'm sure she appreciated it.

There's one back there.

There are some more.

• Good games with good sports. I think the games were fun (Dominion, Skip-Bo, and Scrabble Apple), but there might have been a few sore losers. Or just one sore loser. Who was not Kevin or Leslie. Haha. Oops.
  
• Good nephew time. I think we succeeded here. Dance parties, tower building, story after story after story, cider mills, more tower building at the library . . . this was the real reason she came, right?

I love this one

• Good General Conference. It was great. Of course.

Whether or not my mental checklist came to fruition, we sure had a good time! Thanks for coming back to visit!

title inspiration: "Level Up," Vienna Teng (all of Leslie's blog titles are from Vienna Teng. And this song is about Detroit. So it totally works . . . right?)