How to strengthen the family

On Saturday night, I attended the General Women's Meeting of General Conference. There was a very strong theme of family, particularly in Sister Bonnie Oscarson's talk about defending the family and the Family Proclamation.

As I thought about it later, I felt like there were more ways to strengthen and defend families than what may have been mentioned. Furthermore, the next day when I went visiting teaching, it hit me that outside my middle class culture, the family really truly is under attack. (Also, this.)

So, here are some ideas I had for how to strengthen and defend the family.

• Stay close to God through prayer and scripture study. And if you have a family, pray and read scriptures with them.
• Keep in contact with your family, and don't just call parents/siblings/whoever when you need money.
• Create jobs suitable for teenagers so they develop work ethics and become more desirable spouses. You probably shouldn't have to pay them $15 an hour.
• Treat your employees right.
• Do your home and visiting teaching.
• Be selective about the media you allow into your house. Don't substitute TV for quality time, especially if the TV shows are violent or sexual.
• Fill your children's lives with kind words and lots of hugs so they don't look elsewhere for acceptance.
• Don't kick your child out of the house as a teenager if they happen to be gay. That won't fix anything.
• If you want to help strengthen families beyond your immediate reach, consider donating to organizations that help keep people healthy and well-fed and employable. Fistula Foundation is good. So is Kiva. So are lots of things.
• Do your family history, even if you are sort of mad at your ancestors or the aunt who happens to know a lot about it. (This isn't my case, but it happens.) I am amazed sometimes at how much of my identity I get from knowing about my ancestors, and how much more patient I am with myself, my parents, and so on because I know these stories, good and bad.
• Make homemaking a more gratifying experience. This may sound silly, but I get a lot of joy out of cooking in part because I know Kevin is willing to like what I cook. And, conversely, try to cook foods people will like.
• Serve in the community with your family. This not only helps the community but teaches your kids that you are a family that serves. And that, my friends, is a very powerful family culture to develop.
• Don't always seek friends exactly like you, no matter your age. If you feel like you have a healthy family, reach out to others who may not.
• Pay attention to kids in your community and look for signs of neglect. (FYI, them walking home from the playground alone at the age of 10 is not what I would call a sign of neglect, unless it was cold and they didn't have a coat.)
• Treat your spouse kindly and respectfully.

Any other ideas? There were lots of things I didn't even touch on.

Taller

Joseph says at least one of these a day. And often all of them in a row.

"When I get bigger, I can watch Spiderman."
"I eat vegetables so I get taller and taller and taller!" (not that he eats them, but he gets the concept.)
"When the missionaries were here I ate broccoli so I can get taller and taller and taller and watch Spiderman!" (true story, and we were shocked)
"I'm going to have a birthday! And I will get taller and taller and watch Spiderman. And I will have a bus cake!"
"How old will you be on your birthday?" I ask.
"Two." (Or twenty-two.)

Actually, I'll just pause here for a moment. Speaking of birthdays, he is obsessed with them. He has made 6 birthday cards this month, each with various themes. Well, usually he wants me to draw a taxi or police car on them. I haven't taken any pictures of them, unfortunately. They all have the same template: cake on front, person's name somewhere, balloons somewhere, happy birthday (unless he insists I write birthday with an 'f'), done.

"Grrr. I'm a bad guy." (various kickboxing poses.)
"Spiderman is a bad guy. But he's a helper bad guy. When I eat carrots I get taller and taller and I can be a helper."

And so on.

I guess that if his birthday were tomorrow, his cake would have Spiderman being a helper on a bus. And it would probably have hidden vegetables so he can get taller and taller and taller.

"He's climbing on a wall! That's so silly."

Laundry

(Reposted from Facebook, with slight variations.)

Sometimes I get writer's block on Facebook and on my blog. (If you ever see a lot of videos on my blog, that's usually when I have it.)  It's been frustrating this week since I've really wanted to blog at nights while Kevin works on his paper still (the same one that's been hanging over us since January, only it morphed into two), but though I write, I never press "Publish." As I look over it, I see that it is probably too whiny (I always get embarrassed about angst once I get over it, so I am trying to be better at not making it too public), or too silly (like a story from when I was little).

So, here is a glimpse of life without any pithiness or polishing in hopes that I will break my writer's block. Pretty much it's just rambling.

This morning, Joseph and I folded laundry. For the first time in a very long time, I decided to listen to Wicked while doing it. Joseph heard the first few bars and asked, "Is this about witches?" because I guess it sounded enough like Tangled music that he made the connection (since clearly that is what Tangled is about). We listen to Tangled music in the car sometimes, including the instrumental music they tack on at the end of the CD, and he asks me "what's happening?" and I have to try and remember where that music belongs in the movie so I can say, "the horse is mad at Flynn" or something like that.

I actually thought that "No One Mourns the Wicked" sounded more like My Turn on Earth or Saturday's Warrior or some other 80s Mormon music with the rhythms and harmonies. And actually a lot of the music in Wicked sounds like 80s music to me. I felt that way when I was 14, too.

And, speaking of early 2000s pop culture, the last time we folded laundry, I watched Ella Enchanted. Just had to remember how bad it really was. And I cringed through a lot of it. But the part that bugged me most this time was the costume design. Why did they want them to all look like poorly dressed people from the 2000s? Because that's seriously what they all looked like. The movie is already dated and it's only a decade old.

Anyway, it was interesting realizing how things can become dated relatively quickly. And I think I should find more current music and movies to fold laundry to.

Perfect pitch

One thing that is always eye-opening as a parent is to see the way a child imitates you.

Granted, it's not always going to be accurate. For example, I think I do a lot more talking than listening when I'm on the phone:

(And the robot movie? That's still WALL-E.)

But when he started playing the piano and singing at the same time? Yeah, that's a pretty accurate imitation of what he sees most days:

But this has actually been an exciting development because each time he sings it, he stays a little more in tune and is to the point now where he gets all the letters! I think my favorite version is where he sings "ABCD" and then jumps up an octave to do "EFG." One of those boys choirs needs to recruit him!

(After this video, he sang it about 10 more times in succession. And then some more throughout the day. And if I try to take his invitation of "next time won't you sing with me" he gets mad because it's still his turn. At least he's singing the right words now.)

He likes to have a steady beat while he sings, be it from him playing the piano (which, sadly, has not yet improved as rapidly as the singing), or from a drum. And microphones don't hurt, either.

I suppose this isn't really imitating parents anymore since we don't need mics or drums when we sing. Then again, Kevin was the drummer for his nerd band back in the day.

At any rate, it's nice to hear lots of singing.

NERDFEST

It's that time of year again when we somehow find ourselves incredibly social and busy. I think something must happen when the snow starts to melt that makes us immediately start planning parties.

That, or it's just that there are a lot of things worth celebrating in the middle of March.

Either way, last week I stayed pretty busy planning parties, all of which ended up having a distinctive nerdy flair to them. The first one was Thursday night. I'm in this club where we teach each other useful skills every month or so. I signed up for it even though I didn't really know what I'd want to teach at first. I'm an okay cook, but I don't know any more about it than anyone else. I don't have any ultra special sewing or cleaning or budgeting skills. And I didn't really think I could teach anything about the piano in just an hour's time.

And so, I was left with teaching about basic electrical engineering concepts. And honestly, I loved it. I really hadn't done much with circuits since, well, taking the classes 5 years ago, and I had found other stuff more interesting because they involved more math. But I wanted this night to be mostly math-free, so I started with electrons and moved onto static electricity, basic circuits, rear defrosters, lightbulbs, toasters, capacitors, elevator switches, magnets, motors, waves, radio, and ended with ultrasound. The whole time I was talking I was just geeking out about how exciting it all was. "Guys. Get this. We just made some static on the radio using a coin and a 9-volt battery. Guys, you can see babies using electrical engineering!!!" I think they all liked it too. And it was nice to remember all these things and remember that I honestly truly loved so much of my major.

After the electronic snap kit was put away and the newly-ordered whiteboard was washed clean of all of its amplitude modulation explanations, that white board was filled with my to-do list for Friday's party!

Even now, if I try to explain what the party was about, I'm not really sure. "What are those planets on your wall for?" people ask and I give them a "oh, we were learning about planets!" explanation instead of, "Well, our friends wanted to do a Pi Day Party and they wanted to know if we should do a small party or large party and we decided that we should do both a small party and a large party only the small party should be extra extra nerdy and not make any sense and they decided to go along with it for reasons we're still not sure of."

So, that's basically what happened. I started playing around with a calculator and squared 3.13 (since the date was 3/13) and discovered that it was about 9.8 which is about the gravity constant for earth. So, naturally we needed to have a party dedicated to . . . gravity. (To be honest, this is not even the first gravity-themed thing I've planned.) But we didn't know if gravity was enough of a thing to celebrate on its own, so collectively we discovered that March 13th is also:

• Jewel Day
• Earmuff Day
• Open an Umbrella Indoors Day (I wonder if this one was related to it being Friday the 13th)
• Donald Duck's birthday  (according to some sources)
• National Sleep Day (this one made the Facebook trending sidebar so it must be real)
• Good Samaritan Day
• 234th anniversary of the discovery of Uranus

Now that we had these highly significant occasions to also celebrate, it was time to party!

When I wasn't cleaning or cooking, I spent a lot of the day making decorations. Kevin suggested planets as decorations, which was a little harder than I was expecting. Off the top of your head, can you really say what Venus looks like? Neither could I.

This one is earth. I could do that one okay. The quote says, "The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

This is Jupiter. Joseph helped. He also stuck a nearby quote upside down.  "You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care. "

At 6, we had cheesy potatoes (a food that utilizes gravity a fair amount), beans, salad, and apples (think Isaac Newton) for dinner. We then did some gravity games such as a paper airplane contest (timed with a homemade pendulum that somehow used the number 3.13), tower-building,and Jenga (which got knocked down immediately by a toddler).

Objective: create a tower that could hold a 9-volt battery. Success. I spent a lot of time nodding at my teammate's ideas, which probably helped.

We decided to forgo the relay race that would have used jewels, earmuffs, sleepwear, and umbrellas to celebrate those other holidays. It was muddy and snowy outside, and we don't have earmuffs. But we did do the hitting game again (what a name) with Disney characters, where someone stands in the middle of a circle and tries to hit the person assigned the Disney character's name before they say another name. For dessert we had pie and square root brownies. Also, I think I got exactly one comment about the planets and none about the birthday cake on Uranus, so that was probably not the best use of time. Live and learn.

The final leg of our nerdfest journey began on Saturday. We went to a birthday party (not nerdy), Kevin's lab party, and then the larger Pi Day party. At the work party, I tested out my theory that engineers don't get into pi by asking how many digits they all had memorized.

"Um, 4?" "5?" "3?" "Why would you memorize that?" I felt validated.

After the work party, we headed over to the church for the Pi Day party of the century! If there ever was a year to celebrate it, this was definitely the year. There were decorations all throughout related to pi -- trivia, banners, Pi sudoku, and other things I can't remember. There were trivia contests and pie eating contests. And lots of pie. I was proud to have my name attached to the party, even though we hadn't done anything besides say, "Yeah, this sounds like a good idea."

After it was all cleaned up and Joseph had forgiven Kevin for eating pie with just his mouth instead of with a spoon, our nerdfest was done.

Moment caught.

I'm sure we'll find more to celebrate next March.

parenting win

Today has been pretty productive so far. I've vacuumed the upstairs, cleaned up the kitchen, done two loads of laundry, washed my hair, edited a song, driven Joseph to and from a friend's house about 15 minutes away, read scriptures, and started planning the next time we'll go to Utah.

And there is still plenty to be done. At some point I should blog about Joseph and the fun nerdy weekend we had. I should probably fold that laundry, go shopping since we are almost entirely out of all produce, pick up a hold from the library, and exercise (okay this one will probably not happen). We are going to see some old friends in the afternoon and then help with a game night at the church.

But of all the things that I have done or will do today, probably the one I am most proud of is how I got Joseph to eat a peanut butter sandwich that I desecrated by taking the crust off at the wrong point in the process.

I should have totally been a diplomat.

Probably should mention this

Last Monday I had an ultrasound and found out the baby is a . . . .

Okay, I'll end the suspense for those of you without 2 1/2 minutes to exceedingly enjoy yourself. It's a BOY!!!!!!!!!!!

And we are so so so so excited!!!!! We all love this little guy oh so much. My favorite is when Joseph talks to the baby.

He likes to kick a lot. It's funny because I didn't even notice Joseph kicking until 20 weeks last time but this time it has been a constant thump-thump-thumping in my tummy since at least 17 weeks.

And one last thing. So, Facebook is a funny creature that likes to highlight whenever someone comments on something. Even if the thing is nearly 3 years old. My sister and I were having a conversation about puffiness and she commented on a picture in which I was overdue, and now there are some people who think I currently look very large and puffy.

So I just wanted to set the record straight. Here is how I looked the day of the ultrasound (19 weeks).

So, a little bit larger than normal, but not puffy. Not yet.