Moons, Moonmoons, and Submoons

"A few years ago," the Smithsonian Magazine article begins, "an astronomer’s son asked the type of question only kids and genius astrophysicists come up with: Can a moon have a moon?"

I am here to testify that Moons can have Moons. Moons have been having Moons for generations. Furthermore, Moons can marry Moons, become Moon Moons, and have more Moons. Moons can even live with Moons while building Moon homes within a mile of other Moon homes. (According to the Smithsonian Magazine, this distance is necessary for the younger Moon residence to complete its own orbit but still be close enough to take advantage of the older Moon's gravity [or garden].)

Scientists wonder why moons don't have their own pet moons. I have the answer to that. First of all, children are not pets, so when Moons have baby Moons we don't call them pets. Second, Moons don't usually have pets because if they had pets they would have to be dopey wolves named Moon Moon to fit the theme of the family, and no one here likes big dogs.

Although no moons outside of Earth's atmosphere have been shown to have their own submoons, plenty of Moons inside of Earth's atmosphere have. Here is my photographic evidence:

As you can see, there are several Moons orbiting the Grandmoons. (Not to be confused with the other Grandmoons that live in Duchesne, of course.) These Moons or former Moons have all converged on an orbit that now only extends as far from the grandmoons as Arizona. The orbit used to include places such as Michigan, Connecticut, Alabama, New Jersey, Georgia, Costa Rica, and Spain, so the Utah gravity is definitely much stronger now!

Scientists have considered calling the moons of moons "moon-squareds." Kevin and I were of course the original "moon-squared" (see here), so naturally Joseph was called moon-cubed, at least for his first Facebook album. And these days he definitely likes three-dimensional objects, especially paper airplanes and origami animals.

Matthew is our little Moonito right now. He always wants to know how to say things in Spanish, and once when my sister asked how he said his name in Spanish, he said "pantalones."

Matthew also fits a lot of other criteria relating to moons of moons. According to the article, "In order for a submoon to survive, it needs to be small -- about six miles in diameter or less." And he is much, much less than six miles in diameter. But what he lacks in size he makes up for in volume.

Jacob is our mini Moon, and he is learning lots about gravity right now. For the past few weeks, whenever he got upset, he flung himself backwards and landed on whatever was right behind him. Luckily, he now checks behind himself when he's about to do that, and if the ground looks hard, he slowly lowers himself down backwards and then continues his mournful soliloquy.

Most of the time though he's pretty sweet and happy and very content to hug and nuzzle the pet moons we do have (stuffed animals).

Moon Moons. Submoons. Moons-squared. Moonitos. Mini Moons. Whatever science decides to call moons of moons, we're sure glad that our set of Moon babies exists!

The New Haven Mormon Arts Center Festival

The Mormon Arts Center Festival was this weekend, and it was absolutely incredible. Riverside Church was replete with gorgeous architecture and stained glass windows, the speakers were riveting (with many people considering the talk about Francisco Estevez the best of them all), the art exhibit was astounding, and the sing-in led by Craig Jessop was an unforgettable experience.

Unfortunately, I didn't end up making it. As I mentioned, I had pretty horrendous back pain this weekend and I could barely move even after (or even thanks to) my ER visit. The train would have been awful, the subway would have been rough, and I wouldn't have even been able to sing at the sing-in if it required more than a little breathing.

So I stayed home and imagined what it would have been like seeing the art and singing with everyone. Although I knew this probably wouldn't have happened had I gone, I imagined scenarios where some accomplished composer pulled me aside, found a piano, and helped me with a few measures here and there on some arrangements I've been working on. And then President Uchtdorf shook my hand and told me to name my baby Dieter.

In good news, all the talks will be available online over the next few days, so I will gradually be able to catch up on what I missed. I'm still disappointed that I didn't get to interact with people, but my kids provided a pretty good consolation prize for me . . .

They made their own arts festival! There were costumes, there were original compositions (well, based on the Batman theme song but they made new words), and there were plenty of art exhibits!

Allow me to take you through this highly erudite, avant-garde festival.

"Bat-Tigger," designed by Joseph -- this costume explores the wide ranges of emotions in a child. The slinky sticking out of his shorts represents the playfulness embodied by Tigger, while the Batman T-shirt and "Bat-sword" sheathed in his self-constructed utility belt represent the brooding introspection that even children can't entirely escape.

"The Tree of Life," built by Joseph -- because what Mormon art exhibit is complete without a representation of Lehi's vision?

"The Great and Spacious Building," built and photographed by Joseph -- this Lego sculpture depicts a building founded on crony capitalism, untamed opulence, and an overconfidence in science and secularism as represented by all the dinosaur references. This picture is intentionally blurry to represent how the philosophies of men obscure true vision.

 

"The Inferno," crafted by Joseph -- this top-down look at Dante's Inferno reminds us that the center of hell is ice cold, as are yellow, red, and green popsicles symbolized by these foam quarter circles.

"Farmer Trance" (titled by Matthew) -- this plastic sculpture embodies the daydreams of a farmer who wants to reject an agrarian, Wendell Berry-esque existence and see a world run by robots. Either that or Matthew's just saying Transformer wrong.

"Moroni 8" -- this photograph depicts the fears of little children being sprinkled with cold water.

"The Of Book Of Mormon" (black construction paper, white crayon) -- this first piece in Joseph's triptych does a slight play on words of "The Book of Mormon," reminding us of the ownership we can feel of The Book of Mormon, as well as other gospel topics in the triptych.

"Hartford Temple at Night" (black construction paper, white crayon, yellow crayon) -- this neo-cubist look at the Hartford Temple continues the theme of ownership. A series of lines, rectangles, and triangles work together to create a representation of the temple, just as we can all work together to build a Zion community.

"Man in House at Nighttime" (black construction paper, white crayon) -- this sketch represents Mormon pioneers looking out the windows of their homes in various locations across the American Midwest. Although they were not able to achieve long term ownership of those dwellings, they had ownership in the Zion community that led them west.

"After the Language of my Fathers" (black construction paper, crayon) -- this standalone piece by Matthew tells the dramatic story of Lehi's family crossing the ocean. I think.

And finally, there was a performance of an original composition by Joseph and Matthew, entitled "Poulets."

This piece also proves that modern music doesn't just sound like toddlers pecking at the piano any more than Jackson Pollock paintings just look like toddler scribbles.

Although there were also a series of lectures given over the course of several days (the most memorable being "The color of my spoon needs to match the color of my shirt," "Hi fingers, how are you?" and "Na na na na na na na na na CHANGE DIAPER"), these will not be available on YouTube because they stop doing whatever they were doing when I pull out the camera.

We hope to attend future Mormon Arts Center events in New York City. In the meantime, at least we've got budding artists in New Haven.

Making our own fun, indoor version

Tomorrow marks six months since the muggy day that we loaded up a moving truck to leave Michigan.

We've had quite the six months. There have been a lot of great things about moving here -- we've met some wonderful, wonderful people, participated in the Hartford Temple open house and dedication, and presumably been more of a blessing than a burden to our new ward.

But it has been very different from Michigan. One of the greatest challenges has been the lack of structure on a day to day basis.

Church of course is crazy. Since about the second week Kevin and I have been running around subbing, teaching, translating (him, not me), playing piano and organ (me, not him), doing scouts, organizing, conducting, and trying to keep track of kids with scarcely a moment to catch our breaths.

But the rest of the week is so quiet. This is a huge change from Ann Arbor, where I generally had a long list of things to look forward to on a weekly or monthly basis, including:

• Monday Time Out For Women institute class (always with treats)
• Morning Out play dates
• Zumba Wednesdays and Fridays
• Weekly preschool
• Friday lunches at the institute
• Monthly book club
• Various Relief Society activities
• Library story time
• Spontaneous museum/park invitations from a ward Google group
• Monthly Institute date nights
• Bad Movie Club nights
• Game nights with friends
• Ward choir
• Northwood events (Valentines activities, winter clothes swaps, etc)
• Talking to neighbors outside
• Joseph playing with friends at our house or theirs
• Voice lessons
• Piano lessons
• Rackham graduate school events
• Visiting teachers
• Baby showers

In contrast, while there's not nothing going on, things are a little subdued here. Here's what I've come up with:

• Monday institute lunch class
• Weekly gymnastics
• Monthly Relief Society activity
• Monthly Institute date nights
• Baby showers
• Occasional book club (none in December or January)
• Baby signing time
• Primary presidency meetings
• Joy School (all other participants have been on maternity leave for past few weeks/months though, so we've started going to the library)

One reason I share these lists is I'm just curious -- which list is closer to what is offered by your ward/neighborhood right now? I think Ann Arbor had a fair amount of social capital (and the number of activities even increased in spring and summer), but I feel like that number of activities wouldn't be out of the question in Utah either.

Of course, it's nice to keep to ourselves a bit compared to the craziness that we sometimes experienced in Ann Arbor. I really wish (especially this week) that there were more consistency here, especially regarding playgroups, but I guess in exchange for fun we get more sunshine in the winter, so I suppose that's okay. (Who am I kidding I complained plenty this week, even on the sunniest and warmest day yet.)

I also know that I didn't do as much in the community as I perhaps should have because I could keep myself happily busy with more fun things. (Also, it's hard to do things when you don't have a baby that sleeps through the night, especially in the early mornings.) So the emptiness of the schedule is a blessing here because it's made me think about things I could and should be doing. I have some ideas I just need to figure out how to implement.

But in the meantime, here is what we have done to keep ourselves busy lately. Since this post has gotten long, I'll focus on the calm indoor stuff for this post and show the active stuff soon. 

• Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic

I don't really know what I'm doing, and we're not consistent about it, but we all have fun learning together! (This is probably Joseph-centric, but it is so fun to see what Matthew picks up on too.)

We like to do reading time with the white board. I think the watermelon gas station was made out of Legos, and there's probably a picture of it somewhere.

The day we learned about "ow." Pretty much the best story ever.

If you're going to teach about addition, you might as well make it look cool. If he's making pyramids out of Jenga blocks we talk about triangular numbers then too. We've gotten into negative numbers once or twice too talking about subtraction. Most of it probably doesn't stick but exposure counts for a lot.

The first book he read by himself. I'm not sure how much of it he had memorized, but it seemed like he was reading.

Very occasionally, he will pick up a book and try to read it. He got through a few pages of Horton Hears a Who!  I had to help with lots of words that he spelled to me, but it was so exciting that he tried it.

When we couldn't go to Chick-Fil-A because of the nor'easter on Thursday, we made our house into Chick-Fil-A. 

• Story time

If it were up to Matthew, we would spend hours every day sitting on a couch, covered by a blanket, and reading board books. He is so funny about so many books -- what he has to point out every time, what he has started calling a tauntaun thanks to the Star Wars book, how he has so much of Little Blue Truck memorized -- but it's funnier in person.

Joseph is fine with most any book right now. He likes to be there for the board books and he likes to be there for the chapter books. We are reading Ramona the Pest and just finished listening to Farmer Boy in the car, and it's amazing how emotionally invested he gets in the books. "I wanted you to skip that part!" is what he says for most any part that involves conflict of any kind.

• Building 

Both boys love to build, though one likes to destroy more than the other (much to the chagrin of the other). We cycle through Legos, puzzles, electronic snap kits, small Legos, trains, and blocks until I decide I'm sick of cleaning up that particular toy and hide it for a week or two.

The other day I went and did other stuff and he told me he built the one where "there's the thing that stores all the energy so the light doesn't work." "The capacitor?" "Yeah. I built the one with the capacitor."

He liked to build these puzzles on top of each other.

He also liked to build things on top of each other, which is how we discovered they had the exact same shapes.

It's mostly fun to break Joseph's creations, but he does like building his own stuff as well.

  

Most everything Joseph builds he likes to take a picture of. Our camera is full to the brim of various lego robots and airplanes and houses and block towers so that he can rebuild them when Matthew breaks them. He was shocked when I told him I wasn't really allowed to take pictures of my legos because it was a waste of film.

• Crafts and coloring

These are less frustrating than they were a year ago, so that's good. Matthew also really likes to color . . . almost as much as he likes to throw crayons when he's done. He says "mess, mess, mess" in agitated tones whenever he gets marker on his hands.

We still make birthday cards, but we've also been branching out to other sorts of crafts.

Rain maker. You can't let a good paper towel roll go to waste.

The groundhog can pop out of the slit in the paper. 

Monster Valentine love note box.

One day we drew things that we loved. "Are you going to draw me first, Mommy? Because you LOOOOVE me!!!" I did. And then he drew me. (I think my picture of Joseph was on the back, and that boy I drew was just a demonstration of how to not draw stick figures.)

We celebrated Laura Ingalls Wilder's 150th birthday with this log cabin. And by not having any hot water starting the next day. And being homebound for like 4 straight days. How did they stay sane.

Painting the snow. Laura Ingalls never had watercolors so she never got to do this with all the snow. Sad.

• Playing

And then there's just lots of playing. Lots of dancing, lots of acting out animal movements to a little magic wand we got for Christmas, lots of running, lots of hide and seek, lots of wrestling with Dad, etc. Kevin has had to help with one blanket fort so far this winter, and I haven't had to do any, and that's been just fine.

Everything cost like $8 at this store.

 

One of his cute customers who was also good at shoplifting. Couldn't blame him.

Lining up cars on the couch. He isn't quite as obsessed with cars as he was several weeks ago, but they are still his favorite. I find them lined up all over the place.

A box this big can't have anything more exciting than diapers in it, but luckily the box itself is its own fun.

So, we survive. I still go stir crazy, and I desperately wish Joseph had the same kind of friendships he had in Michigan so that he could play with someone who wasn't boring like me or too little like Matthew, but we survive.

And luckily, there's plenty to do outside the house, too. (to be continued)

Song as old as rhyme

One afternoon in November, I woke up from a nap with a sudden burst of inspiration. I was going to make a mashup of Beauty and the Beast songs! I had fiddled earlier that week with an arrangement of "Something There" with Chopin's Raindrop Prelude, but now I knew I needed to do a whole slew of songs.

I was excited and got to work finding Chopin pieces that would fit each of the major Beauty and the Beast songs. I quickly ran into a difficulty -- most of the songs were in 4/4 whereas most Chopin was in 3/4. The 4/4 songs were slow and peaceful, and I needed upbeat! I considered branching out to other composers, but I felt like it would lose some of its magic and cohesiveness.

This was also the time that I was feeling sicker and sicker with each passing day, and when I had a free minute to myself I wanted to spend it sitting on the couch instead of practicing. I began to worry. How would it ever come together in time? How would I perfect it in time? I knew the movie wasn't coming out until March, but I wanted to get the movie made well before then. I knew there was a Belle dress and good pianos in Utah, and I wanted to take advantage of them during Christmastime. Besides, if I waited too long I might not even fit into any dress!

I would remind myself of that and gradually chip away at the difficult passages and unnatural key changes until I had something that maybe, just maybe, might be ready to perform when I was with family.

Once in Utah, I practiced more and more, gaining confidence with each run-through. I contacted my aunt Jackie who let me borrow her beautiful dress she had made. Now I had no choice. I had to make the video!

My parents were incredibly helpful. When the bright piles of snow outside made strange glares on the piano, they hung up tablecloths to block some of the windows. My mom worked and worked and worked with my hair to try and get something looking like the movie hair. We spent hours fiddling with camera angles and tripods, testing different cameras and phones to see what would make the best image.

And then when the afternoon was through, we just decided there was too much light in the background, resulting in graininess near my head, and it wasn't going to get any better that day. So we were back to work the next day!

Finally, after so many takes, after finally improving enough that I felt confident in what I was doing, we had a working video! For the first time I ever, I decided to actually say "thanks for watching my video!" which I had promised myself I would never do. People had to see the beautiful dress, after all!

At the end of the day, it might not be the most professional, simply because we didn't have all the equipment for that. But it was great to see a pretty good video come out of a lot of work from a lot of people. After several weeks of wondering if this would ever come to fruition, it was humbling to see it come together.

And after nearly a month of waiting to get closer to the movie's release date, I'm so excited to share it with you! After all, what could be better than Beauty and the Beast and Chopin?

The month I didn't become wildly famous

I had two very little dreams for October.

The first one began in October 2014, when a hymn was published in the Ensign (as they occasionally are). I saw that and thought, "I would love to see my hymn there someday!" My ward choir was currently working on it, but I didn't know how anyone else would really hear about it. So I submitted it to the Church Music Festival, got an honorable mention, heard it performed on Temple Square, and then waited, hoping that maybe this October would be the one where it would suddenly show up in the Ensign. When I got the Ensign this month, I flipped through and didn't see any music. Lots of other great things, but not that. Not really a surprise, but it was a fun fantasy.

The other little dream came one night after Kevin was reading the spring BYU Magazine. "You should write one of these First Person stories," he told me. "Don't you have all these stairs stories from when you were pregnant?"

Intrigued by the $50 prize and another chance for fame and glory (ha!) I sat down and twenty minutes later had about 242 words describing my experiences with stairs for 9 or so months (max word limit 250). I proofread it a few times, added one word to give it more detail, and then submitted it.

When we got the magazine, Kevin flipped through it. "Your story didn't make it in," he said. Again, no surprise -- I had never heard back from them, and in retrospect they didn't want a montage. And that word I added. Rancid. To describe the plums. Was that the problem? Was "rancid" too negative of a word to describe an aspect of the BYU landscape? When you're in the throes of morning sickness "rancid" is just a word that describes most everything you smell, but it can come across badly without that context.

Anyway. Point is I did not become famous this month. (Not, of course, that two tiny little magazine pieces would catapult anyone to stardom, but it is fun to see your name in print.) But the good news is . . .  I still have a blog! And if you've made it this far into the blog post you may as well finish it! So without further ado, here are . . . supplementary materials to the Ensign and BYU Magazine.

I admit it is cool to have that blurb at the bottom added on

And here is my silly story about BYU stairs.

I knew that being pregnant during my master's degree would be tiring, but I didn't take into account the added difficulty from the stairs.

Each morning in the fall as I walked up to campus, I would dodge the fallen plums squished into the stairs and attempt to avoid inhaling their rancid scent. I had a speech prepared for bystanders in case my morning sickness got the better of me, but luckily I never had to use it.

As fall turned to winter and winter to spring I continued my daily trek up the stairs, pausing occasionally for contractions and to catch my breath.

Of course, it wasn't just stairs up to campus that caused me problems. There were still plenty I had to scale within each building. The day my thesis was due, I found out at about 1:56 that it was due at 2 rather than 5 pm. Clutching my thesis in my swollen hands, I dashed down the stairs from the 4th floor of the Clyde Building to the Former President's Home -- and I made it with seconds to spare, along with my 8-month-pregnant belly.

I took a break from the stairs after that for the next month. But the day before my due date, I decided to try the stairs up to campus one last time. 10 flights of stairs later, all I could say is that I hurt a lot, but still no labor. I'm sure though that all the exercise over the previous 9 months helped with labor when it finally occurred 5 days later.

I'm not really sad that neither of them made it into magazines, but they were fun to work on. And maybe someday something will make it in for real!

July Holidays

I'm always up for celebrating a holiday, and July is full of them! And since Joseph is old enough to do lots of crafts, we have even more ways to celebrate and decorate!

So, here's some of what we've done this month:

4th of July: Joseph had a few play dates the week before the 4th of July. That was about the time that I realized I ought to decorate, so I had him and his friends help.

With one of his friends, we made patriotic wreaths out of paper plates and flags out of popsicle sticks. With another friend, I added fireworks to Joseph's birthday cityscape out of painted Q-tips. I also changed out the Superman birthday banner for a patriotic banner. One night, I decided that I knew how to make slipcovers, so I made one out of scrap fabric. 

The Saturday before the 4th, Joseph and I gathered wildflowers (one of the vases had pink, white, and lavender flowers that almost looked red, white and blue) and had fun covering the sidewalk with chalk fireworks and the number 4. Overall, I think it helped make the holiday more meaningful, so it was worth the bit of effort we put in. (And then the day of we subjected Joseph to as much Schoolhouse Rock as we could in addition to the pancake breakfast, barbecues, fireworks, etc.)

(Oh. And Joseph celebrated fireworks by not being afraid of them or covering his ears but instead yelling at them in a very manly way from a safe distance.)

7/11 day: We did not go get Slurpees. But we thought about it.

7/12: We did not celebrate Cow Appreciation day by getting a free meal at Chick-Fil-A. It's an hour away, and Joseph had a fever and our air conditioner leaked through the floor and dripped into the basement (stressful, but everything was fine. Even though Kevin was in Spain.).

Instead of going anywhere, we celebrated cows by making a cow out of a paper plate. Some water got spilled on it, so its eye disappeared, but it was still pretty cute.

I also enlisted the help of my Facebook friends to think of good cow puns, and I was not disappointed.

July 14th: We celebrated Bastille Day by looking at our Madeline book and making Lego buildings that loosely resembled the buildings in Paris and eating crepes with friends.

Eiffel Tower. Sort of.

July 20th: We celebrated Moon Landing day about a week early by going to the little moon exhibit in the Francois Xavier Bagnoud Building next the wave field. I'm still so amazed that real live humans stepped on the moon!

July 24th: We celebrated Pioneer Day by eating leftovers from the fridge because pioneers didn't have fridges. I tried to sing and play some pioneer songs from the Children's Songbook but neither kid was interested in them. Joseph and I finished reading The Boxcar Children which is sort of about pioneers in the 1940s. I pushed my kids around in a stroller which might have kind of been like a handcart. I sent my husband off to the modern equivalent of the Mormon Battalion (two back to back priesthood meetings he was gone for from 5 pm to 9:20 pm). I listened to a podcast from the Legacy series on Mormon Channel.

There are a few more holidays worth celebrating this month, so we'll see if we celebrate them or not. I'm tempted to hold out on celebrating Harry Potter's birthday until Joseph's old enough to really appreciate the books. And of course, we don't celebrate Christmas in July. I guess I did buy some things on Prime Day, but that's different.

Road Trip

I don't have much to say about Britain's exit from the EU. To me it looks like chaos and recession, but I have done so little research and know so little about international trade that I really don't know what to think.

But I just want to talk about the word "Brexit" for a moment because it reminded me of a word I made up once upon a time for a poem when I was 14.

Here is the poem:

Radio's on with lot's of static
There just might be a door ajar
Smoothness of the road's erratic
When we're driving in the

  Cargo's piled up to the ceiling
Battle lines are set and crossed
"Who cares one bit what sister's feeling?"
Peace and love seem to be

   Lost again maneuvering exits
Nausea threatens to prevail
No longer hungry for good ol' MexIts
My digestors start to

  Failure finding decent rest stops
Angry murmur starts to build
"Seat belts on! Here come the cops!
Quick! Slow down! Or we'll be"

   Killed a skunk (which was no flower)
And just our luck -- a traffic jam!
On KSL for half an hour
Then slowly, we're no longer

   Cramming in our last day riles
Zip wars, and "Mom, is it far?"
Found X, Y, Z, just 10 more miles
Til liberation from the CAR!

I was pretty proud of that poem, but when I showed it to members my family, their reaction was always the same:
 "What's a MexIt?"

"It's . . . a Mexican restaurant! What else would it be?"

I guess it could be a referendum if Mexico wants to leave NAFTA or something.

Anyway, looking at this poem reminded me that:
-My siblings and I fought a fair amount (my poor parents)
-We threw up in the car a lot (my poor parents)
-We took lots of road trips

in this.

But we were a lot better about wearing seat belts than this poem suggests. Poetic license and all. Just like MexIts.