BANG!

The other day, I was driving down the street at the same moment Forrest was driving up it (he was just coming home from the airport after being out of town), and as we passed each other and waved, in that split second I could tell he'd shaved off his goatee. Only rarely in the last ten years or so has my beloved been clean shaven, and the sight of his vulnerable upper lip remains a shock. He looks, oh, 19 to me now :-). Although I do like my hubby's face, hairless or not, I'm a big fan of the goatee myself, as it gives him just a little bit of edginess. I'm one of those girls who likes guys who are mostly nice but not so nice as to make me feel guilty for my own lack of constant niceness.

(Sidenote: Forrest was ruminating the other day as we were out on a walk with Wyatt and passed the house of the nicest, Molliest-Mormon couple in our ward, that we should start a website called MormonFlanders.com, after the Simpson's character, where folks can post humorous and anonymous stories of Flanders-like characters in their own wards and neighborhoods. Our own Mormon Flanders recently declared the following two gems: "I frequently visit Providentliving.org for up-to-date food storage tips. It's the best website ever!" and "My children love going to the cannery! It's fun for the whole family!")

So aaaannnnyyyywaaaayy, I was starting to feel like Forrest had turned back the clock a bit, walking around looking like his early-90's self, so I thought I'd join him and give myself some early-90s bangs, making the two of us a matched pair. Here they are, in all their glory:



Now all I need to do is whip out my acid washed denim jacket and I'm good to go.

(Sidenote #2: I tend to look better in pictures I take of myself at arms length. I think it's because I point the camera down and it minimizes the Sweat Chin. And if any of you are from Bangladesh and accidentally happened upon this blog, no, I do not have sweat on my chin. Sweat is the family from which I hail, a family with with many members who sport what my sister-in-law calls a "sloping esophagus," or, in other words, a double chin.)

So here are some random updates:

1. Over the last five minutes, the phone has rung 4 times. It is the cell phone of Elise's friend, Tayler (yes, she's 9 and has a cell phone)and all I hear are children screaming and shrieking. Either they are on the bus and messing around with the phone, or there is some kind of horrifying hostage situation going on at the elementary school. I should know in, oh, 4 minutes.

2. I had my Super Saturday on, you guessed it, Saturday. Went swimmingly. (For my Bangladeshi reader: Super Saturday is a church sponsored event where women get together and make handcrafted knick knacks.) Was supposed to end at 12:00 and ended at 2:30. Dried flowers and blobs of paint and sawdust EVERYWHERE. Bought fruit and sweet rolls and muffins and, at the last minute, chocolate chocolate donuts, and the chocolate chocolate donuts were the first to go. We say we're calorie conscious, but when faced with a chocolate chocolate donut we simply cut it in half and demurely eat the first half, then fifteen minutes later demurely eat the other. I made myself a magnet board (cute and hard to explain) and I have walked around my house with it and can't find a single, solitary place to hang it.

3. Still no bus.

4. Wyatt is getting cuter by the day. He loves to crawl and is much happier when he's mobile. He's working on tooth #6. We have installed a remote control gate at the top of the steps to the basement and the kids love to press the remote button and open and close the gate repeatedly. Yes, they are 6, 9, and 11.

5. Still no bus.

6. Things are going well with my online class. I kind of like it. It's funny how different it is to "lecture" in a chat, typing as fast as my fingers will let me, and there are some things that are harder to teach. But overall, it's going well.

7. Bus. But no Elise. Turns out she and Tayler got off at the stop before ours because they wanted to walk a little bit. And Elise thinks the phone is broken. Hmmm. But all are home, safe and sound.

So here are some pictures of Wyatt to prove how cute he is. Note the teeth:





Now I must go rifle through the kids' backpacks and assess what kind of homework we have going on tonight . . .

Chuga Chuga

Yes, I have finally gotten around to updating my blog after the trip Forrest and I took with the Wilkey family to Colorado last weekend. Here's a play by play:

Thursday:

Woke up and cleaned. I am grateful with all my heart for the wonderful folks who took care of my kids while we were gone . . . and I had to make sure there wasn't any ring around the toilet and whatnot while they were here. So I cleaned and prepped and wrote my little "Mom's List of Instructions" until noon, when I dropped Wyatt off at my friend Karen's place. (She has four boys and her youngest just went to Kindergarten . . . and she actually said "Thank You" to ME for asking her to watch Wyatt. She says she's baby hungry, but I say she's just really, really nice.)

So Forrest and Darrin and Katie and I settled into the Tahoe and took off for Colorado. We had an excellent time yapping and snacking and spotting UFOs on the seven hour drive to Durango.



See that shiny white speck in the sky? We couldn't figure out what it was, either. UFO, we figured. I took four pictures of it, by the way, and three of the four mysteriously disappeared from my iPhoto application on my computer after I deleted them from the camera. Mysterious, mysterious.

Also, on the way there we got a call from my Mom and Dad--who had taken over from Karen later on that afternoon, thanks guys!--letting me know that (of course) WYATT WAS SICK! So I moped for about an hour, feeling sorry for myself and my little guy that he can be perfectly healthy for months on end, and on the very day I leave him for the first time, he comes down with a fever.

He has recovered, however, and all is well.

We also received a call from a very conscientious older Wilkey brother who checked on our reservations and discovered that we, in fact, did NOT have a reservation at the General Palmer hotel that night. (Long story, but we'd asked them to cancel Friday, and they canceled Thursday instead.) After many attempts to call other hotels and finding them all booked (and getting continually disconnected from the ever-patient hotel personnel, because every time we would go up or down a hill our call would drop, even with three different wireless providers represented in the car) we finally finagled a way to get two rooms for the same price we'd been paying at the initial hotel, even though one of them was a suite. Sweet! we said. Well, Forrest and I said, because Darrin and Katie let us have the suite. Nice guys.

We pulled into Durango, which is kind of like Park City on Cowboy Steroids. Cool town. We had an excellent dinner with 20 other Wilkey family members and I enjoyed one of the best chicken dishes I have ever eaten. Plus I was really hungry. We stayed that night at the General Palmer--a 120 year old hotel--but it was a really nicely kept-up, modernized 120 year old hotel. Unlike the Friday night hotel. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Friday:

That morning we woke up to a tooting steam engine and little flecks of coal dust in the air. Here's a shot of Katie and me that a.m., if only because 1. we liked posing under a sign that said "Quiet Ladies" and 2. Forrest says I have Jennifer Aniston hair. (Circa 1999, maybe.)



And here's a shot of Forrest and me in front of the rail car that the Wilkey clan (and two other unrelated, and probably a little frightened, women) occupied. It was the last car on the train, which was great because we could step out on a little platform on the back and take excellent photos and enjoy the gorgeous air. And when we were near any roads, everyone would wave at us like we were celebrities.



Here's a shot of Darrin and Katie from the interior of the train. Not only is it a delightful photo, but it also shows off some of the woodworking and craftsmanship inside the car, which was built in the late 1800s.



The train ride to Silverton was gorgeous. Gorgeous! Here are some pictures to prove it:





Here's my favorite picture from the ride. Since we were in the end of the train, we could see the front of the train as it turned. I think it looks like a toy train on a track, or a Disney ride, don't you??



When we got to Silverton, we moseyed around town for a bit. It's a very small town, and probably would have disappeared by now if not for the tourist trade. Silverton actually closes down completely in the winter months. The train ride back to Durango from Silverton wasn't quite as exhilarating as on the way up--we humans are so easily bored, aren't we?--but it was fun to listen to assorted Wilkey family members sing morbid songs about the Titanic at the tops of their voices. (I wish I remembered what the song was called, but one of the lyrics I recall is "glug glug.")

We'd decided to stay Friday night in Silverton instead of Durango (which caused the initial hotel reservation confusion in the first place) -- and once we got to Silverton we immediately began second guessing our decision. The Silverton hotel was also a 19th century "classic" hotel like the Durango hotel, but it had slipped a couple of notches from rustic and charming to creaky and haunted. And I mean it when I say haunted. The lady at the front desk told us that she had seen the ghost herself--a Dr. Luigi, an unfortunate M.D. who had killed himself in the hotel over a hundred years before. "He's a nice ghost, though," she told us. Apparently he goes around healing people of their ailments. (Darrin's usually very reserved oldest sister mused that she might wake up with bigger breasts, then. Hilarious.) She also informed us that there had been a number of murders in the hotel, and that the most recent had taken place "a couple months ago." Hmmmm . . .

The floorboards creaked with every step, but Forrest and I lucked out once more and got one of the nicer rooms. (Darrin and Katie were bummed that they didn't get rod iron canopy beds.) Here's Forrest looking spooked in our haunted room, and a shot outside our haunted window:




Saturday:

We woke up in the morning refreshed and unharmed, although I was disappointed to find that I hadn't been healed of my stretch marks. Dang!

We took off that morning for home. The drive out of Silverton was one of the most gorgeous (and scary) drives I've ever taken. Apparently Coloradoans don't think guard rails are necessary, and we snaked our way through one of the most beautiful canyons I've ever seen. I kept telling Forrest to stop looking at the scenery and keep his eyes on the road, though. Here's a picture of Katie and me against some of the only fall color we saw on the trip (too early), and a cool shot of an old, run down mill up against the mountain:




We also saw three young bucks (literal young bucks!!) crossing a river. (We also saw antelope and wild elk actually frolicking, but didn't have the camera ready in time):



The final great story of the trip is how I ran into my old elementary school friend, Stephanie Reiva. Quick background: Stephanie and I were best friends in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades. Her dad was in the military, though, and they moved to Denver when I was 10. It was one of the saddest days of my life. I went and visited her when I was in sixth grade, but we haven't seen each other since. Amazingly, we've stayed in touch all these years by sending Christmas cards, even though Stephanie lived in Boston (working as an engineer on the "Big Dig") and Puerto Rico. She got married about five years ago, and she and her husband finally decided the wanted to settle down and picked a small town in CO called Montrose and bought a business that builds cedar homes. So, as we were driving through random small Colorado towns, we passed a cedar home builder on the outskirts of one town and it reminded me of Stephanie. "Will we be passing through Montrose?" I asked Forrest. "Sounds familiar," he said. Well, a few minutes later I had to go to the bathroom, so we pulled over at a gas station. While at the gas station, we discovered we were in Montrose at that very moment. Darrin pulled out his Mio, a very handy/annoying GPS tracking gadget, and punched in Stephanie's address. Lo and behold, the cedar home business we'd passed was hers! So we flipped back around and walked in, their secretary called Stephanie on her cell phone (she was taking her son to the pediatrician to check for an ear infection) and fifteen minutes later, there was Stephanie Reiva! In the flesh! It was so fun to see her and meet her husband and her two little boys. Fifteen years is a long time, but I would have recognized her anywhere. Here's a picture of the two of us (even though I look TERRIBLE and blame it on the haunted hotel because it didn't have a hair dryer, so I couldn't wash my hair and I was all greasy and limp, but I must get over my pride):



We pulled into home at about 6:00. I was more than ready to see the kids, and I'm sure that Forrest's Mom and Mindy and Pete (thanks, guys!) were more than ready to see us. We had a ball, and we're so grateful to the Wilkeys for inviting us and for our marvelous babysitters for allowing us some badly needed Mom and Dad time.

And if you've read this whole thing until the end, congrats! (And I mean you, Dave. I know how you hang on every word I write :-).

**Addendum: I am a lot older than I think I am. It has actually been TWENTY FIVE years since I have seen Stephanie, not fifteen. Sigh. Why am I not 25 still????**

Fall is in the air . . .

which is nice since our air conditioner is broken . . . again. We've been patient w/ the Dick's Heating and Air Conditioning people, but after about seven or eight freeze-ups since we moved in, we think it's time to get a new one. (Especially since it's been broken since Wed. and they still haven't returned our calls). The heat is supposed to be back later this week, so hopefully they'll get sick of us calling everyday and fix/replace it sometime soon.

The other reason I say fall is in the air is because it's time for the kids to get back on the school/extracurricular activities bandwagon (and Mom and Dad, too). Jonas is playing soccer again, Jonas and Ethan have gone back to karate, piano is starting up, and Elise is going to do a Children's Community Theater this year--I think she'll like it. They're doing a "Pirates of the Caribbean meets the Little Mermaid" play. She has her first class tonight. She's also participating in the Monte Vista school choir and has to go to school 1 hour early on Tues and Thurs, which shows how much my girl who loves to sleep in wanted to do it. This morning, after dragging her out of bed and watching her droopy, grumpy face stare back at me in the mirror while I was doing her hair, she demanded to know why, exactly, they start school so early? "It doesn't make any sense!" she said. When I told her that junior high and high school were even earlier, she groaned and said, "Well that's not good news." I agree, sister.

Ethan also just graduated from Cub Scouts and got his Arrow of Light. Here's photographic proof:




The first shot is of Ethan and obviously me--with a loverly spit-up stain on my chestal region--holding the really cool plaque a nice woman in the ward makes for all the boys who receive their Arrow of Light. (For those of you without Scouts, it's an award you can work toward once you graduate from Cubs and move on to Boy Scouts.) The second shot is of Ethan walking across the "bridge" from Cub to Boy Scouts--a highly symbolic and emotionally weighty moment that, as you can tell from Ethan's stance, he wasn't taking quite as seriously as his mother and the Scout Master would have liked. But what are you going to do? I suppose the line between stand-up and somber symbolic moments can get fuzzy at times?? We discussed it and hopefully it is now clearer :-). I was still proud of him for getting the award. He worked hard in Cubs and did a lot of cool things. And now he's an official Boy Scout, and next year he'll be in the Young Men's program with his Dad, now that Forrest is the secretary. Hard to believe.

To conclude, I should probably say something about Jonas, since I've touched on Ethan and Elise (and I touch on Wyatt all the time--who by the way is having a rapturous love affair with remotes, shoes, and keys). He's doing great in 1st grade and his reading is really taking off. He's reading stuff all the time now. He had his first soccer practice on Sat. and did great. The more he plays, the more aggressive he gets about going after the ball -- but he still hates it when other kids take it away. I think he's spent too many years being the youngest and having a Mom who tells the older kids "just give him what he wants!" or "Maybe let him win!" in order to keep the peace. Bad parenting, yes. But I don't do it all the time. Just when I want some peace.

So that's it for now. As of yesterday, I have collected $1,779 dollars for our upcoming Super Saturday. Even though it's in check form, it's making me very nervous and I can't wait to hand it off to the woman who's buying all the supplies. Now that's really it for now.

Why do we hate Hillary Clinton again?

Good Hillary:



Bad Hillary:




I'm asking this question in all seriousness. I saw her on Ellen yesterday and she seemed quite nice. Although I can understand not liking her politics, or not liking her personality, I know there are quite a few people out there who don't find her simply unlikable. They think she's evil. And my question is . . . . why? I read the paper every day (almost), I read Newsweek every week, I watch the news, I read a lot of online stuff, I even listen to the occasional right wing radio program, and I'm wracking my brain to come up with why she's the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. I can't seem to put my finger on anything specific.

And you can't say it's because she's calculating (ambitious) or a flip-flopper (a politician) if you plan on supporting Mitt Romney, since he's both of these things.

I'm not on a pro-Hillary bandwagon or anything. I don't know if I'd ever vote for her. But it was a bit unsettling to me yesterday when I realized I'd dismissed the possibility of voting for her right out of the gate (when I haven't done the same with Barak Obama or John Edwards). When it comes right down to it, the reason I'm so skittish about the possibility of voting for her is I'm afraid some of my friends and family members will think I'm voting for a minion of Satan. Vote for Edwards or Obama and I'm simply a silly Democrat (like James E. Faust :-). Vote for Hillary, and I'm contributing to the constitution of this great nation hanging by a thread.

I don't think it's because she's a woman. Is it because she's a woman? If it is because she's a woman, would we even be aware that it's because she's a woman?

So . . . . lemme know. I won't jump on anyone's case or anything. I'm just curious, truly.

Kinky Neck

Yesterday we went on our final boat trip of the season with the Wilkeys and their five kids and Forrest's sister Mindy and her family. Lots of fun but supercrowded (and I mean super--it took us over an hour waiting in line to get our boat out. Should we have reminded ourselves not to go to Pineview on a holiday?? Hello.) I also had a pretty wicked wipeout on the waterskis and woke up with a sore neck for my trouble. My spell checker is underlining both "wipeout" and "waterskis". Are these not compound words? Hmmm.

Here's a cute picture of Wyatt and the Wilkey's little boy Isaac. They were both eating crackers at the time, so excuse the food remnants on the face. Our kids match up so well with the Wilkeys'--it's a lot of fun. They have FOUR boys and one girl, though. Thank heaven our two girls have each other to hang out with:



Right now I'm listening to Wyatt upstairs in his crib as he babbles and yells. He's supposed to be going down for his nap but instead he's saying "Bap, Bap, Bap" very loudly. But at least he's not crying, right? We've gotten to the stage where we can hand him a bottle at night. Very bad habit, but oooh, so nice to get right back in bed. Don't tell my pediatric dentist. My kids also rarely floss. Aren't I bad?

So a few quick updates. First, Forrest and I both got new callings at church. He was released as the ward mission leader and put in as the Young Men's secretary. I think he'll really like being in the young men's--he's never done it before. And I was released as the Enrichment Leader and put in as the second counselor in the Relief Society presidency. I think it will be fun, too. I'm happy to be a counselor in a presidency any day. It's being El Presidente that makes me feel woozy. So these changes should be fun.

Next, I have decided to drastically reduce my Diet Coke intake for a little weight loss experiment. To my dismay, I find that even though I stopped nursing (which always makes me lose a little weight--or at least, it did with Jonas) and I'm exercising regularly and trying to watch what I eat, I still weight exactly the same as I did at my 6 week postpartum doctor's appointment. My pants do fit better, but the weight itself is still so discouraging. I hate my dumb metabolism. So a friend of mine said she gave up Diet Coke and lost 5 pounds. We'll see. So far it's mainly making me grumpier and martyrish (I realize that is not a word.)

Ooh, also just finished reading a really good book, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaleed Hosseini (probalby didnt' spell that right), the author of The Kite Runner. I think I liked this one better than The Kite Runner, which I liked quite a bit. It's so interesting to learn about Afghanistan--the things the women went through under the Taliban are breathtaking. Like they were taken out of a horrifying post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel. I remember reading A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood ten years ago or so and not believing that such things could happen to women--and they were happening to women in Afghanistan and we didn't even know it. Anyway, the book is a page turner and fascinating and well written, and you'll learn something, too. Recommended highly.

Speaking of reading, a story of mine, "Accusation," just came out in the most recent issue of Dialogue. I'm sure that very few of my regular blog readers actually subscribe to Dialogue . . . but the story will be in my book when it comes out, so you can read it there. (Because you're all going to buy my book, right? :-).

So that's it for now. Wyatt has stopped "Bap Bap Bapp"ing, so hopefully he's decided to go to sleep. Now I gotta get to work!