"Nanaru" quite the pair...

Ruby and Chris got back last night from a long anticipated trip to Colorado to see Ruby's special great-grandma, "Nana". It is undeniable that they have a special bond, as Ruby talks about her almost daily and cries because she wants to see her, "I want my Nana!". When we decided against going to Colorado for Christmas, Ruby was crushed, and we planned a mini trip for she and Chris to go in January. Over a year had passed since they'd seen each other, and I know Nana was worried that she wouldn't live up to Ruby's expectations, but that was definitely not the case. When I asked Ruby last night what was her favorite part of going to Colorado, I expected to hear mention of jumping off the diving board at the swimming pool, playing with Porter, seeing aunts, uncles and grandma and grandpa. Sorry, no. The answer, with no hesitation was, "Seeing Nana."

The day before they left, we were shopping at Michaels, and Ruby saw a display of knock-off Crocs. I'd been meaning to get her some, and so she picked out some navy blue ones, and then she noticed that there were bigger sizes, and she said, "I want Nana and I to have matching shoes!" So we got her a pair too.

Ruby is overwhelmingly gentle and sensitive. It is so noticeable to me as her parent, that I feel like the parent who has the psycho kid running around the store spitting on strangers and ripping open bags of chips. I don't take credit for Ruby's amazing-ness any more than that crazy kid's parent takes credit for their child. If anything, her sweet nature mis-represents my parenting, because I don't think I could ever make a kid like her on purpose.

THANKS Sage for taking the pictures!

A's Birth

So normally, I wouldn't post this randomly, but since I traumatized you all with R's story, I thought I should follow up with A's.

I know it will seem odd, but I chose to have the same birth plan with A as I had for R. I had to drive an hour 47 miles to every single appt. because we had moved, but we chose our midwives and the whole birth experience because it was what we trusted most, and even though it was a hairy scenario, I knew (because the docs told me so) that had I been in the hospital, I would have had a c-section since my contractions ceased. C-sections are greatly necessary in many instances, but in this case, I was very glad to have managed things a different way.

I think the bottom line with these kinds of choices, is every individual needs to know who they trust and be somewhere where you don't have to question the care you are given. For me, this is a home or birth center environment.

So I was five days overdue with A. I was miserable. R had come early, so I'd been counting on having my baby for like four weeks and was SO READY. At this point, sleep is not a possibility, so I usually opt for the couch, since I can lean against the back of it a little and flip the television on anytime I'm tired of pretending to sleep.

I was folding laundry and watching "Spitfire Grill" on TV. First contraction. I don't have any Braxton Hicks contractions or false labor, and being five days overdue, I knew it was the real deal. I watched the clock and had a second contraction five minutes later. After about fifteen minutes, I ran upstairs to wake Chris up and do a dance of joy. I was soooo ready. I told him to go back to sleep and went downstairs to labor a little more. My mind was racing with the details of how we'd get R to my folks (farther from the birth center), etc. Finally, I went upstairs, we woke R, put her in the car and drove to my parents' house so I could labor there and know that R was where she needed to be and that I was then only 20 minutes from the birth center.

I had regular contractions maybe 2 minutes a part the whole drive. They were intense, but I felt good between contractions.

At my parents' Chris got R to bed and I told him to rest in the living room until I needed him. I thought we were at the tip of the ice berg, and I was planning to labor longer on my own and not at the birth center. I WAS SO UNCOMFORTABLE. There was no way to be comfortable, I just felt pain all the time, and a lot of pressure. I decided I needed to be in water. I called my midwife and she said she'd meet me there right away. My mom was listening to me describe how I felt like I had to go to the bathroom, and that I felt all this pressure, and she was like, "LET'S GO!"

So on the drive over, I was thinking all these discouraging thoughts about how I didn't want to do this and how I wanted it cut out of me. I was very uncomfortable, and was annoyed that Chris was driving in the right lane and the car tires were bumping in the sewer drain things, I told him to change lanes for a smoother ride. I didn't imagine at the time that I was in transition, but these negative, "what am I in for" are typical of transition.

Anyway, we got to the birth center and I walked in (whenever I walked, the contractions would cease for like ten minutes). I was chatty and bright eyed and feeling fine on my own two feet. My midwife (Ali, the one from before...I was sooooo glad she was on call, we both felt we needed to have a different experience to heal from the previous one) asked if I wanted her to check me, "YES"!!!

I was 10 cm dilated! Woah! I had no idea! I was elated and so full of hope. She wanted me to have one contraction before getting in the water, so I did. I got in the water and eight minutes passed with no contractions. Hmmmmm. She warned me that at 10 minutes she'd want me to get out. I was also told that this time, my body would tell me what to do and that she didn't want any pushing on my own, that I would know when to push. That was it. I felt it, and could do nothing but push. 11 minutes later, I caught my little A (2 pounds heavier than R) and pulled her close. She was born 59 minutes after I walked through the birth center doors, healthy as can be. I immediately said, "I WANT TO DO THAT AGAIN!"

I got quickly out out of the tub so Ali could verify that my bleeding was normal. Everything was contracting normally and so I got to nurse A while I delivered the placenta.

Three hours later, we were back home all together with our healthy little A and of course, my mother who saves my life for a week after I have a baby.

Claim to Fame...

That's her, a long time ago...mom of three in the red coat...it's the only thing I have!

Unless there is a link between the Hamm Olympians or Mia Hamm, I have really only one super famous person in my family. I tell people all the time, and I have to say, most are pretty impressed. Curious?

My aunt Peggy (my mom's brother's wife) won the title of Miss Congeniality when she represented Utah in the 1972 Miss America Pageant. At the time, she was Peggy Moore, and when I googled her, I got quite the results! Here's what wikipedia had to say.

If you knew my aunt now, it wouldn't surprise you for a second that she:

A. was the winner as Miss Utah

B. was the most well liked among all the contestants

She's really funny and beautiful, and because I don't have a good recent picture, you can take my word for it!

Anyone else out there with similar fame in the family?

Who is YOUR oldest friend?

Lyndsey Durst (it took me about one minute to think of her new last name), formerly Lyndsey Thomas is my oldest friend. She just turned 31 last week and I'll be 31 in a couple months. We've been friends since the summer before we went to Kindergarten, so I think we were 5 and that gives us 26 years of friendship.

Our friendship wasn't taken for granted, as we only lived close to each other until we were going into the fourth grade. That is when she moved to Clovis, CA with her family. Many kiddos that young would have lost touch, but not us. We were best friends, and we wrote letters religiously and every once in awhile our folks would let us call each other. After not seeing each other in person for five years, I won $101.50 in a radio station contest, which at the time was almost enough to buy a ticket to CA. I spent it all on that ticket and flew at age 13 to visit her in Clovis.

We were still as close and compatible as ever, and I really looked up to her because she'd been kissing boys for a couple of years and I was still running away from them. We had a great week together, and lots of tears were shed when it was time to return home.

We continued letter writing and added to the fun, mailing each other whole cassette tapes of one-sided conversations. When we were maybe 14 or so, her family moved to Moses Lake, WA only a couple hours from where I lived and we were able to see more of each other.

Her friendship was the most important to me through the high school years as she was one of my only friends who shared my religious beliefs. We were pretty regular with visits and phone calls increased, and we relied on each other through many petty boyfriend fights and other such adolescent drama. She experienced some fairly major health issues over a period of a year or more and it was something I remember really worrying about a lot, though she seemed to take it in stride.

After high school, we attended college together at Ricks College in Rexburg, ID and we were roommates. It was a great time for us as we got along flawlessly and enjoyed the freedoms of living away from home and experiencing college together. This was a time when I realized more than ever how much her friendship meant to me. Many people assumed we were sisters, or even twins. We shared all our clothes and gave little effort to keeping our room clean. We lived together for two years, before she transferred to Utah State and I transferred to BYU.

We both graduated the spring of 2001 and took any and all money and credit to EUROPE where we travelled for about two months. We were very compatible travelers, often skipping the museums for shopping or a suntan, when we spent a week in Nice, we really just ate, slept and sat at the beach, she may have read...we knew that if there was anything overly worthwhile to see in Nice, we could just google it when we got back home! We saw U2 in concert in Paris on our last night. We didn't have tickets, so we went to the trusty ATM and started withdrawing funds from any and all cards in our possession until we were completely out of money. We took all our money to the ticket scalpers and flew home the next day with big plans to work off our fabulous trip all over Spain and the south of France.

She was at my wedding four months later, and I was at hers 18 months after mine. We have managed to see each other even as she continued her education and a full-time career in ID and I took on the role of mother. We still get along effortlessly and we are still as ever, on the same page in most everything.

It is so nice to know that there is someone who knows you inside and out so effortlessly and with whom there is no time lapse or requirement for friendship maintenance. We have done many silly things together, we learned about S-E-X from the same neighbor informant when we were little, we both fell head over heels for the same boy when we were in kindergarten and our crush remained mutual until she moved, we always agreed that we could just share him, she coached me through seven long years of ups and downs and complete outs with my now husband, and continues to hear me out now that we are married, we got caught at a pizza buffet when we couldn't eat what we determined was our fair share, so we wrapped up a couple of pieces to take on the road, we once used nylons to tie the front doors shut on an entire apartment complex across the parking lot from our college pad, we obsessed over music together and would lay down on the floor of our room with sad songs on full blast and the lights out, we watched over two pet turtles, and subsisted for two full years on popcorn and butter spray.

I'm glad for my first "sister-friend" and for her solid friendship all these years. I miss you and I love you!

President Gordon B. Hinckley Passed Away...

"We are dedicated ... to teaching the gospel of peace, to the promotion of civility and mutual respect among people everywhere, to bearing witness to the living reality of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the practice of his teachings in our daily lives." -President Hinckley

The full story will tell you more about this amazing leader, humanitarian and disciple, all he did for the Lord and the world during his life of service, but I have a fun personal story to share.

All the youth from my congregation travelled to Salt Lake City to attend the twice-yearly church-wide general conference of the church. This was a really unique conference, as President Howard W. Hunter was the prophet for only one general conference...that same one...October of 1994 before he passed away in March of 1995.

Anyway, we wanted to see a really popular church film and we needed to wait in line. We needed a handful of people to wait, because you could only get 6 tickets per person, so I volunteered to wait with a few others while everyone else went across the street for breakfast at McDonalds. We got the tickets and everyone returned from McDonalds. There was time, so the other ticket waiters and myself left for breakfast. While we were GONE, President Hinckely was spotted walking around the building admiring the beautiful paintings hanging on the wall. One of our leaders approached him and asked him if they could get a picture, and he went to take her camera, as if we were asking him to be our cameral man! He was probably joking, as he had a really good, public sense of humor, but we didn't really know that at the time. So they all gathered and took a picture with him!

I WAS AT MCDONALDS!

I was really bummed when I returned and they all excitedly told me what had happened. I'm sure I'll find the picture somewhere so I can post it, but anyway, it is my own personal story about how I almost met the prophet.

I will miss him, I really loved his humble nature, his knack for people and his contagious energy for doing what is right and serving with full purpose and effort.

Free Digital Stuff

For my friends who are getting interested in creating fun things with Photoshop, I had to post my secret spot for awesome (almost endless) digital kits that are FREE! I love 2peas! They have free fonts too.

Anyway, mostly for you, Jenny. It isn't that easy to find the free stuff.

Two of my favorite posts...

I have two favorite blog posts by friends/family that I think most of you will get a kick out of.

The first is by my sister-in-law's sister, Season about a conversation she had with her daughter regarding the size of her behind. It is really funny. You can read it here.

Another funny blog about my friend Mimi's house gets now that she is (pobrecita) sick with child. Her husband wrote it, you can read it here. Pretty funny, if you ask me. Just the kind of description to give my man a little less reason to complain! Thanks Meem and John for keeping it real! Love it!

Attempt at a family pic

We haven't taken a good picture since right after Alice was born. I really want to get a decent one this year because we might add another member to the family sometime (hopefully) and I'd like to immoralize our family of four in some way. Anyway, when our friends visited us last weekend, I took pictures for them and then Sommer snapped some of us. I'm not crazy about them because it was freezing cold and really kind of dark, so we have racoon eyes in lots of them because we weren't facing the right direction. The kids were cold and wanted to be done. Sommer did a good job though, because there are a couple of decent ones to make the effort worthwhile. I'll probably wait and try again in the spring when we can sit on the grass or something and not freeze ourselves silly. Thanks Sommer!

Free Online Photography Class

I came across a free online photography class and decided to do a few of the assignments. I am learning new stuff! First of all, I've learned a lot of things through trial and error with my camera, but I didn't really know what they were called. The class is showing me why what I do works and how to use it more effectively. I've also used a course that my sister-in-law Pam loaned me, and that has helped a bunch too, though I haven't fully applied myself to it because I do like due dates and assignments.

Anyway, here's the assignment for week one, focusing on aperture. The first picture was taken at 22, the second at about 8 and the last one was at 5. I wish I had something blooming to photograph, but no such luck at this time of year, so I used the weathered light in front of our house.

The second week was a lesson on shutter speed and ISO. Here is a picture of water. The first picture of course was at a slower shutter speed than the second.

Week three still needs some help. It is on white balance, something that I really rely on for getting the right color in different lights. I already know how to work with the various settings, but I haven't used the custom white balance setting before. I still haven't gotten it to work for me...though I follow the directions and get all the right menus and steps on my camera. This is a mystery to me. I'd really love to use a custom white balance setting if I can figure it out because then I can avoid some of the post picture-taking editing that eats up so much of my time. Here's a picture of a little wreath I have on top of a lamp shade in different settings. Setting the white balance properly really makes a big difference! The first picture is the most true to color, but I like the warmth in the second picture. The last one is just way off!

Terrible Twos

Who hasn't heard of them? Has anyone survived them? Will I?

I don't know what to think about Alice. She reminds me of me when I was 16 and heartbroken...she doesn't stop crying, and she walks around defining "broken hearted" with every limp move and stops crying only to ask for things using one word in the whiniest voice she can conjure. There are times so desperate that she taxes herself with only one syllable requests even when the word has two or more syllables: "Crack..." for cracker or "much" for sandwich. Honestly!

Like any good parent, I start talking myself into believing that there might actually be something clinically wrong with her. I start putting drops in her ears and popping out a dose of Tylenol to see if that will do the trick. When those things don't work miracles, I start considering that maybe she is depressed. Who knows? I think I have heard of cases where kids were born depressed! Naps don't help. Entertainment doesn't help. Candy only helps until it's gone...then it actually make it worse because she then finds the energy to repeatedly cry for candy, accepting nothing for an answer.

I can't get her dressed. I can't change her diaper. I can't put her down for naps. I can't put food away in the pantry. I can't leave the room. I can't brush her hair, get her out of the bath, turn off the bath water...you get the picture. I can't do anything with out provoking my depressed two year old. When we get home and I try to take her seat belt off, she has one hand covering the chest buckle and one hand covering the one between her legs. She wants to stay in the car...buckled in her seat...alone...more than she wants me to help her! It isn't even a matter of tricking her into thinking that she is doing it herself...no, she really just wants to stay in the van (until I start to walk away).

I can't win. I can't get a break from her crying. Ruby screamed bloody murder her first year, and Alice was super easy. Ruby's toddlerhood was blissful and so far, Alice's is a nightmare. Where's my girl?

Anyone have any tips?