Things I Learned on My Vacation

I've been on vacation for the past six weeks, visiting my family in Idaho and Utah. About a week into the trip, I saw things and learned things that amused me, so I began keeping a record. Now that my vacation is over, I can share my wisdom with all of you lovely people!

1 - Menopause is no big deal. (Granted, I have less estrogen than most women, so that's probably why it's been a breeze for me.)

2 - Nobody wants to see your butt crack, no matter how cute a bum you may think you have.

3 - Trampolines are way more fun when they're wet.

4 - Revving your engine repeatedly at a red light does not make you look cool. You just look like an idiot. Especially when you're the only one doing it.

5 - Bugs on a windshield make a lovely abstract photo.

6 - If your brother is grouchy, and no attempt to cheer him up is working, try presenting him with a wiener dog to play with.

7 - My little wiener dog, Bones, is a bit of a masochist. He's happiest when getting his butt kicked by my parents' big chocolate lab, Bella.

8 - No matter how old he gets, I can still get my younger brother to cross-dress.

9 - The house must always be tidied up before the maid gets there to clean it.

10 - Flash floods can create wonderful swimming holes in the street in front of one's house. 

11 - Some people just look better when they're pixellated.

12 - New babies can never have too many "My Aunt is the best!" onesies.

13 - No matter how nice a guy may smell in person, his bedroom is probably stinky.

14 - Wiener dogs are escape artists, and prefer to make their escape while people are actually playing with them in the (fenced-in) back yard. I believe this is referred to in the doggie world as "showing off."

15 - If you take a party-sized bag of M'n'Ms downstairs, forget about them, and your brother eats them all, you're the one who gets the blame.

16 - Apparently my brother, Joseph, will let just about anybody pick his nose - including Chuck Norris.

17 - The Mad Hatter looks best when portrayed by a fabulous four-year-old girl.

18 - It's hard to hit a tennis ball with a tee-ball bat when your pants are falling down.

19 - If you want your kid to eat veggies, let her pick them from the garden herself and eat them with her bare hands.

20 - Preparing to send your child to school for the first time will be far scarier for you than for your child.

21 - Dancing, swimming, and jumping on a trampoline are the world's best forms of exercise. Hands down.

22 - People are incredibly stupid about their pets.

23 - Who needs makeup when you have pink markers?

24 - I'm terrible at remembering how to cut my brother's hair. When I do remember, I do fine. But when I don't remember, horrifying things happen. Note to self: Razor for Ben, SCISSORS for Daniel!!!!

25 - Evie's hips don't lie.

26 - Actual working road construction workers are more elusive and impossibly rare than leprechauns.

27 - More than 8 hours of sleep a night will make me fat. Less than 9 will make me cranky.

28 -  Any prolonged conversation with a pregnant woman will inevitably turn to the wonders (aka "horrors") of childbirth and a competition to see who has given birth to the biggest baby. (Evie was 9 lbs 3 oz. Just sayin'.)

29 - My 11-year-old brother, Joseph, will make a wonderful mother someday.

30 - Just because you can squeeze into a size 2 bikini doesn't mean you should, folks. Muffin tops and fat rolls = not cute.

31 - If you want to see tacky, badly-dressed people who apparently don't own a mirror, there are better places to go than Wal-Mart. Try the Idaho Falls Fourth of July celebration. Wow. Just... wow.

32 -  Heckling children's camp skits is fun! Also, said heckling is generally frowned upon by said children's parental units.

33 - There's a real life person named "Fritz Schmutz"!!! Awesome, right??? I'm so jealous.

34 - Inside jokes are always funny, even long after the meaning behind them has been forgotten. Mraaah. Gimmie a fish.

 And finally, the strangest of all:

35  - People back home in Abilene actually miss me when I'm gone! Crazy, huh?

There! Now that I've passed my vacation wisdom on to you, go forth and discover knowledge of your own! ;)

Overactive Imagination

I inherited something super-fun from my mother, who, as I've recently learned, seems to have inherited it from her mother. It's called "an overactive imagination."

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this particular issue, let me explain. What happens is usually something along these lines: "I haven't talk to so-and-so lately, even though they said they'd call. They must be dead."

There's also the ever-popular "I have a really bad headache today. I wonder if it's a brain tumor?"

And, "I heard a faint noise in my house. It's the middle of the night. I'd better grab the nearest weapon (aka, a safety razor from the bathroom) and go make sure my daughter isn't being kidnapped."

My mother and I (and probably my grandma, too) all recognize that we have this problem. We're completely aware that our fears are almost certainly unfounded. We even laugh about it. But not until after we know for sure that our fears were not, in fact, realized.

Don't get me wrong, though. It's not like I spend all my time in a perpetual state of worry. And I'm not a hypochondriac. I've never once actually gone to the doctor because of headaches that might be brain tumors. I recognize that it's just my overactive imagination at work, and let it go.

But when something unexpected happens, like a sound in the night, my imagination goes into overdrive. I find myself in a state of extreme nervousness. I have to make sure all is well before I can relax.

And that's what I'm waiting for today. My husband is deployed at the moment, so naturally I fear for his safety. But I hear from him every day, which reassures me and keeps my imagination at bay. The problem is, I haven't heard from him since Wednesday. Today is supposed to be his day off from flying, so there's no reason he should be unreachable. And yet, I can't reach him.

My mind is telling me that it's silly to be worried. He's probably fine. He may be napping, or at the gym. And maybe he got in so late last night that we just didn't get a chance to talk. There's no reason to be freaking out yet.

And I'm not freaking out. But, thanks to my overactive imagination, I'm slowly getting there.

Let's face facts! He is in a dangerous situation. He's fighting a war, for crying out loud! He's living in a part of the world where there are multitudes of people who want to kill him, and every other member of our military. Granted, since he's a pilot, he's probably safer than a lot of the other servicemen and women. But that doesn't mean that he's guaranteed to be safe. When someone is in the military, there's always a greater chance that they'll be killed or wounded, compared to those who work in regular jobs, like accounting or plumbing. So my fears aren't completely unreasonable.

So that's where I'm at today. Worrying about my husband, and trying to convince myself that it's just my imagination working overtime. To be fair, it probably is just my imagination. There's no reason to assume the worst. But I can't seem to help it.

It's in my genes.

The Calm After the Storm

I realized today why it is that I don't write in my blog much anymore.

Writing is a catharsis. It helps me vent my frustration in a non-violent way. Over the past four (almost) years, as we've struggled with infertility, I've turned to this blog to try and express my feelings.

This year, though, I've finally reached the point where I'm okay. And now that I'm okay, I don't feel the need to vent anymore. Ergo, no blogs.

But that isn't really fair. For anyone who actually reads this blog, all they've seen are the negative, venting, frustrated feelings that I've expressed. They haven't seen the resolution. I've kept it to myself.

So, even though I've already written one blog entry today, I'm going to write another one and explain the change that has overcome me in the past 6 months or so.

On Christmas Eve of last year, we did a candle-passing with Ben's family. It's a family tradition. What happens is, we turn off the lights, sit in a circle, and pass a candle around. When it's your turn to take the candle, you share with everyone a gift that you want to give to the Savior. It's kind of like making a New Year's resolution, only more meaningful.

When it was my turn to take the candle, I had a hard time speaking. The infertility issue had been weighing heavily on me for more than three years. I was tired of feeling bitter, angry, and heartbroken. It had been a very emotional three years. So I said, "For my gift to the Savior this year, I'm going to make a greater effort to embrace His will for me."

That had been the problem all along, of course. I was frustrated because the Lord wasn't blessing me with a child right then, like I wanted Him to. He was making me wait, and in my opinion, it was taking too long. I would panic about the age gap between Evie and the next kid. Every time I thought about how much older Evie would be, I would find myself muttering, "It's too much! It's too much!" I would decide when the best time to get pregnant was, and then spend that month begging the Lord to finally give me a baby. And when He didn't, I always felt hurt and a little bit betrayed.

I wasn't accepting His will. I was trying to make Him accept mine.

So I made my promise to the Savior; that I would to try and change all that.

For the first month, it was still very hard. I had an opportunity to go see Ben on his TDY in Utah during January, right when I was ovulating. I had just had a test done for my infertility, and the doctor said that the test would make my chances of conceiving that month increase. When a friend gave Evie and me free plane tickets to Utah so that Ben and I could try and conceive that month, it felt like a sign that the time was right. It seemed like everything was falling exactly into place, and that it was finally going to happen.

When it didn't, my heart ripped apart all over again.

But I reminded myself of the promise I had made to the Savior. So I took a deep breath, calmed down, and said a prayer. I asked God to bless me with patience, and the ability to not only accept His will for me, but to embrace it.

That became a familiar refrain in each of my prayers after that. I began adding, "if it by Thy will" and "Thy will be done" to everything I said in my prayers. And, miraculously, I truly began to want it.

In just a few short months, the pain in my heart had been healed. Looking back, I'm still astounded by how quickly it happened. I had a complete change of heart. As a result, I'm happier. I have more joy in my life. I feel a greater love for my family, and for the Lord. And, most importantly, I'm at peace when it comes to the infertility issue.

I still firmly believe that we will have more children. I know they're coming. I can already feel them residing in my heart. But I no longer obsess over it. I no longer glare at pregnant women on the street. I no longer compare the number of children others have to the one I've been blessed with. I no longer fight the Lord, or try to make Him do things my way.

My testimony has been increased an hundredfold. I can feel the Lord's arms around me, giving me strength and patience. I can feel His incredible love for me. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that He wants me to be happy. He wants to bless me with every good thing He has to offer. If He isn't blessing me with children right this second, it's because it's not time yet. Everything He does is for a wise purpose. He can see what my life holds, and He knows what will give me the greatest joy. If I continue to trust in Him, and put my life in His hands,

I will have more joy than I can possibly comprehend.

This trial has surely been for my good, and though infertility has been hard, I thank God that I had to go through this. It has made me a better person. I am, one tiny step at a time, becoming the woman God wants me to be.

My heart has been changed. My faith has been increased. My pain has been healed.

All is well.

Pre-K

So, Evie is a smart kid. She doesn't miss much. Her memory is fantastic; she can quote a movie almost word-for-word after seeing it once (if she liked it and was paying attention). She can already count to forty, and could probably go higher if I told her the words for 50, 60, etc. She knows letters and the sounds they make, and can read small words if she feels so inclined. She does basic addition and subtraction in her head.

But she missed the cutoff for kindergarten this year by two weeks.

Sad, isn't it? She's such a little smartie, and she loves learning. She should be in school with all of her friends from church! But she was born two weeks too late.

I decided, therefore, that she needed to do pre-k this year. I didn't do pre-k, and in fact, it's only recently that I even heard of it, but I knew she needed to do some kind of schooling. She's just too bored at home. So I started looking around, and pre-k seems like the thing to do.

The great part is, it's free for military dependents in Abilene.

The downside is, there are a LOT of military families in Abilene. Couple that with the kids who qualify for free lunches, and what you get is too many kids and not enough spots in pre-k.

There's a school registration fair for military families on base in August, so I'm going to try to sign her up then. My assumption is, if the school representatives are coming to the registration fair, they must have some slots open. I'm praying that we get one.

But now that I've got it all planned out, the reality is starting to sink in. From what I understand, pre-k is just like regular school. She'll be gone for most of the day, five days a week. For almost five years now she's been my shadow, my little buddy, my constant companion. Now, with Ben being gone so much between deployments and TDYs, I'm going to be alone a lot of the time.

I'm not afraid of being alone. In fact, part of me is looking forward to it. But the other part is starting to PANIC!!!

I'm going to miss her, for one thing. She's such a fun kid, and I love having her around all the time, so that will be hard. But this is also a sign that she's growing up. Once they start school, they don't stop until after they've moved out of the house! Never again will I have my tiny shadow with me all day, every day. There will be summers, yes, but that's just a few weeks out of every year. Then she'll be gone all day again.

The biggest source of my anxiety, though, is that I will no longer be her lone source of answers and teaching moments. She'll be surrounded by different kinds of people, many with different kinds of values, who will have all different kinds of influences on her. Of course, I'll still be an influence at home. But how long will it be before she thinks I'm

lame, and starts turning to other people for guidance instead of me?

All I can do is pray that she makes good friends, friends who will help her make good choices. That's the scariest thing. She will no longer be under my lone influence, in my controlled environment all the time. She's taking her first steps out into the real world. And I'm afraid of what might happen.

But she's a smart kid. She's already got a testimony, and isn't afraid to share her values with other people. She may even be an good influence on other kids. I know she'll be a good example.

It's a little bit terrifying to let my baby step out into the world,

and grow up. But I've got God on my side, and I know that He wants what's best for her, just like I do. Between Him, me, and my wonderful husband, she's got a good team of people watching out for her. I've just got to trust in Him, and keep doing my best to raise her right when she's at home.

It's a scary thing, but it's a wonderful thing, too.