I am oficially full term pregnant.

I am not even going to apologize for not posting. This November is rough. I am a hero even for sitting upright right now.

We had our last Primary Program Practice. It went much better. No broken feet. No kamikaze jumps off the podiums. No Maracas. Our piano player did stop playing, in tears because she thought the sunbeams were all going to die, but I think she was over-reacting a little. We have six sunbeams and three adults sitting between them. No one else was crying. But, then again, the more I learn about primary callings the more I see how frustrating it an be to be a chorister or pianist who has to be ready all the time, but doesn't necessarily get a say in what's going on.

Also, though going well-ish, the program was stressful enough to start me having some contractions. That is no bueno. I have to hold out until the program.

I was going to write some more but I can't even.

Late start

Well it's November and I am starting NaBloPoMo two days late. In my own defense, my whole body hurts. Lets do a quick recap of where my life is at to get everyone (my adoring and faithful masses of readers) up to speed. This is my first November pregnant. The baby is due December 1st. (It's a girl).
We are living in Eugene, Oregon. Chris is in his first year of law school...again, but this time are getting paid an Army salary and the government is footing the bill. Thanks, Government,

Sophia, and Mary (oh, did you know she goes by Mary now?) go to an elementary school right by our house. Grace stays home with me and plays imaginary My Little Pony games all day long.

After we'd been here about three weeks I got called to be Primary President. I had never been primary president before. It looks a lot easier when other people do it. Our first program practice was last week. We had one kid attempt to jump off the podium and then one other little boy almost broke his foot in one of those folding chairs. I think the lowest point was when some well meaning teacher gave all the sunbeams maracas. So basically, it was your typical practice. We'll see how next Sunday goes.

Good enough catch up. I'll do a real post tomorrow.

I AM THE WINNER!

Yep folks. I did it. I wrote 50,000 words of my novel in one month. I am a hero. It was really hard, and annoying, and fun. Whoop Whoop! I'm going to put it aside for  week and then come back and do some major organization and hopefully finish a rough draft in January. Hooray for me! I am the best.

I can do hard things now (maybe because I have an easy life)

That's me at the bottom right. I look like I'm dying.

In September I ran my first ever half marathon. It was in Scotland. (Oh that's right I just flew to Scotland for the weekend and ran a half marathon. No biggie. Yawn.) I would have never thought I could do that--but I did! (Not very fast, my time was 2 hours 16 minutes.) It made me feel so awesome, not just that I had the willpower to run for that long, but also that I was able to practice every week. I certainly wasn't perfect at practicing, but I almost always got my long runs in on Saturdays. I was impressed that I could make a long term, difficult goal and keep it. I was also impressed that I did it to meet no one's expectations but my own. It was a purely Anna thing. 

Now it's November and I'm doing NaNoWriMo, which is a commitment to write 50,000 words towards a novel in a month. Uh, I'm not done yet. I have one day and 2,000 words left to write. But I know I'll finish it. FYI it is pretty hard for me to do. I have been writing about 2 hours every day. After thirty days, that's a long time to be writing. And a lot of it is pretty terrible, but some of it shows promise and I feel like my writing muscles are flexing in a way that they haven't since I graduated. This makes me proud as well.

So basically I am telling you that I am amazing because I am doing hard things that fulfill me.

But also, a little voice inside of me is kind of laughing because I am doing hard things because my life is easy right now. My children are all older than two which makes them lower maintenance; however, they are younger than six so their social lives still revolve around our family and I don't have to ferry them to multiple activities yet. We don't need money so I don't have to work. I have as few social responsibilities as I want, and I have a flexible schedule that I can shape around my wants. My life is easier than it has ever been as a mom! So I can do what I want to do.

I do think, I have matured and acquired  a lot of discipline, but if our finances changed for the worse, if another baby happened, if Chris deployed again, or if illness or any number of unforeseen obstacles fell into my life I am pretty sure I would have to drop my chosen hard things---because I would have real hard things to deal with.

But in the meantime, hooray for achieving goals! Whoop whoop! I am a hero!

Rough around the edges

Chris has an overnight shift tonight so all day has been a little rough around the edges. Knowing that there will not be another adult around somehow gives me all the permission I need to abandon all routine and practical parenting practices.

Hair did not get brushed today. Not everyone got lunch. Many cookies were eaten. Bedtime occurred when Mom got grumpy.

We did a lot of awesome things today too. We made Christmas cards and painted home-made ornaments. We cleaned...a little. But the end of the day was not a real end of the day because there was no Daddy to tell the girls to stop talking and eat their vegetables, no Daddy to tell the traditional weekend story of the adventures of Pink Giraffe and Red Giraffe (You should really ask Chris about those stories.)NO Christ to sit beside me and look at expensive knives on the Ipad while I try to write 2,000 words before bedtime. And now it's almost 10:00 and I should be done with my writing and heading to bed right now, but I wasted my time and I still have 700 more words to write.

It will be nice to have him back tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, it's been a splendid Thanksgiving. Much better than the last one where someone peed on my head. 

No, this time we had a snuggly family day where I made Chris help put up Christmas decorations with me. Anytime he got grumbly I just casually brought up that last year I did it ALL BY MYSELF, and then he got all all quiet and helpful. Actually he was helpful all day.

I wanted to make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies today, but I didn't have any chocolate chips. Chris very happily chopped up five chocolate bars so we could have chocolate chips. (Is this a normal thing to do? I started doing this on my mission a lot and have done it every so often since.) Anyway, he was excited to chop chocolate because he got to usev a knife. Actually he used two knives.One was doing a poor job and I think I heard him say he was going to sell it because it was bad at chopping chocolate.

Chris had to work tomorrow, so the girls and I are going to go to a local Christmas market and then I hope to write a ton. I am so excited for NaNoWriMo to be over. I have four days to write 8,000 more words. Wish me luck.

Bedtime Song Update

I was writing a post about Latin and Abelard and Heloise but then the computer went all crazy and I lost motivation (Don't tell me you didn't want to hear about that. I KNOW you wanted to hear about that.) So instead, here are the most-requested bedtime songs at our house lately:

Too Many Deals - a guest post by Chris

I don't know if Anna is still doing the "Too Many" title series. Honestly, I don't even know if it was intentional. We have been humming the theme song for the last weeks, so it could have been sub-conscious.

But I am doing it consciously to try and keep some kind of continuity among these posts. I told Anna that I would write her Blog post tonight if she would read to the girls. Gracie wanted some hide-and-seek flap book that I have read about three-dozen times, and I didn't want to walk all the way up the stairs to look at Maisy the Mouse look for her friends again. (I really don't mind reading to the girls every night, just some nights are rough and it is nice to have a break and eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's[blueberry graham greek yogurt, or cookie dough? hoo hoo!] without sharing instead.)

That is all I really had. Somehow I thought that explaining the deal would take up more space than a paragraph. Does this count as a legitimate blog post? It is the blog post equivalent of reading a shampoo bottle blurb. It has real sentences, but no value or information. I am sorry to be the author of such disappointment. I assume if you are reading this, you wanted to hear Anna talk about some experience or thought that impressed her, and instead you just learned that I was lazy tonight and didn't want to leave the Ipad and go upstairs when Jojo finished brushing her teeth (alone because she was in time-out for "accidentally" slamming Gracie's fingers in the toothpaste/hair band/spare change/barrette/q-tip drawer. Four times.)

I hope my next post next November is more substantial.

Balloons against invasion

Last Friday I went to Nuremberg and watched Interstellar. It is the first movie I have seen in a theater in at least four years. It was pretty amazing---I think it totally deserves it's high IMDB score. Go see it; it's awesome.

On the way to the theater, there was a small sing-along/protest going on. They were giving out a bunch of stuff so I grabbed the most useful--which is why I now have three balloons proudly declaring Crimea still a part of Ukraine.

I don't know what the symbol on the back of the balloon. A two minute Google search did lot clear up what it was so I suppose I'll never know. Still, the girls are loving hitting these around. 

Eat-All-The-Milkas Update: Judgment Day

So a few nights ago I bought all my favorite cookie Milkas: Schokokeks, Chips Ahoy, Oreo (large panel) and Oreo (100g version. Plus, we had some Weihnachts Schokolade Marzipan left and since it was Chris's new favorite we added it to competition. Here is a more clear picture without my six year old charmer:

As I tasted each bar and discussed the benefits and drawbacks with the other four tasters (i.e. my husband and three daughters) it became clear that this "best of" competition was an oversimplification. All the bars (except for Chris's Marzipan bar) were examples of a single category: Cookie bars. It was easy to name one best cookie bar, but there were other marzipan bars that were excellent but in a different category. Sometimes, no matter its excellence, you don't want a cookie bar. So, in order to be more fair, I have broken the bars into categories and am naming the best in each category.  Please enjoy the rewards of my exciting and arduous Milka journey:

THE RESULTS:

Best Cookie Bar (which tends to be a favorite in our family): Oreo 100 gram version

Best nut bar: Nuss &Nougat Creme (only in large panel)

Best yogurt bar: Johgurt Milka (100 gram)

Best Novelty Bar: Choco Jelly (large panel)

Best Marzipan:  Marzipan (100 gram)

Best bar to make you throw up in your mouth: Luflee Caramel

For the record, the other tasters proclaimed their favorites:

Sophia: Chips Ahoy and Oreo (100 Gram)

Jojo: Chips Ahoy and Oreo (100 Gram)

Chris: a triple tie between Weihnachts Scholade Marzipan, Nuss &Nougat Creme, and Schoko Keks

Gracie: Chocolate Chocolate chocolate chocolate

Good luck in your own chocolate eating endeavors.

Three hours

Three hours is how much sleep I had last night. And now it's 6:30 p.m. and because of prior obligations, I have not been able to have a nap. It is quite the struggle not to be grumpy at my children who are doing nothing out of the ordinary, And by "not be grumpy" I actually meant "not be a horrific monster." One of my least favorite feelings comes right after I lash out at one of my kids and realize a second too late that  it had nothing to do with them and all to do with myself--but they got the brunt of it anyway.

Here's to repentenance,forgiveness, and more sleep.

Too many gag gifts

There is a very deep and real part of me that loves giving gag gifts. A gag gift is something that is funny and useless, like a bobble-head doll, or a t-shirt with a funny quote that is too ugly to actually wear. I don't know why but I long to buy people gag gifts, especially at Christmastime. In fact, after I saw the Santaur the other day, I literally went over every person on my Christmas list because there had to be one person who would love that ornament.

I have learned, over the years that actually, gag gifts are rarely a good idea. The best way to gauge if a gag gift is appropriate is to consider the person and ask if they would rather have the gag gift or an real gift of equivalent value.

The Santaur costs (alarmingly) fifteen dollars. I don't think any of my family or friends would prefer the Santaur to fifteen actual dollars. If they do, I should probably stop hanging out with them.

I even considered buying it for myself and realized that I would rather have fifteen dollars than that amazing beast. I would even rather have five dollars. Or a chocolate chip cookie.

I think the only time it is appropriate to give a gag gift is when it is a) unexpected and b) involves a hilarious joke you share with the recipient. Even still, it might be wiser to go with a box of chocolates or a fruit basket.

So, no Santaur this year. Sorry if anyone is disappointed.

Bragalog: Too many quilts

Right before my friend Becky got married, she told me I should start working on a baby quilt for her. I am always late finishing baby quilts and she wanted me to have plenty of time*. Well, I finally finished and mailed it to her about three months after her little girl was born. But let's not focus on my tardiness, let's focus on my awesomeness. I saw this quilt online and wanted to do something similar, or basically just like it.

Here are a gazillion pictures I took because everyone loves looking at quilt pictures. I apologize in advance if you fall into a pit of despair just thinking about how you will never live up to my amazingness. (Also ignore the binding. Bindings are hard for me.) (Also, uneven sewing lines are part of it's charm. Charm, I say!)

So you can tell better in the close up pictures that the quilt is actually pieced. For the piecing I just basically cut up all the fabric and sewed it back together again. It was a little time consuming. I did this because a) I wanted it to be a pieced quilt, but mostly because b) I thought it might be more authentic to do so to better represent the complexity of space. I admit the authenticity added by the subtle lines in the quilt is slightly compromised by several of the planets being represented with not-so-subtle polka-dots, but sometimes science has to take a backseat to cuteness. Am I right or am I right?

That's Pluto of course.

*Just thought I'd better clear up that Becky wasn't pregnant at the time she asked me. Just in case you thought she was. She's just a good planner.

Too many Parades

The girls watching the end of a mystery parade last Sunday.

We live at the end of the main street in our town. This is pretty awesome because it means that every time there is a parade, it goes right by our house. Our town has parades all the time and, since we are not well versed in all the local small holidays, they are generally surprise parades for us.

There is very little as charming as having a normal humdrum day, and then suddenly hearing a cheery tune slowly grow louder. We always rush to the windows and watch them to the very end. (Our town's pretty small so the parades don't tend to be very long.)

We used to open the windows and wave and cheer but we stopped doing that after one rather somber parade passed us and I realized hat it was not a parade at all, but actually march from the Catholic church to the cemetery. Funeral processions are kind of like parades, but you aren't supposed to cheer or throw confettin. Yeah, not our finest moment.

But we still watch every parade we can. Sometimes they sing, sometimes they chant, sometimes they ring bells and bang drums. Sometimes they wear current military uniforms, sometime ancient military uniforms, usually there are some dirndles and ledehosen involved. It's always awesome and always just under our noses. Hooray for Germany.

Too many books

Sometimes I read too many books. Like, one a day. As anyone knows who has suddenly become addicted to Harry Potter, reading too many books gives you the same feeling as when you go on a TV series binge. It's really fun, but in the back of your mind you know you should be actually doing something with your life. And when you're through your eyes kind of hurt and you feel a little sick.

I do this a lot. Too much. I actually took a breather today and thought about other people, who read in moderation and how much more meaningful their lives must be than mine. I don't read great books, or books to make me a better person. I don't even require good writing. I just like reading fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery-- it doesn't matter (well actually, there pretty much has to be a love story). I read just for entertainment. Other people must get so much accomplished in their lives. But I'm not sure they are happier.

Anyway, my latest favorite series in the world is The Raven Boys series by Maggie Stiefvater. So so good. I downloaded the audiobook to Chris's Ipod and, to humor me, he started listening to it. Now he is hooked because it's pretty compelling. If you need a book recommendation, this is a good one. Also, if you have any, you should always feel free to give them to me, because lately a lot of my recommendations come from whatever the Goodreads algorithm decides to recommend for me and i am reading some weird stuff. Goodreads thinks I'm way more mystical than I am.

Flash from the past: Anne Geddes

(So for today's post I thought I would just repost something I wrote on our family's blog back in 2008, the month after Sophia was born. To give you some background-- Anne Geddes was pretty famous back then and we used to call Sophia "Soapy" or "Soaps." Sometimes we still do.)

After seeing Anne Geddes pictures (like the one above) for years and years, it is hardly a surprise that when I finally have a baby of my own I try to replicate her style. Here is my spin on her technique.

Lookin' good, Soaps.

I eventually ate all of this salad as well, which is something I bet Anne Geddes cannot say.

Breaking stuff in Primary

Today I shocked the heck out of the Junior Primary kids by taking a hammer to a dinner plate in the middle of Sharing time. It was so fun. It was an object lesson about repentance--I doubt most of them will remember the point of it, but it was still worth it.

I really love teaching in general, and teaching primary is my favorite calling. The gospel is really really fun to teach to kids partly because it is so massively complex but also so simple so it's easy to adjust the lesson to be age appropriate. But mostly it is fun to teach to kids because the gospel is crazy. It is so easy to shock kids, you don't even have to use object lessons, you just have to tell them the truth about what they believe and their mouths drop open.

As adults we are a little calloused to the irrationality of religion, but kids who haven't dealt much with it, are easily blown away. They can still see the similarities between fairy stories and a virgin conceiving. When we tell them that Lehi found a compass that only worked based on how faithful he was, their eyes are wide open waiting for the the dragon to come, or the princess or the next unbelievable fact. The scripture stories are as exciting as other stories to them, except rational, authoritative adults are insisting they are true AND the spirit is testifying of it too.

Another bonus of teaching kids is you can teach about the atonement and play charades at the same time (or break a dishware). And you have to move fast or you lose your audience. Most kids would rather be poking their eyes with sticks than sitting in primary so  they conciously or unconciously try to sabatoge you all the time. It's a constant balance between fun and entertainment and hard saving doctrine. So fascinating a game to play.

Mostly I like being a primary teacher in a class, but one of the benefits of only teaching sharing time is the adult camraderie you get. When a child makes an entirely inapproriate comment, it is quite satisfying to be able to look around the room, and meet eyes with the other surprised and shocked adults. IF you are a lone in the classroom with the kids when that happens, you don't have anyone there to help you secretly laugh at the child.

Anyway, I love primary. And breaking things.

Too many cooks

Whelp. It is after nine o clock. Yesterday all my writing for Nanwrimo was deleted so today I had to write over three thousand words to catch up. I am kind of sick of writing now. BUT I am at 26,000 words so that is impressive.

Also, have you seen the latest internet sensation: Too many cooks? Because I have and Chris and I keep singing the theme song over and over.

Dream Job

My senior year of high school I quit the crew team to go to work at the library as a book shelver (the official title was Library Page). I don't think I realized until I wrote that last sentence how ridiculous it was for me to quite the crew team. I loved crew.. I quit because I figured it was time for me to start earning money for college. It's true my family wasn't wealthy, but I think I should've taken the hint that if my parents had no problem paying the ridiculous crew team dues, then maybe we weren't so poverty stricken I had to get a job. Or, maybe I could have done some basic math and figured out a part-time job wouldn't cover much of my college education. This now explains some of the funny looks and comments I got from my parents and school counselor when I told them about my choice.

Anyway, that's not what I want to blog about. I made this dramatic sacrifice and got a job at my local library. It was kind of the most boring job ever, but I also kind of loved it and it had amazing perks. I have been thinking about it lately, and I think now that Ipods and podcasts and  Wifi have been invented it would be the best part time job ever. When all my kids are in school  I am going to try to land this job again.

All you do, all day, is shelve books which is mindless and lonesome work---perfect for listening to audio books! And, something I loved is that, even though I couldn't read the books as I shelved them, I could look at them and decide not to shelve them and check them out instead. I read such an eclectic selection of books that year, just because I was exposed to them. I read a lot of Christopher Marlowe, theology books, random books about cancer (I was always picking up books I thought were about something else, but they were really about cancer). I read biographies, plant identification books and I checked out TONS OF BOOKS about art--not how to draw books, but books  that had collections of art in them. There was this one book  that was just a bunch of photos of Edvard Munch's art that I checked out a bunch of times.And fiction---i read so much bad fiction. The 808's is where the poetry is at and I read a ton of stuff there that I didn't understand but I liked the sound of.

I don't think I felt really happy there as a seventeen year old. It's not glamorous and there weren't boys around to talk to--in fact there was no one to talk to because you weren't aloud to talk. But now, it seems like a dream job to me. I'm not even kidding.

Also, did I mention you done get overdue fines if you work at a library. So nice.

The unpredictable return of the lisp

So today I had my meeting with one of the speech therapists at Sophia's school. She's been working with Sophia for about a month already, but this was my first time meeting with her. This nice woman showed me an evaluation of Sophia's "R" sounds. Basicallyshe had Sophia say a list of words with R+vowel blends.Then she marked down which ones Sophia distorted or completely omitted.

Out of all the R+vowel blends that exist in the English language Sophia can say... none of them. That's right. Not a one. Apparently most kids her age don't have them all yet, and it's not abnormal for them to all come later without any intervention but it is rare to have them all missing. She can say some of the consonant-R blends, but not a lot.

Then she talked to me about Sophia's lisp and said that she had been making some headway with Sophia's S's but then both of Sophia's front teeth had fallen out and they can't really do much until they grow back.

I'm not worried about Sophia's speech-I couldn't say my R's or S's growing up and years of speech therapy only contributed to how amazingly awesome I have turned out.

I now know exactly where my tongue should be and what it should be doing when I say the letter S. I can even picture it because in Speech therapy you spend a lot of time in front of a mirror looking at your tongue. I feel that generally I can "get by" with my S's. I don't have clear and crisp language but it is not superbad.

But sometimes the lisp comes back. I have wondered if it's true for other former lispers and I think it is. I'll feel my tongue get stuck in a position and no matter how hard I try to fix how I'm speaking I get stuck with the ethhes for at least a minute or so. This is more likely to happen if I am talking about lisps. In fact, just from writing this post I can feel the lisp just waiting to creep out.

Anyway about halfway through my conversation with the speech therapist I suddenly realized I was going to have a lisp recurrence. It doesn't bother me, it's just a little frustrating. And then all of the sudden the speech therapist broke out in a lisp. She definitely hadn't had one before and then all of the sudden it was there.

I waited until it receded and then (in a normal and not weird way) asked her if she had ever been to speech therapy and she had! I wanted to ask her about her lisp every coming back at weird times but...I couldn't come up with a normal or non-weird way to ask so I didn't.  But anyway it made me feel like we were kindred thpiritth.