Beards

Look at that amazing beard hat! Isn't it the shiniest? Yes, it is! Also, my wife is the shiniest. Hooray! Want to watch an amazing stop-motion video about a beard? (Weird, I know!)


http://vimeo.com/38991709

Do you have a double blade safety razor? If so, you'll probably appreciate this even more. If not, consider getting one : )

Hubby Extraordinaire, Always So Debonair

This week we celebrated a fantastic occasion (I mean aside from Friday the 13th). The birthday of one pretty fantastic man. He’s so prime (31)! (I had to stick that math joke in here somewhere.)

In our family (a tradition started in my foo and continued with us), we always get one present on the bed when we wake up. Brice got a scripture journal. Then he went off to work for a while to have some stinky meetings.

He came home early, though, and opened his presents: an insulated lunchbox, some monkey-shaped ice thingies to keep in the lunchbox, and another scripture journal. After that we went to lunch at Chick-Fil-A. Coriel’s kids’ meal toy was, appropriately, a book you can make all about your Dad. 

Coriel interviewed Brice to discover his favorite things and then we told her how to spell them. Take this quiz (try to read the handwriting) and see how well you do. (Answers at bottom of page.)

I made this one with the stickers provided, and then Coriel embellished it. She gave him hair, a football, and a pet lion (lately everyone has a pet). But what are those spots all over his face, you ask? No, they're not measles or some contagious plague. They’re stubble.

Here’s me with my pet zebra.

This one is Addra with her pet kitty.

 

I’m not sure, but they look like flower/lion people.

 

Then we went to Rita’s. Brice loves Rita. If Mormons still practiced polygamy, I’m pretty sure Rita would be his second wife.

Delicious AND messy!

 

Next we drove down to the D.C. Temple and wandered around outside. Coriel got to touch the temple, which was very happy for her.

We went to the Visitors’ Center there, and Coriel got made into a “junior missionary.” She was so excited, and when her sticker disappeared into the washing machine the next day (oops), she missed it quite a bit. I’ll have to try to find her a pin or something.

Roaming around the Visitor’s Center...

 

Right now there’s a beautiful quilt exhibit at the Visitor’s Center. If you live near here, you should really go see it. Even if it’s only so you can see this quilt, it will be worth it. I mean, wow. 

 

This one was called "Emma's Vigil at Cumorah," by Susan McBride Gilgen.

 Then we came home, had dinner, relaxed, and made Brice blow out his candles.

This is Coriel’s drawing of us eating our Rita’s ice cream. Please note the little lines indicating that the ice cream is going into our mouths.

And finally, here is a picture of this handsome man wearing his main present of the day: a Viking beard hat (I haven’t added the horns on the hat yet). Isn’t he stylish? I sure do love that man.

 

Here are your quiz answers:

My Dad’s Favorites

Food: Coriel (this was not actually his interview answer; she just really likes to write her name)

Color: Orange

Movie: Star Wars

Sport: Frisbee

Team: Stay (as in, Stay Family Team)

Band/Singer: Tom (as in Tom Yorke from Radiohead, although it turns out it’s actually “Thom”)

At this point, she got bored and moved on.*

*Please note: The fonts and smart quotes and various other things about blogging continue to burn my poor little copyeditor’s soul. But there’s only so much freaking out you can do before you go crazy and scrap the whole thing. So please ignore font changes, extra lines, and/or quotation marks that are curvy, aren’t curvy, or are totally spazzy. Of course, probably no one reading this is OCD enough to care, but the disclaimer sure makes me feel better.

Top Five Reasons Why My Husband Is a Poohead* ** *** (those are asterisks, not swear words)

1. It is 9:53 pm. He is being my voice of endurance, forcing me to do my writing today (which I haven't done yet, even though I'm on a month-long streak of writing every day) instead of playing WoW with him.

2. He stops me from eating too much sugar when I tell him, "I've hit my limit. Any more and I'm going to feel terrible."

3. Sometimes, on the night of a social event I've been looking forward to, I suddenly say, "Ugh, I don't want to go. It will be too long and I'll be leaving you here with the kids all alone. I don't really need to go. Waily waily waily, excuses, excuses, blah blah blah." Then he says to me, "You've been planning on this all month. You are going." And then I go. And have lots of fun.***

4. Sometimes when I want to stay up reaaaaaally late reading (which will lead to me feeling lousy the next day), he tells me I have a time limit and I'm going to be in "big trouble" if I don't go to bed by then.

5. Pretty much he acts in place of my better self when my better self has taken a vacation or is sitting on the couch watching movies instead of helping me do things that are wise and will make me happy. He helps me be far better and stronger than I otherwise would be.

What a poo, huh?

*No, I really don't think he's a poohead.
**This post was written in the horrible composer that has no smart quotes. Please ignore this terrible oversight.
***Yes, I realize that no one but me finds this to be an oversight.
****A note to Meghan: This comment did not apply to your baby shower. I was unerringly excited to go to that.

Bday

Had a great bday today! Slept in, ate German pancakes (batter thoughtfully prepared by wifey in advance), very much enjoyed my new extremely awesome beard-hat that best wifey in world made for me, left work early after longish back to back meetings and eating some really good cookie bars that C helped me make yesterday, lunch, Rita's and delightedly happy messy kids who napped while we drove to the Washington DC temple*, spent a lot of quality, spiritual time with the kids on the grounds and in the visitor's center, drove home, and now some time to myself while J puts the kids to bed so I can actually post my first entry in a long time. Happy new year to me, happy new year to all of you reading. Pictures of beard hat awesomeness coming soon. Seriously, this is cooler than any possible version currently available on the internet and it was hand made by my darling spouse in absolute secrecy. Man I love that woman.

* Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temples are sacred places where families can be sealed together for all eternity. If you ever see this one just off of the 495 in the DC area, as soon as you drive past it, take the next exit and follow the signs. There are almost unbelievably nice, helpful people there who won't bother you but will be happy to show you around, explain things, let you watch uplifting movies, etc. They are awesome. The temple is awesome. Go visit some time. You can't go inside unless you're a member (the local church buildings in every community are open to everyone), but you can still feel God's love for you just by visiting. Seriously, when you see it rise up out of the trees, get ready to exit the beltway : )

Meaning and the Post-It Note, part 1

Note: I’ve been feeling annoyingly introspective lately, so you might start getting an excessive number of posts about Meaning and Life and such. So… deal with it. J

I have noticed that the way we experience events depends on our internal explanations of these events. Here’s an example from my first months of marriage:

Brice usually left for work before I headed off to class. This means he got up, showered, and left sometimes even before I officially got out of bed. Then I would get up and shower and get ready for the day. And I started noticing something. He always left the shower curtain open. So I was always closing it and trying to make sure that mildew didn’t form on the wet crinkles of the el-cheapo curtain. Now, being the dutiful newlywed wifey that I was, I certainly didn’t want to make a big deal of it. After all, he always put the cap back on the toothpaste and never left the toilet seat up, so I just needed to deal with this one. No one’s perfect, I said with a sigh. And yet, as the weeks passed, you can imagine that this sighing forbearance didn’t really do its job very well, and I found myself increasingly annoyed that he couldn’t just close the shower curtain to let it dry off instead of getting moldy.

Finally I decided that instead of turning this into a grudge I should ask why he did it. Now remember, I thought he was doing it because he was being thoughtless, but here’s what he said: He left it open because he knew I’d be getting up soon and he was leaving it open for me.

Suddenly I wanted to hug him.

A single experience—the shower curtain being left open. When I assigned the “thoughtless” meaning, I was cranky. But when my meaning changed, my reaction changed. I was happy and fluttery (newlywed, remember; even shower curtains make us fluttery happy).

So much of our experience comes not from the actual event but from the meaning we make of it.

Now here’s a paranoid example. When I was a teenager, I didn’t like it when groups of teenage boys laughed. It made me feel tense and nervous. For some unknown reason, I always thought they were laughing at me. (I did already mention this was paranoid, right? I’m fairly sure they weren’t actually laughing at me. … Although, hmmm… You never know.) If I had assumed insteay that they’d heard a funny joke, I would have reacted differently.

I saw this in my therapist days all the time. Everyone has a story to explain why something happened. He didn’t put the dishes away in the right place because he doesn’t care what I want. She got angry at me about those dishes because she’s too controlling. My child is drawing on the walls because she’s a bad kid who needs to be punished. My child is drawing on the walls because she’s trying to get my attention. My child is drawing on the walls because she really likes art and hasn’t learned the rules yet. We all do it, all the time. I think we are wired to make meanings and stories out of the world around us.

So, when does it matter? When the meaning we make is so negative or incorrect that it negatively impacts our behavior or our emotions. (Or when the meaning we make is so positive that it positively changes us, of course—but that seems to happen less frequently.)

Can we change our meanings? Absolutely. I think one trick is to imagine a plausible positive meaning to ascribe to someone’s behavior—and then act as though it may in fact be true. And when we make a new meaning, we are freed to act differently.

So the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, try this: Maybe that person was hurrying to get a sick child to the emergency room. Too clichéd? Try this then: Maybe the person was just temporarily distracted by an energetic toddler in the backseat. Or maybe the person is a terrible driver who’s just trying to practice and get better; she wasn’t being rude, she was just being clueless (yes, this is slightly autobiographical). Then think for a minute. Are you going to flip her off? Or are you going to take a deep breath and give her a little more space?

Now try something a little harder. When was the last time your spouse/best friend/sibling/parent did something that really pushed your buttons? Can you come up with a neutral or even positive reason why he/she may have done it? And can you act as if it were true? I think if you do, you will be kinder, gentler, more patient. You will be less angry, more forgiving, just generally happier and better.

And what does all this have to do with a post-it note? You’ll just have to wait and see.

Oops!

It turns out I completely forgot to mention how I did on the Mormon Lit Blitz. Whoops! So, here we go: I got third place, which made me do a little happy dance (okay, it was kind of a big happy dance). So thanks, everyone who voted. Or even if you didn’t but still read my piece and chuckled. Or even if you meant to read it. Or, ummm, even if you know my name and like me? Ish?

Thanks!

For all the results, click here:

http://mormonartist.net/2012/03/lit-blitz-winner/

(By the way, I thought the first place winner was lovely, so I wasn’t sad to lose to her. And since then, I’ve read a few more of her poems that were also quite wonderful. So I’m incredibly happy for her.)

Stream of Semiconsciousness

So I'm supposed to be writing some brilliant blog post tonight because, after all, it's Sunday and so I'm not working on my novel. But then again, I'm also not on the compy that has all my blog drafts on it. In fact, this compy doesn't even have Word on it (which explains why I'm composing this post in the blogger itself (which explains why this post has no smart quotes whatsoever (which explains, perhaps, my growing insanity))).
And I'm sick again? Did I mention I'm sick again? And even though I haven't taken my nighttime cold medicine tonight, like I did, the last two nights--which made me feel all wonky and weird, even while I was trying to stay awake to watch Sherlock Holmes--which seemed entertaining, what I got of it, although distinctly not Holmesian... Where was I? Oh yes, even though I didn't take my cold medicine, I still feel like I did. Sort of like my brain is drifting around in my head which has suddenly become much larger than it was before, which is how my brain has room to drift around in there. So my brain is drifting around, kind of unconnected from anything. And it's thinking, What in the world am I going to write tonight?
And I hear crickets chirping.
And then they chirp some more.
And some part of me wonders if--if I listened to them carefully--I could use them to gauge my internal temperature? But I'm not actually running a fever, so it's probably not terribly important.
And now, annoyingly, I have just noticed that blogger also does not automatically turn two hyphens into an em dash. But as much as this bothers me, I am most definitely NOT going to go try to find an em dash in some other post and copy and paste it here. Because that really would be obsessive, and I'm not quite that obsessive. Yet.
Okay, seriously now, I'm impressed if anyone is still reading. If you're still reading this, you must seriously love me. Or you're bored. Or you're using it to procrastinate. Or you too are only semiconscious and so I'm making some kind of sense to you.
If that last one is the case, that's unfortunate. I'm pretty sure I'm not even making sense to me anymore.
And now, to finish things up, I think I'll throw in an aardvark. Because, after all, everything is better with an aardvark.
The end.