We got our ultrasound this morning and we have a healthy baby boy growing right on track, due April 12. We’re at 19 weeks and the baby is about 10 oz. We’re very excited for this happy news!
I don’t think I ever have a problem getting to sleep (or staying asleep) except when I’m pregnant (or when a baby is keeping me up). Tonight it happens to be both. I woke up about an hour ago (about 12:30am) and my brain has been just non-stop firing about this whole minimalism kick. Zoë woke up shortly after I did and after attempting to feed her and putting her back down, we are both up again – this time I’m eating a sandwich and she’s playing on the living room floor while I type up this blog. She’s actually starting to really walk a lot these days. She still crawls when she wants to get somewhere in a hurry, but she is standing and trying to walk even without us prompting her too.
Anyway, so about my minimalist thoughts in this wee hour of the morning – today I was sorting through my footlocker of sentimental items I’ve been hanging on to for years and years. My plan was – anything I thought I could truly live without, I would try to either sell or find a home for. Luckily, a lot of the items are from international travel – a Russian fur hat, a burka, an Egyptian male headdress, a Turkish bath soap holder (a gift from Shana), various international flags and maps, many 8×10 pictures of France and Paris in particular and some of Greece, etc. You get the idea anyway. So I called up my sister Heidi and asked if she’d be interested in any of it for the kids. She basically was willing to take the whole lot – which makes me feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I know it’ll be used and it’ll be in the family still – so I don’t have to just throw away potentially useful things that still have some sentimental value to me. So the plan is, I’ll take pictures of all the items before I give them to her and write either a description or a short story to go with it – to tell why it was important to me. That way, no matter where we are in the world, or no matter how small a space we live in, I won’t have to worry about finding a space for those items, and my home won’t be as cluttered (or my garage, attic or basement as the case may be), but I (or my children) can still enjoy seeing and reading about the items if and when we ever feel so inclined.
The other thing that has been on my mind this evening is my journals and scrap books. I think I mentioned in my last post that I was going to just scan or type whatever pages of my journals and scrapbooks I felt were most important in my life-history. But then as I was talking to some ladies at church tonight I realized that maybe some of the things I may not deem as being of value or may seem too mundane to include might actually be intriguing for my posterity to read about. So, what I concluded is that I will just take as much time as I need and type up every entry of my 14 volumes of journals (and probably include some current thoughts on those entries or fill in some gaps as I type as well), and I will scan all the pages of my scrap books (all 20 or so volumes). That way I again will have everything digital and will be able to access them whenever and wherever we are in the world (I’ll probably back it all up on the internet somewhere besides on our external hard-drive). It will also be much easier to create some much thinner, more uniform hard-copy volumes if I so desire in the future.
Maybe now that I’ve finished my sandwich, written down my thoughts and let Zoë play a little, we can all get back to sleep.
I think I’m officially into that phase of pregnancy where I have these totally insane ideas that sound not only completely rational to me, but they sound like the greatest ideas ever. Sean helped me remember (because I can’t remember hardly anything – especially from when I was pregnant) that I seem to have a few recurring crazy ideas during pregnancy. One – to rejoin the military – I thought about this during both Aurora’s and Zoë’s pregnancies. I don’t know that I’ve thought about it much this pregnancy yet, but that’s probably because while I was in Monterey I was seriously contemplating joining the National Guard, talked to a recruiter and then felt prompted that this was not something for me to pursue (at least at this time – and probably not for a while if ever). The next crazy idea is school – not that school is a crazy idea by itself, but when I have an idea during pregnancy which never was that important to me before pregnancy, I just have to watch out. When I was pregnant with Aurora I wanted to finish up my Associates in Arabic degree from DLI, which required me to take one science class with a lab. I decided to take one from BYU – it was Physiology and Developmental Biology. It was a very time-intensive class with a LOT of memorization. I ended up doing about 1/3 of the class at which point I told Sean I really didn’t want to finish it. Luckily, BYU gave me back part of my tuition (a lot more than I expected). I also found out later that year that the lab portion of the science requirement for the AA was no longer required and therefore I was eligible for the AA degree even without that BYU class. While pregnant with Zoë, a time came when I thought I should start a master’s degree. I not only was accepted into a program (granted it was a tiny college that would accept almost anyone), but I signed up for and attended my first class. It was at the end of that very first day of class that I realized how insane I was for doing that and was able to quit without too much of a financial loss. I was fortunate to have such a supportive husband who didn’t make me feel bad for those decisions. I felt bad enough as it was.
Anyway, my crazy idea this time is to become a minimalist family. This link has been extremely helpful as I’ve started sorting through everything in our house and have been trying to decide what we don’t use, need, want or can just do without even if we do occasionally use it or just want it. http://www.becomingminimalist.com/how-to-live-with-less/ It has already inspired me to sort through the kids clothes (although I’d really like to just get rid of everything they own that they aren’t currently wearing (like 7 outfits each) or won’t need coming up this winter, and just start from scratch. I seriously have a bucket full of kids shoes ranging from size 1-9 or so. It’s crazy. I’m not talking a small bucket either. I also have at least 2 buckets almost full with the outfits I’m saving for the girls, and a huge stash of dresses. If I have a boy next, I’ll be seriously tempted to just find someone in need and donate all the girl clothes and then get more (from the thrift shop, craigslist, etc) when or if I have another girl.
I am currently working on cleaning out my kitchen and ridding it of anything that I haven’t used in the last few months or think I can make due without anyway. This minimalist kick is not just limited to physical items though. In the link above it also talks about living with less digital clutter, screen time, facebook time, etc. After reading the one about facebook today I cut down my facebook friends list from 259 to only 67! Most of the people who I was friends with on facebook were friends or acquaintances from years past, but if we’ve never even or rarely exchanged messages except through facebook, we’re probably not going to all of a sudden start up some new meaningful friendship. Maybe I’m wrong with that, but I feel ok so far having drastically cut down my friends list.
One other part of my plan is to create an autobiography/digital photo album of my life which will include some of my journal entries from growing up, photos from my scrapbooks, and photos of old sentimental objects with stories or descriptions of why those objects are important to me. The big questions that’s been going through my mind is 1) why keep something if it’s rarely if ever used, looked at, etc. and 2) will any of my posterity want to keep this when I die. I currently have about 20 scrapbooks and 14 journals. I figure if I can make an abridgement of my life using those memories as a reference, it will probably be much more valuable to me and if I want, I will easily be able to create more copies of it for my kids, etc. because it will be created digitally first, then published.
Well, it’s been almost a week now of thinking about and working on this project and I expect it to continue for many more months (as long as I have the energy to do it). I have more thoughts about it each day, so I’ll try to be good about adding a little bit about the progress we’re making and add some photos of how things are coming along too. I say the progress “we’re making” because Sean is fully supportive of this idea as well. That’s the only reason I’m thinking that this must not be a completely insane idea. And actually, I’m REALLY excited about it. I can’t wait to see the end result.
Oh, a few of the quotes I had written down on a 3×5 card and carried around with me on my mission have been going through my head lately and are inspiring me in this process. Here they are:
“The way to God is to free yourself of passions and possessions.” – Hindu Proverb (I’m not sure I agree with the passions part, but I like the possessions part. I think bridling our passions is important though – as it says in the BoM).
“I live simply so others can simply live.” -Ghandi
“More and more I keep thinking simple is good and what I have is sufficient.” – Kim Proffit (In my case, I think simple is good and what I have is too much, but hey – it’s a good quote by a friend of mine anyway).
I realize some of this may sound extreme, so I’m more than open to hearing any differing opinions (or voices of reason) on the subject.
Evolution and Mormonism: A Quest for Understanding by Trent D. Stephens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I definitely enjoyed learning about evolution from a Mormon perspective. I realize I was fairly ignorant on the subject. This book explains why it is so likely that we really did evolve from lower forms of life as well as giving some potential theories for how we can resolve this with many commonly held interpretations of scripture (which probably aren’t exactly correct). One of the things that he suggests is that Adam and Eve (who had been created through the evolutionary process, with natural laws governing the process – and God “at the controls”) were not mortal until they were actually placed in the Garden of Eden and were able to partake of the fruit of the tree of life which kept them immortal until they partook of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and then were cast out from the garden and no longer had access to the fruit of the tree of life. Interesting theory. They do say that this is just their own conjecture, and that the only way to fully understand scriptures is to study them out and receive our answers through personal revelation. Another thing I liked was how they compare our eternal progression to the evolutionary process. This was based on a quote put out by the First Presidency in 1910: “Man is the child of God, formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes, and even as the infant son of an earthly father and mother is capable in due time of becoming a man, so that undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable, by experience through ages and aeons, of evolving into God.”
View all my reviews
Yesterday I took the girls to the Sunset Zoo here in Manhattan. It’s not a big zoo, but we still didn’t manage to see everything before it was too much for the girls and I had to take them home. At least it’s not an expensive zoo and both the girls are free until Aurora turns 3. We did manage to see a famous chimpanzee among other animals. When I saw this chimp, Susie holding a tiny little baby, I was sure she had to be the grandma because she just looked OLD! Well, it turns out she “is the third oldest chimpanzee in captivity in the world…and the oldest chimpanzee ever known to give birth in the world.” Some of the things I learned in talking to one of the zoo workers are that they had been giving her birth control but decided to take her off it because they figured she was too old to get pregnant, and obviously they were wrong. They also apparently use human pregnancy tests to determine if the chimps are pregnant or not (that’s how similar we are to this species). In the article I posted the link to above it says that monkeys in the wild typically only live to about 40-45, but Susie is 56 years old! This poor old chimp even has a cataract in one of her eyes, but the zoo worker said that both the baby and the mother are doing amazingly well despite the circumstances. Speaking of old animals, we also saw a 37 year old bald eagle. Usually they only live 35 years. It looked its age as well.
Tonight Sean and I took the girls to the movie theater on campus (movies are only a $1) to see Toy Story 3. It turned out there were several other LDS families there and Aurora quickly found one of her friends (Owen – a boy she’s played with a few times who is a couple years older than her). He offered to open her bag of candy for her, and then asked if she wanted to share his seat with him. I was rather surprised she accepted, but it was adorable seeing the two of them sitting together, sharing his family’s popcorn and her gummy worms. I didn’t manage to stay much past the first 20 minutes or so because Zoe was too cranky, but Aurora seemed to really enjoy herself, and Sean said the movie was great.
Yesterday I cut Sean’s hair for my second time ever. He’s the only guy whose hair I’ve ever cut before, so the first time (about a month ago), I was a bit nervous and watched a few youtube videos on cutting men’s hair. They helped a little, but practice was probably the best way to learn, so that’s what I did. He was very patient with me as I painstakingly cut his hair for an entire two and a half hours! I was really nervous about cutting it too short or not making it even. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but it was decent enough for him to be seen in public without being openly mocked at least. 
Well, yesterday’s hair cut went much better, and much faster. It only took me half an hour this time, and I think the results were pretty decent. Yes, it is a a bit military, but since neither of us mind that, we’ll probably stick with it until I learn how to cut it any other way.
I went in for an ultrasound today so they could figure out exactly how far along I am. It turns out I am 8 weeks along today, which makes my due date April 12. I got to hear the babies heart beat and see a few images of the tiny baby who is starting to form little arm and leg “buds” and is about the size of a kidney bean. The sonographer said everything looks healthy and great, so we are happy for the good news.
Zoe Laughing, originally uploaded by J Webeck.
This is just a cute video of Zoë laughing as I tickle her with my chin and give her kisses. This is about a month old – from when we were in Austin. I’ve really missed my mac mini.
0