Books in 2017

This year was awesome for books. I canceled Netflix for the year and found out that when I procrastinate doing chores or tasks, I watch t.v. instead. When there is no t.v. to watch, I read. And boy, did I procrastinate a lot this year:

So I read a ton of fantasy novels (my favorite genre) and quite a few thrillers and murder mysteries. I have never really been into mystery novels before, but I read Stephanie Meyer's The Chemist and realized that thrillers can be really exciting and fun to read, so then I read a bunch of Tess Gerritsen novels (she's amazing) and that led me to historical fiction mysteries by Rhys Bowen (the Molly Murphy series and the Her Royal Spyness series). They were super entertaining to read. To counteract this indulgence in silly fictional stories, I made sure to read plenty of biographies, nonfiction, and history. I feel like I read enough of those to justify all the silly novels that I enjoyed endlessly.

Reading this year has changed my life. It's made me more compassionate and more eloquent. Someone at church told me I use really fun vocabulary words and that made me feel good. I think on a lot of history these days and reflect over how far America has come from the days of blatant corruption (we certainly still have it but it seems to be less public now). One negative thing that I've noticed with my reading is that I still use it to procrastinate accomplishing my other goals. I've got a long list of resolutions to work on this year and they won't get done if I spend all my time in a book. I've set a much smaller reading goal for 2018 so I can learn to back off from one extreme goal and hopefully balance out my life more. But I'm still grateful for the experience of reading so many books in 2017. It was a heck of a ride.

Day Clothes Optional

You know you've been slacking off as a mother when you tell your daughter to get dressed and she counters with, "Why?"

I was about to answer with something like "because I said so" or "because that's what people do...I think?" but my tongue got caught and instead I said, "I don't know. Just get dressed."

In fact, the only reason we were dressing in the a.m. was to go to an appointment. I do try to have all of us (myself included) dressed and breakfasted and ready to greet each day, but it usually ends up being lunchtime by the time this is accomplished. And some days it doesn't seem worth the effort to swap out their pajamas for day clothes when they're just going to go to bed again 12 hours later. I know--mom of the year committee should be ringing me any day now.

When I was single, it was typical to wear pajamas all day on a day off when I wasn't expected to go anywhere. When I was married without children, we'd look forward to those days of staying indoors and staying in our pajamas. Now that I have kids, there's suddenly all this societal pressure to teach my children by demonstration that living your entire life in your pajamas is probably not the best way to be a productive member of civilization.

If in twenty years you see two young adults walking around town in their pajamas and blinking confusedly at the sunlight, treat them kindly. Their mother was also a very confused person.

I'm Famous! (locally)(sort of)(well no, not really)

A month or so ago, Josh and I attended a city council meeting that was going to discuss rezoning the street behind our house to allow for general office buildings rather than its current status of single-family residential homes. There are four or five plots of land that are vacant where old houses had been removed so long ago that no trace of them still stands. A developer wanted to buy up the properties but only if he could then build office buildings, which would reduce the size of our neighborhood and increase traffic along one of the only exit routes out of our neighborhood.

I hadn't planned to speak at the meeting but there seemed to be so few people there to protest the rezoning decision, so I volunteered to speak. There's a three-minute time limit on individual citizens' comments, so I was very brief. I explained that we purchased our home because we love the neighborhood and inviting more traffic into our neighborhood reduces the safety and beauty of the area we are so in love with. Despite my and a handful of others' pleas against the development, the city council members voted to move forward with the rezoning and I was pretty devastated. So our beautiful little neighborhood just got reduced by one full street.

While it's not the end of the world, it does add a new safety concern to my life. My children can't play in their backyard with public buildings just on the other side of it. (Technically the office buildings would be built on the far side of the street behind our house, so our backyard would still share a fence with another house, but for how long?) I deem it an inevitability that the houses up and down that street will all eventually fold to commercial construction and I'll be forced to live against a backdrop of businesses and strangers. Boo...

Anyway, this doom and gloom is certainly a bit hyperbolic and will dissipate somewhat over time. Josh and I got some frozen yogurt after the disappointing meeting to temper the bad news (why is ice cream so effective?!) and then we moved on with our lives.

But then Josh found this little nugget in our local paper:

Sorry for the sideways picture. For some reason, I can't make it rotate.

If you squint at the tiny print, you can see that one Camille Bowman is mentioned and slightly misquoted. I'm famous! I'm also totally saving the paper...because we're using newspapers to clean windows in our neighborhood as a Young Women's activity this summer. Can't wait to show my girls that their church leader happens to be a total celebrity before we crinkle the paper up and use it to smear Windex across dirty glass. Those fifteen minutes of fame go by quick, my friends!

Josh's Sacrifice

Josh makes me laugh so much. Last week I went to dinner with some friends and while I was gone, Josh took our kids to a neighbor's birthday party at Jungle Jim's. Jungle Jim's, for those who don't know, is sort of indoor pizza place with a bunch of child-size rides. It's very cheap and super fun and dirtier than I like to think about and we love it. While I was out, I didn't check my phone because manners. But when I was getting into my car around 10:00, I thought to check my messages before heading home.

Josh had sent me four texts back-to-back between 7:09 and 7:30. They read as follows:

"Rode some spinny ride. Sweating all over now, still trying not to throw up a few minutes later now."

"Still sweating, stomach hasn't calmed yet."

"Oh gosh. Almost just threw up. Why of why did I think I'd be the fun dad? I'm not the fun dad."

"Still fighting to keep from throwing up. Did I mention I only went on the ride once?"

I tried calling him to make sure he was all right, but he didn't answer, so I drove home and let myself into the house. The kids were asleep in their beds, fully-dressed and with bobby pins still in Scarlet's hair. It looked like Josh had unceremoniously dumped them into their beds upon arriving home.

I checked on Josh, who was fast asleep in our bed, a bowl on his nightstand just in case he actually made good on that threat to throw up. I had to smile.

The next day, Josh was still pretty dizzy. It took him most of the day to recover from that one spinny ride with his little girl. For what it's worth, I think he's a pretty fun dad.

The ride in question

Moved In

So we've been living in our new house for eight whole months. (We purchased the house nine months ago.) Within the course of that first month we refinished the floors, bought kitchen appliances and demolished the former kitchen, installed a living room ceiling fan, bought and installed a dozen window blinds, sprayed the entire house for bugs, and cleaned and dusted and washed and vacuumed every inch of the house. Then we rented a moving truck and moved our apartment belongings into our house over the course of six hours. Within a week or two, the house was unpacked and we had moved comfortably in. Almost.

Since we were renovating the kitchen and we didn't have the cabinets yet, all of our kitchen supplies remained in boxes in our bedroom so they'd be out of the way of our kids (through October). When the cabinets were installed, we still couldn't move the kitchen supplies because we didn't have a countertop (through November). When the countertop was installed, we still couldn't move the kitchen supplies because we didn't have a kitchen sink or faucet installed (through December). When the kitchen sink and faucet were installed, we unpacked our dishes and pans and washed everything and found places to put it in our new kitchen. Then we discovered that those weren't the only items left hiding in our bedroom for all those months.

There were five final boxes that contained any number of odds and ends that we didn't know what to do with. They contained such things as antibacterial hand soap, extra razors, nail polish, two surge protectors, an extra length of coil for the dryer, baby shampoo, Reynold's Wrap, skewers, tape, a baby-proofing kit, an extra pair of glasses, stamps, the box of CenturyLink cables left over from our internet installation, and numerous other similar miscellany. I hadn't even realized we'd had this junk. We'd been living for half a year without needing them, but I also couldn't just throw the stuff away without at least sorting through it all to see what we needed to keep. And then there was the dizzying concept of having to find a place to store those things somewhere in our new house. I'm not the most organized person, so I combat that weakness by minimizing the amount of stuff I keep in my house. That way, organized or not, there isn't too much clutter around me, stifling and oppressing me with its mass.

Since I was overwhelmed by the concept of clearing out those final boxes, I just pretended they didn't exist. Our room was significantly clearer without the kitchen items in it, so it was already improved even with the remaining moving boxes. And I knew Josh wouldn't touch the boxes without strong encouragement from me, so it'd be up to me to sort through them and I just didn't want to.

Cue the music while months and months roll by. A rainy April rolls around and just as it's about to turn into a sunnier May, I decide I've finally had enough. We spent last Friday night cleaning the house after the kids were asleep so we wouldn't have to waste any of our Saturday on chores. After I'd done my housework, I entered my bedroom with determination. Those boxes were going to die that night.

I did end up throwing away a lot of the stuff from those boxes. Another portion went to D.I., and a tiny amount went to various places around the house where we would eventually use them. After the boxes were stomped down and shoved into the recycling bin, I felt an incredible lightness. I walked back into my bedroom and saw just how big and beautiful it looked with a few select pieces of furniture and nothing else to mar the even pattern of the light wood floors. I loved it immensely.

That night I slept soundly. I couldn't believe what an effect that clear room was having on me. I mean, I'd been living with those boxes for most of a year and had slept like normal (that is to say, a little fitfully thanks to my insomnia). I hadn't realized that they were a source of oppression for me. Those boxes were a dark little cloud on my soul and I'd been unconsciously avoiding my bedroom except for sleep to avoid that cloud.

Now I welcome time spent in my bedroom. I no longer keep the door closed to keep the kids out, because there's no longer a pile of things they could get into. I raised the blinds today and opened the window to let in the beautiful spring air for literally the first time. The kids like to come in now to sit on the bed or the computer chair. They play in the open space while I fold laundry. They revel in the newness of the room the same way I do.

Now we have officially moved in, and I love this house more than ever.

You Might Be A Dad If...

Josh is a pretty old soul. A lot of his family are old souls, actually. And what I mean by that is that they're pretty mentally mature and think pretty logically, and also they tend to enjoy things that younger-minded people of their same age do not enjoy. For example, Josh was watching Peter Pan with the kids and later on our family walk, he commented on the fact that the Darling children's father wasn't a bad guy and hadn't really done anything wrong. He said that it made sense for him to have Wendy sleep in a room by herself rather than share the nursery with her younger brothers, that dogs should sleep outside, that drawing on his last clean shirt was a pretty offensive thing. His anger was justified and it's not like he screamed at his kids or did anything particularly offensive.

I pointed out that he kicked Nana out of the house even though it was obvious that she was accustomed to staying inside with the children, that he couldn't appreciate how much his children loved to be together, that he was shouting at the family as a whole and seemed to be more preoccupied with his pending evening out than with his children. But in reality, I think Josh was right. That father had acted like any father would have under the circumstances and although as a child, I thought Mr. Darling was cranky and mean, as an adult I now recognize that he's just a dad. Thanks to Josh for pointing that out.

Anyway, it's that fatherly perspective that has shaped Josh's mid-to-late 20s. And what goes with fatherhood better than the cheesy, punny Dad Joke? I shall give you an example of what Josh has been up to just in the last week:

At the grocery store, he was being checked out by a female checker and a male, teenage bagger. The overhead music was playing "This is How You Remind Me" by Nickelback. The bagger said to the checker, "How about this song? Can you guess this song?" to which she replied, "I'm bad at this. I won't know it."

The bagger said she could just name the band even if she couldn't name the song title. Josh recognized the song so when the checker told Josh that his total was $29.34, Josh devised a quick plan on the spot.

"What if I were to give you $29.39?" he asked the checker.

She absently stared at him before correcting. "No, it's $29.34."

"Yes," Josh agreed, inserting his credit card into the chip reader. "But what if I gave you $29.39? What would you have to give me BACK?"

"Oh, did you somehow overpay?" the checker asked.

The bagger was no help at all. He also had no idea what Josh was trying to say. So Josh explained, "I'd have to get a nickel back then, wouldn't I?"

The bagger finally catches on. "Ohhh, he's trying to give you a hint! The band's name is Nickelback!"

Neither the bagger nor the checker was particularly impressed with Josh's dad joke.

Josh relayed this story to me in the car, where I had left him earlier to wrangle the kids into car seats while he paid for our groceries. As the story progressed, I cringed more and more often with embarrassment and Josh grew cheerier. He laughed heartily at the end of his retelling, perfectly pleased with himself while I resigned myself to fifty or sixty more years bound to this man.

Date Night!

Last Friday, my sister was gracious enough to offer to babysit my children while I went on a date. Josh and I have been trying to get to the temple for like three weeks now but our best-laid plans have always been interrupted with surprise responsibilities or repeated illnesses. I briefly entertained the idea of going to the temple but honestly, I just wasn't feeling it. What I wanted was a good, old-fashioned date with the husband, so we did that instead.

After dropping the kids off at my sister's house with a house key to our place (so that in case we got back after their bedtime, my sister could take them home and put them to bed), we went to Jinya, this new ramen bar on State Street. Every time we drove past it, we commented on trying it out but we just never did. It's hard to make long-term date plans for eating out, so we don't often do it.

The food was amazing! We had tempura-battered brussels sprouts and a pork bun as appetizers and they were absolutely delicious. I told Josh that the bun in particular was so satisfying as it went down my throat and settled in my stomach that I described it (in a whisper so as not to sound like a pretentious hipster to the other diners) as umami. He mocked me appropriately for the description but (also in a whisper) agreed. We chose to eat outdoors because it was so beautiful and aside from the ten minutes of smoke we smelled from a woman waiting at a nearby bus stop, it was very pleasant. Josh had a pork ramen and I had a spicy chicken. I added a seasoned egg and loved that part the most. The noodles, the meat, the vegetables, and even the broth was individually tasty, but combined it was heaven! I didn't grow up loving soups much, but soups from various Asian regions knock it out of the park. I thought trying pho was epic, but ramen is just as savory and delicious in a different way.

Josh also teased me for taking a hipster picture of our meal, so I included him in it.

After dinner we went over to a bowling alley and played a game. We were going to see a movie but nothing was out that we were interested in (technically it was opening night for Beauty and the Beast but there was no way Josh was going to go see THAT with me), so we opted for a game instead. I am lousy at bowling. I can't roll the ball properly, I can't aim, I usually throw half my turns into the gutter, but I absolutely love bowling! It's just fun! The lights and the slippery shoes and the satisfying sound of the ball crashing into the pins (on other people's turns because that seriously doesn't happen with me).

Josh had a hard time finding a ball that fit his fingers without being unbelievably heavy, so he ended up playing with a heavier ball than he would have preferred. My ball didn't seem too heavy for me, although my wrist was starting to hurt as the game progressed. Our final scores weren't terribly impressive, although Josh did manage to get almost double my score.

Since Fat Cats is so close to Iceberg, we decided to swing by and get some ice cream on our way home. The wait was really long, as it always is, but the ice cream is pretty good. I usually stick very close to my favorite flavors when I get ice cream because we don't get it often and I don't want to risk getting a gross flavor on one of the rare occasions when I actually do splurge on a treat. The same principle holds for eating out: because we don't do it very often, I'm afraid to get something new because what if it's not as good as my tried-and-true favorites? Sometimes it pays off and I find something new that is delicious but it is a risk, because other times I end up getting something mediocre and who knows how long it'll be before we next go to that particular restaurant?

Anyway, because of this first-world problem of mine, I was a little antsy at Iceberg. This was the third time in my life we've ever been there and I wanted to try an as-yet untasted flavor from their massive list, but I was afraid of branching out and risking a bad experience during such a rare opportunity. Josh sort of persuaded me to try something new, and I'm glad I did. It was yummy! I went out of my comfort zone and got a butterscotch flavor this time. It was a ton of ice cream, and not even halfway eaten before we got to my sister's house to pick up the kids, but very tasty.

Somehow, even after our three-part date with fun conversation and beautiful weather, we still managed to take up only two hours of time. That was like the fastest date of my life. It worked out great, though, because we were able to sit out in my sister's backyard with her and her husband and just talk in the beautiful weather for half an hour while James begged more and more bites of ice cream off of me. Eventually my brother-in-law saved me and ran the ice cream into the house and on a kitchen counter so James would stop begging. He went inside and we didn't hear from him until it got a little later and we decided to take our kids home.

James had managed to use his incredible balance and his tippy toes to reach up to the kitchen counter, pull down the cup withOUT spilling, and to bring it to the ground, where he was calmly feeding himself spoonfuls of ice cream. I have no idea how long he'd been doing that, but not a drop of ice cream was to be found on his clothes, the floor, or the counter. That was really impressive. The stinker!

We put the kids to bed and enjoyed half of a movie together until we both fell asleep on the couch. Such is the exciting lifestyle of the not-so-young couple with children! It was a great date and a great night.