Grabbing bees and the nature of God

I'm amazed at what Chiara teaches me. This afternoon I was getting into my parents' van after a little trip to Shopko to get some dorm stuff for Shauna. As I was putting Chiara back into her carseat I saw that there was a bee in the van. Let me just tell you, I hate bees. I hate anything smaller than a hummingbird that flies. Especially if they sting. But as I stood there in full mommy mode my reaction to seeing the bee flying near my baby was to reach out and grab it so it couldn't hurt Chiara. My protection reflex was so much stronger than my self-preservation reflex that I have been thinking about it for the last ... eight hours or so.

This experience made me think of the Atonement. I know it sounds a little corny/bad testimony meeting-ish, but I was overwhelmed with gratitude for a God and a Savior who love me enough to protect me from the painful consequences of sin despite the tremendous personal cost to themselves. I know the parallel is seriously skewed, but I was deeply moved by my imaginings of how I would react if Chiara thanked me for what I did. I imagine God's reaction would be similar (in a much more perfect, holy way of course). Something like, "Oh, my daughter, of course I did it. I love you."

Please forgive the comparison. I just love how much Chiara teaches me about the nature of God. It changes me forever. But not into someone who feels badly about being a bee murderer. Sorry.

Thank you, Bonnie!!

Let me paint a picture for you. On second thought, I'm going to spare you the details. Let me just say I wasn't having the best day. Eldon came home to find me in quite a state of fatigue-induced stupor. And I was ugly. But he'd gotten the mail on his way home and there was a large and spacious package in his hand. What could that be?

I opened it to find a plethora of treasures from my Bonnie. Scented candles, relaxing bath salts, soap, and lotion, and ... a gift card to Barnes & Noble! (Which I've already used to purchase the Harper Collins Study Bible I've had my eye on for months.) My day went from less than stellar to fantastic in about three minutes. And I've smelled like freesia ever since. :)

Bonnie Mattson, you are a dear darling woman. Here are three fond memories I have of you:

1. Sitting in Sacrament Meeting as a young, single adult and resolving to be a kinder woman as a result of what I felt during your talk.
2. Making eye contact with you across a room as a Laurel and watching you make a beeline to me just to say hello and ask me about my life as if you honestly, and sincerely cared.
3. (I just had to erase what I just wrote because I remembered that I'd promised not to tell about this particular act of service you'd rendered me. I think about it all the time, though.)
4. Laughing with you and my mom in your backyard as if we were all just little girls. I'm smiling right now just thinking about it.

I really, really love you, Bon. Thank you for sending that thoughtful package. Your give-away made my whole week. Gratitude is a wonderful, soul-saving emotion and I appreciate you for helping me feel it. I promise to pass on the do-gooding torch to someone else as well.

A few of her favorite things ...

She LOVES my water bottle. She can be in a full-out my-teeth-hurt cry and I'll bring out the water bottle (only the Fiji one works) and she stops crying, grabs it, and stuffs it in her ginormous mouth. I've stopped actually using it for drinking water. Instead we keep it empty in the freezer so it's always cold for her and her poor little gums, but light enough that she doesn't drop it too much. Dropping the Fiji bottle is the tragedy of her young life. :)

We've let her play with her spoon after feeding her the rice cereal -- which she loves. Chiara gobbles that stuff up like nothing else. She's been refusing to nurse for very long these days, so we're compensating with lots of rice cereal. :)

We sit up by ourselves now!!!

And again!! :) Note the classy cheetos-in-a-bag toy. I brought it home for Eldon from a work BBQ and he doesn't like them. I didn't know that. So we let Chiara play with them and it is now one of her favorite toys. I think it's second only to Mommy's water bottle. Oh, and my Sleeping Beauty bookmark.

Daddy's knees are a comfy place to relax these days. She always covers him with drool. :)

I made the headband with my friend Brittanie. I LOVE it ... so does Chiara, apparently, because it's the only one she pulls off. Maybe it's the only one so big she can see it when it's on her head.

Nap hair! She woke up with this delightful hairstyle. That is some impressive volume. I couldn't capture it, but there was a lot of fun curl to her hair too. Gosh she's a darling child.

I bought her this lamb blankie when she was the size of a golf ball in my womb. I love lambs and have a little bit of a fetish. I thought it only fitting that my child be a part of it. I'd seen one of these years ago and after a diligent search on Amazon I found one. She loves it.

She is absolutely the light of our lives. Her personality is so fun and easy-going, she just delights us. Everyone who sees us together can't believe that she's such a "copy" of me. Eldon and I just laugh and agree. It really is fun to have my baby look so much like me. She has certain elements of Eldon, for sure, but the look-alike points go to me. :) The Rule Book points go to him.

Smiling because we can!

We had some quality family time tonight. My computer was open to my unfinished compassionate service spreadsheet, we didn't want to put Chiara on the floor because it hasn't been vacuumed for days, and we all played on the couch flipping the channels between a rebroadcasting of a Josh Groban concert on KBYU, America's Got Talent, and a little Dances With Wolves. We never do that, but it was fantastic as a one-timer. :)

Eldon is so funny with her. They have their own little daddy/daughter world. He was a great sport about the fact that Chiara puked on his head 5 seconds before that picture was taken. If you look closely you can see the little glint of self-congratulating delight on her face. Gotta love that. :) She really likes to puke.

She's chatty!! :) And my camera actually caught this as a candid because I was setting the timer to take the following picture and accidentally took a picture instead. But I thought it was darling because that is exactly how she talks. Right there.

And here we are today at 9:30pm. My patient husband, my teething child, and me. Life isn't perfect, but we sure love living it together!

Spilled Milk and Frozen Chicken

Sometimes I get waaay too emotional. I can feel myself doing it most of the time, actually, which is really just irritating. It's like an out-of-body experience when floating me is watching real me in ashamed helplessness. I really hate that.

I've been trying so hard to maintain a regular feeding schedule so I can continue to nurse Chiara as long as possible. It's actually a miracle that I still can while being as sleep-deprived as I am. I'm not saying that boastfully but very, very gratefully. She needs it. Anyway, it was late and I was just finishing a red-eyed, on-the-brink-of-fatigued-collapse pumping session (while she slept) and as I went to pour the milk into the little plastic freezer container I knocked it over. I froze as I watched my precious milk spread over the counter and drip onto the kitchen floor. It made me cry. Truly. I was suddenly and cruelly overwhelmed by my life, my schedule, and the constant struggle it is to fill all my different roles. The weight of being a wife, mother, employee, visiting teacher, and compassionate service leader came crashing down on me while floating me watched real me with something like a mixture of pity and disbelief. I leaned against the counter, half-dressed, with frizzy hair and smooshed eyelashes, and just bawled.

My second example is even more ridiculous. I know; brace yourself. Chiara was having a little bit of a hard day today. She's teething and so she cries in pain a lot and it's so out of character for her that I don't know a) what to do to soothe her best and b) how to make teething less painful for her. Before I knew it the clock read 4:00pm and it was time to start making dinner. Or at least think seriously about it. So I slumped to the kitchen, opened the cupboard, made a face, closed the cupboard, opened the fridge then quickly shut it again without even looking inside, and opened the freezer to pull out some chicken breasts. What I found prompted an audible reaction. Eldon had put the entire package of chicken breasts in the freezer without putting them in individual bags. So I was looking at about 10 chicken breasts frozen together in one solid, impenetrable lump. Which meant I wouldn't have time to get dinner ready before Eldon got home. Which meant I would have to thaw out the entire package. Which meant they couldn't be refrozen. Which meant I'd have to spend a few hours cooking the chicken so it wouldn't go bad.

Poor Eldon, he hadn't been home for five minutes before I mentioned being less than pleased with his attempt to help in the kitchen. But I caught myself.

Some things just don't matter enough to get worked up about. My floating self wanted to shake my real self out of pure frustration, but I was able to come around on my own. This might be an opportune time to express extreme gratitude for a husband who has the patience to let me figure this kind of stuff out on my own. If I were at home I'd hug him right now, but I'm not, so I can't. When I come at him with my eyes brilliant with irrational irritation and I express my displeasure, he never gets defensive. He always just apologizes. It kind of blows me away. My floating self would look at his floating self (if he had one) and just tilt her head in a "Huh" kind of way. Marrying him is the best decision I've ever made.

Honey, if you're reading this, you really are balm to my heart. How I love you.

And I'm sorry. :)

Because I'm so, SO, nerdy ...

I thoroughly enjoyed this poem. I get daily poems from The Writer's Almanac, the host of which has fabulous taste in poetry - though sometimes the selections are a bit too ... PG-13 for me. This one reminded me of Bryce, and sitting together on my bed when we were growing up, talking about books and poems and our thoughts about life. Even then he was a better English Major than I am. :)

The Student Theme
by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.