.

I made a new friend. And she just left from our first play date. I'm good at being interested in new (and known) people, I am not so good at making plans to spend time with them for some reason. So I was happy to have committed to and followed through with a play date. Every week I make a list of friends I want to see or have Zane spent time with, but somehow I never make it enough of a priority and we end up with a spontaneous park day without friends.

So this new friend, the more and more I come to learn of her and her life, the more interesting she becomes. It's fascinating to me the variety of benefits that come from having
friends. Some become emotional support systems for a hard day. Some always have a great story to make you laugh. Some have great teaching/ educational ideas for children. Some are spiritual beacons. Some are wildly positive and uplifting just to be around. I'm glad I learned an important lesson in my mid 20's that no one can be all of this in one person. In addition to the lesson that you can never have too many friends, and that there is almost always something to learn from someone else.

So now I get to remember that it's not a game of weighing how much I offer back in exchange for what I gain. Just keep befriending and being who you are. Don't worry about the scale of expert levels you each have on your talents list, it may never feel perfectly equal. And it doesn't have to be. Just as I cannot expect another person to be everything, I also cannot expect that of myself.

The thing I love about my new friend is I got to meet her at a time in my life that I am really wanting to feed my family better. I have been thinking of resources to collect for reading material and discussion. And as it turns out, she is incredibly educated and passionate about this area of her life. She fills me with inspiration already and has me thinking about things I wasn't thinking about yesterday. Things I want to do to better nourish the bodies of my family and in turn, their minds. I don't mean just food pyramid wellness, but more in-depth discussion about pesticides and other environmental concerns I have been really lazy about learning.

I really do think we bump into people at times in our lives that we need to. That's it's not an accident.

journaling my inspiration

Pretend it's not a recession and imagine how awesome this crib is. The color combo of the crib is a newer to me look I really like. I found this off the Skip*Hop site looking at their bedding. If I were in the market for a new crib, I would shoot for this look. The bedding is cool, but not what I am looking for.

Here is another sample of this look of furniture I like from The Amy Coe Westport Collection. Not crazy about the colors of the nursery in the photo but love the furniture.

I like this bedding below from Pottery Barn Kids. Still working out my color scheme desire. I think it would look nice with pale pink matte walls and another pale color of artwork framed on the wall. I imagine having my own photo shoot with some of those pale sweet tart suckers that are not perfectly round, a little chalky. It would be easy to go with a round theme for decoration.

the fam

For Family Home Evening we each had to draw a picture of something we are thankful for. Zane drew the family. Without any prompting or direction, he thought of that on his own. I thought that was pretty cool. So here is our family. In the order he drew us:

Zane, Evan, Daddy, Mommy, and the little baby sister in mom's tummy.

I'm glad to see he drew smiles on our faces. Well, except Evan for some reason.

Probably because I was yelling at him for eating crayons.

I know, I was just thinking the same thing. Way to invite The Spirit, MOM.

I spy something round*

I try to avoid finding child care for my kids when I have a quick appointment. So I take them with me. It's cute for them to hear their sister's heartbeat. And in the middle of keeping them quiet and entertained in the office, I mean closet, I always regret this decision.

My last doctor's appointment was no exception. It took thirty minutes before she came in to see me. THIRTY MINUTES. With a toddler and a hyper-active 4 year old. In a closet. With no windows. Did I mention one of those two is a screamer. And when I say screamer, I mean the one you hear echo through the corridores of a mall and exchange looks with your spouse like 'thank goodness that's not OUR noise to contain!' kind of scream. The kind that makes you instantly look for the source because it is so shrill you are certain the kid just had an arm ripped off by an alligator and then got slapped in the face with it 54 times. But in all actuality, just a lone goldfish cracker dropped to the ground. You could say one of us has anger management issues to sort out.

So I do one of two things. Grit my teeth and speak to them in my demon mommy voice that starts with "so help me if you two don't pull it together..." or I am mommy sunshine and we play I Spy. That was the route I choose to go. Only because I didn't know I would have to hold my $hit together for THIRTY MINUTES inside that closet.

So in the process of playing the game, Zane asks if the item I spy is the pink brain. Then he declares, "Hey, I want to have a closer look at that brain! Can I touch it?" It's then I appreciate that this office doesn't have the usual self breast exam* poster on the back of the door. Or labor positions complete with curly hair groin sketchings. Or wait, is that only in The Joy of Sex book?

Regardless, thank you doctor's closet for being PG.

panic at the disco

It's no secret that going #2 for pregnant women can be a struggle. No, that's not the right word. Outright painful is more fitting. In my head while these 'episodes' occur the whopping two times out of each month, it seems as though I am working a small melon out of my intestines. Surely it's three melons coming out........it seems, at times. That's when the whole Lamaze class I took so long ago comes back into full force and I feel like a pioneer woman. Despite the fact I have always planned and executed confidently the choice to be drugged during labor. That's right, Lamaze only comes in handy for me when I am getting my dook out. Could I be more classy? Would you rather have smiling pictures of my children posing for you when you come to my site? Too bad.

So! Speaking of dook! I remembered today when I was in labor with my first child for, oh I dunno, what was it 392 hours? I had my beloved drugs, so I was resting and thanking GOODNESS I wasn't in pain. Then I started to feel like my whole body was being squeezed by a giant glove. A suffocating glove, not a cute garden one with ruffles. It was like one with spikes on the wrist and it was made of black leather with motorcycle gang logos scrawled on it. It was a mean glove.

Kind of like that scene in Star Wars Episode IV when Chuey, Luke, Leia, and Han are stuck in the trash compactor and the walls start closing in on them.

Nurse more drugs please! Only with this nurse's visit I began to notice this intense feeling that the biggest poo of my entire life was about to shoot across the room from my bum.

The nurse entered the room, upped my numbing dosage without even asking me about that Lamaze class I took {bless her heart}. Being a lightweight in the pain department has never been an issue for me. Who wants to be squeezed to death by mean gloves anyway? When you don't have to be? Not me, I say. Okay so the nurse. She was all about to leave when I made her stop and listen to me tell her about this intense poo coming out. I told her I needed to use the restroom. She sort of laughed, as if I forgot about that whole body-numbing thing going on. Which I did. For some reason. Totally forget about. So when my brain joined my mouth I demanded sternly for a bed pan because THIS POO I CAN'T STOP IT! She went off to get the bed pan. Only poking her head back in to ask {as if we were in the maternity wing of a hospital or something} if I felt the "urge to push".

Urge to push? What was she talking about? Here I laid for days in this freaking hospital bed and find myself awakened by a mean glove squeezing my body and now my poo is about to jet out of me and break windows and she peeks back in to ask about "feeling" and "urge"? I was so confused- what part of me telling her it's just going to come right out here on the bed! was she not getting? Nothing was cute about this. NUH_THING.

She came back with the doctor. Not a bed pan. I was finally a 10. Something none of us thought would ever happen. And it wasn't poo. It was my baby. It was Zane. I thought Zane was poo. That will forever be funny to me.

Can you see this in a Hallmark birthday card? One with a picture of pine trees and a lake.

Son, when I was giving birth to you it felt like I had to take a huge dook, but really it was you. I love you.

fun?

It goes without saying the best part about elementary school for me was P.E.

It was especially exciting on the day they would bust out the awesome parachute. Never fail, every year all us kids would knock into each other when 'everyone wearing red' got to run under it and trade places while the rest of the class held the edges down. I think it was the time in school where everyone would be smiling and laughing at once and no one would get in trouble for it. I always wondered why we didn't do the parachute games more often.

You wanna know what made me think of that this month? Because it marks the beginning of the end of my pregnancy. And that essentially means that my underthings consist of enough fabric to make an entire parachute. How fun would it be to stitch one together for this little baby girl after I give birth? Who needs a quilt made of baby blankets anyway? Parachutes are waaaaaaaaaay more fun.

Photos from here and here.

payson, az

I loved hearing your stories of you as a kid in the woods as you looked up at the trees. Plus, the way your hair naturally twisted into this 80's 'do without any effort whatsoever.

Tired boys snoozing while I made hot chocolate and we waited for the sky to get dark enough to see bright stars.

trying to bring it back

The weekly family photo. Hope you had a Happy Easter!

Plus the baby girl:

this piece of mind is keeping

I read this quote from a friend's site this week. I love it.

'Pride is a sin that can readily be seen in others but is rarely admitted in ourselves. Most of us consider pride to be a sin of those on the top, such as the rich and the learned, looking down at the rest of us. (See 2 Ne. 9:42.) There is, however, a far more common ailment among us—and that is pride from the bottom looking up. It is manifest in so many ways, such as faultfinding, gossiping, backbiting, murmuring, living beyond our means, envying, coveting, withholding gratitude and praise that might lift another, and being unforgiving and jealous.

"From "Ezra Taft Benson, “Beware of Pride,” Ensign, May 1989, 4"

There's no better time for taking in personal character inventory than conference weekend. I like thinking about areas in my life I have improved upon with much effort/ prayer in addition to areas I want to work on with regard to my character. I've been thinking a lot about that this month. And find it most refreshing to work on ignoring that of others' flaws and remember I am accoutnable for knowing about/ working on my own, being a great example to my children, and also ignoring others' impressions of my flaws. My purpose is to live to please my Heavenly Father, not the people of this earth.

girl talk

I love this simple little decorative spot

I spied in a hallway at the gym.

*

Those little pom pom guys remind me of

the flower the dust spec lands on

in Horton Hears a Who.

{sleep}

I had a dream last night that I went into labor, but my dream was nice to me and skipped the dramatic part about how I got there and what arrangements were made for the boys and even avoided that part about the giant needle I choose to have inserted into my back. It plunked me right into the delivery room with scrubbed up nurses and some doctor with a face I never saw.

But somehow in this dream birthing was more like pulling groundhogs out of their hole. And a t.v. was on and Mike was reading a book. He was brilliantly blasé about the whole thing, like oh another birth, pfffft, whatev.' And they kept pulling out babies. Three of them to be exact. And the third was trying to swim into my neck or something, it didn't want to come out. So it was this really crazy thing where I didn't understand how no one ever knew there would be three. And Mike was still reading a book like pshaw, three babies, such a bore and I had some doctor climbing inside my body to get out that third stubborn baby. And I wasn't mad at Mike for being removed for some reason in this dream, or uncomfortable that my body was a mini hotel for so many people (including this doctor walking around my uterus trying to catch the third), and there wasn't any pain. I was just trying to figure in my mind out how to get all those car seats into our car so we could take them all home.

Needless today, I'm not one for practical jokes on April Fool's. Too much planning. But my dreams seem to think it's a great time to be funny.