Alyssa's Act of Kindness

Alyssa's class did a project this week called, "Act of Kindness," where they each had to do an act of kindness for someone outside their family, and make a poster with a three paragraph essay about it.  Then, all of their families were invited to a social at the school library, where each of the students were able to present their project.  They did it "museum" style, where they each stood by their poster in shifts, and the parents walked around, hearing each presentation.

Alyssa's act of kindness was doing service for our neighbors, the Salisbury's.  Her original idea was to open doors and hang up coats for people at our ward Christmas party, but the car accident messed that up a little.  Then, she said, "I hold Rebecca all the time for you.  I can do 'taking care of Rebecca' as my project."  I said okay, and the first time we had a moment to make the poster was the afternoon before it was due.  Right when Alyssa came home from school we got out our supplies, then I read the assignment paper again and was reminded of the "outside the family" rule.  That's when we started scrambling to do some service.

Alyssa wanted to help the Salisbury's, so she called them up to ask what she could do, and she and Ethan rode their scooters over to clean their toy room.  I sent the camera with them so Shaylene could take some pictures, then Alyssa came home and got to work on her poster.

Everything in Alyssa's poster is her idea.  She wrote and typed the essay by herself, cut out and framed the pictures, and put captions on the pictures by herself.  She was the one who wanted to paint it, and she spent all evening adding stars and flowers.  See the orange sun up in the corner?  Nope - flower.  She told me it's a "sunset flower."

I am so proud of Alyssa for doing this project.  She was so cute when she was presenting it.  All the kids were very professional and grown up during the social.  They all did a great job!

It's teachers like the one Alyssa has now that makes me want to keep her in public school.  If we were lucky enough to have teachers like Mrs. Halverson all through her school career, I'd keep her in without a second thought.  I loved this project.  It not only teaches our kids how to write, make a poster, and present their ideas, but it teaches our kids to think of others and be good, caring citizens.

A Christmas Miracle? Crash-Crash? That's the Way the Pie Falls?

I am really in a slump with my titles.

Yesterday was a little crazy.  I made three pies (two pecan and one lemon meringue) for the ward Christmas party.  Brian picked up Ethan from school and took him to buy groceries for a couple of Salvation Army boxes and to buy a fan for our fireplace.  Brian then installed the fan.  The battery died on our van, so we pulled out our battery charger (you can probably tell that this has happened before - who has their own battery charger?)  and charged up the van when it was time to pick Alyssa up from school.  I picked Alyssa up using Brian's car.

Ethan had a birthday party to go to that I forgot about, so after Alyssa came home we all loaded up in the newly charged van, with Alyssa holding a cookie sheet with the pecan pies and me holding a cookie sheet with the meringue, and with a stack of paper plates for the Christmas party at my feet.  We rushed to Walmart and Brian ran in to buy a birthday present.  (Can I take a moment to say that I really don't like Walmart?  I have many many, multiple reasons like: nothing is where it's supposed to be, even their workers aren't given any information on where everything is supposed to be, so they're not very helpful either, but the reason yesterday is that Brian picked up a toy that said it was on sale for $15. It rang up as $20, but he didn't fight it because we were so late.)  Anyway.  Moving on.

We rushed from Walmart to the birthday party over at Mid Columbia Gymnastics just off of Gage Blvd.  It's right by where Skate West used to be.  (Memories.)  After dropping Ethan off at his party, we had an hour to kill.  So we went to Brian's office to pick up some email paperwork we do at home, went to Target to get some poster board for Alyssa's school project, then we took a drive around the temple before picking Ethan up.  And you have to remember that all this was done with pies on our laps.

We picked up Ethan, and started to head over to the church to help get things ready for the ward party.  It was just after 6:00.  The party started at 6:30.  Our original plan included dropping off the pies and plates first, then doing everything else, but we left too late to do that, so by this time we were hoping that people weren't worrying about the plates being missing.

As we sat at a stoplight on Gage Blvd, Brian checked his phone to see if he had missed a text or a call from the bishop, and asked me to plug his phone in to charge.  As I was doing so, there was a huge, "BAM!" and we were all shoved forward.  I dropped the cell phone, heard Alyssa scream, then we all shifted back into our seats.  Luckily, we were at an intersection that turned into a small parking lot, so as Brian pulled in to the lot, I turned around to check on the kids.  Alyssa and Rebecca were crying, but other than that, everyone seemed fine.

I hopped out of the car and set the lemon meringue pie on the ground.  "I'm so sorry, ma'am," a man was saying to me.

"It's okay.  It's okay," I said both to him and myself.  Then I remembered that you're not supposed to say anything that might admit fault after an accident and wondered if by saying "It's okay," was telling the man that it was "okay" to run into our car.  "These things...happen,"  I said, which sounded a lot better.

This very short conversation took place as I was pulling the side car door open to check on Rebecca.  I looked her over real quick and felt her arms and legs, then quickly unstrapped her and lifted her into my arms, all the while saying, "It's okay, it's okay."

Brian and the man from the other car checked on Alyssa.  She said her head and back hurt, and she couldn't stop crying.  I went back to my seat and had Alyssa come sit with me.  I sat holding Rebecca in one arm, with my other arm around Alyssa while Brian and the man worked out the details.  The man was apologetic, and very concerned about the children.  Apparently he had just come from putting studded tires on his car, so that slowed his stopping time, plus he got distracted by something - I never heard what.

While I sat in the car, I again asked the kids if they were okay, if they hurt anywhere, and I kept checking Becca to make sure she was alright.  After the girls settled down, I told the kids, "If you guys hadn't been wearing your seat belts, and Rebecca hadn't of been in her car seat, this could have been a lot worse."  I wondered if I had used words strong enough to get the message through about the importance of seat belts, but apparently the crash had done that for me, because that's all I had to say.  I watched Marcus' face just fall when I said the words, "a lot worse."  I could see that he understood the seriousness of the situation.

The car seems fine.  Brian said the back door kind of bumps and makes a funny noise when you open it, and we're getting it looked at on Monday, but the bumper is not even scratched.  We were surprised.  From the noise and the force that we were hit, we were expecting the bumper to be completely messed up.  The kids are fine.  The boys don't seem to be physically affected at all, Alyssa started feeling better once she was able to calm down, and Rebecca seems to be her regular happy self.  Brian and I are fine.  Brian said his neck was a bit sore last night, and my back and neck feel a bit stiff this morning, but over all we are fine.  I'm just so thankful that we're all okay.

And the biggest miracle of all: the pies were fine.  The filling of the meringue kind of shifted inside the pie crust, and one of the pecans fell to the floor, but all three pie survived the accident enough to be able to be served at the ward Christmas party.  Truly a miracle.  Plus, we even made it to the church just before the party started, and no one had been concerned about the missing plates.

No Idea What to Call This One

Three things popped up on my Internet feeds yesterday that made me think.  First, after the kids took off for school and Marcus played with blocks, I rocked Becca to sleep and watched "Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women [Trailer]" which talks about the flawlessness of the women in advertising photos.  Then, later that afternoon, I read a friend's blog post about Mormon mommies going to "visit relatives" for a few weeks and coming home with tummy tucks, facelifts, and whatnot, and the worst part, really, is that the person who was sharing this information was supposedly sharing LDS women's "secrets to keeping our lives together and perfect."  And then I read a news article about one of my friend's art exhibits, titled "Princess Religion."  The exhibit is about how the Disney princesses and other princesses shape our young girls' expectations about what they should look like and what they should do with their lives.

And all of this got me thinking throughout the day, which made me fully prepared to respond when we sat in the doctor's office and Alyssa looked at a picture advertising some skin stuff and said, "I just was to be perfect.  I want my skin to be flawless like hers."  Honestly, she truly said the word, "flawless."

I told her that even the lady in the picture wasn't flawless.  The picture had been sent through the computer to make the lady look the way she does in the picture.  I hope she listened to me.

Now here's my thoughts on it all.  I'll take them one at a time.

Killing Us Softly 4 by Jean Kilbourne

I love that this woman is speaking out against this issue of portraying women as being prefect and skinny, and using women's bodies as objects to sell products.  Photoshop wasn't as common when I was young, and I had no idea that the pictures on magazines weren't just taken and simply put on the cover as is.  I would look at the pictures on grocery store magazines and think that I was abnormal, because I had faint stretch marks on my outer thighs from growth spurts.  I wondered why I still had cellulite, even though I exercised.  And, yes, Jean Kilbourne comments that the ladies in pictures have no pores - I thought my pores were huge and wondered what these models used to get their skin to be so perfect.

I remember the first time I saw a before/after picture of a model.  The lady in the finished picture looked nothing like the lady coming in to get her picture taken.  The computer specialists shaved off fat, smoothed wrinkles, deleted bags under her eyes, even changed the color and brightness of her skin and hair.  I discovered this picture a little after Alyssa was born (when my body was baggy and stretch-marked) and I remember how shocked and relieved and empowered I was to have that information.

I have since come across a couple of websites that show real pictures of naked women.  I know it sounds bad - "I've looked at websites that show pictures of naked women" - but the purpose of these websites is to show teenage girls what real women look like.  I applaud the people who run these websites.  I think they need to be used with extreme caution(?)  I don't know what word I'm looking for, exactly.  They need to be used with sober judgement, but I do think that these websites have their place, and I'm sure they've fulfilled their purpose of helping teens and women feel better about their bodies.

Makeover? from NaDell's Blog

Okay, if you don't have the time to skip over to NaDell's blog to read her post, I'll sum it up for you.  She was talking to someone who is not LDS, who used to have LDS friends that let her in on a little secret of how Mormon moms always looks like they "have it together."  The secret that was shared is that these moms use plastic surgery to shape their bodies after having babies.

I guess my gripe with the whole thing is not the plastic surgery bit, because, really, it's their body, they can do what they want with it, and it's not my place to judge.  And I know that my information is coming from a third party, so who knows how much this lady fudged on details while talking with NaDell or how much of NaDell's opinions that I'm mixing in with the actual story while I'm remembering it.  My gripe is that if people actually do this, and go around toting it like it's the Mormon Mommy Secret to Happiness, it makes me mad.

Anyway, here's what I commented on NaDell's post, a little bit edited.

"Wow. Really - wow. I didn't even know we are like this. It makes me very sad that someone took a missionary opportunity to share something so shallow. What about "Mormon moms are happy because they have Family Home Evening" or something like that? That is very sad.

I'm kinda on the fence about plastic surgery. I do agree with Kori that sometimes it can be beneficial, and in some cases even necessary, but obviously that's something that is hard to judge (and not our place to judge). On the other side: my skin does not stretch AT ALL and I have tons of stretch marks and loose skin from being pregnant. I would love the magic that a tummy tuck would do to that. But does that mean I'll ever get a tummy tuck? No. My body is the way it is, because I've had children. My body is the way it is, because of the lifestyle I chose, meaning I CHOSE to be a mom, and the body I've got is just part of the package deal. I want to teach my daughters to love their bodies despite imperfection, and how could I do that if I don't accept the body that I have?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to improve your body by eating healthy and exercising, but that should be with focusing on living a healthy lifestyle and having a healthy body, not with how good you look. And definitely not changing your body in a competition to be better than others.

Nice post, NaDell! You really got me thinking."

Right now I'm counting calories and trying to eat healthier and exercising to lose the pregnancy fat that's accumulated over the years.  I'm trying to do it in a healthy way, because I want Alyssa to see me making wise choices about what I eat to lose weight and be healthy.  I wouldn't want my daughters to see me starving myself to be skinny, and I definitely wouldn't want to teach my daughters that if you're unhappy with the way you look, then a trip to the surgery room will make everything better.

I also realize that my body is never going to look the way it did before having children.  I have wider hips, a thicker waist in general, loose skin, and I even have that bump of loose skin hanging over my c-section scar that will no never away, no matter how skinny I ever get.  And I'm okay with that.

One of my favorite things about going to the Great wolf Lodge water park last month was that while we were there, the place was mostly filled with families with young children, and all the moms and dads running around cared more about having fun with their kids than looking good in their bathing suits.  There was cellulite galore in that place, and nobody cared.  We all had the attitude of, "This is my body.  I have to put it in a swimsuit to have fun here.  I may not look good in a swimsuit, but I'm doing it anyway, because I'm going to have a blast!"

Princess Religion by Emily Fox

I really think Emily is onto something here.  From what I've read the art exhibit is focusing on the ideal that princesses create of what it takes to live a successful life, i.e. be beautiful, get the guy, live in a "castle", etc.  And I think it also ties in to one of the points that Jean Kilbourne is trying to make about physical appearances being the key to our happiness.

Have you ever noticed that when Ariel sits down, her stomach doesn't scrunch up and get thicker?  I used to think that that was normal.  I know, me taking a drawn cartoon character and setting her as the epitome of "normal."  I don't think the logic center of my brain had kicked in yet.  And because I had set that standard as being normal, I thought I was fat.  And then a little later I was at a slumber party saying, (and you have to say this in your head with a nerdy voice, 'cause it makes it more fun) "When I sit down, my stomach fat scrunches up.  I'm so huge!" and my good friend Bridget responded with something like, "Oh my gosh, Carrie, everyone's does!" (And for those of you who know Bridget, do that in her exasperated, how could you be so silly voice, and it will make it that much better.)  So that's when I realized that Ariel was not the body type I should be striving for.

But I don't think Emily is just talking about physical appearances.  I think she's also trying to make a point about the ideal that the only way to live a happy life is by finding your prince and living happily ever after.  Well, whether that's what she means or not, that's something I took away from her pictures.  I know several women who have said, in essence, "I wouldn't change who I married, I wouldn't trade my children for anything, but if I could go back in time and just push that wedding date back a couple of years, I would," and I feel the same way.  I wouldn't trade Brian or the kids for anything, but I wish I would have taken better advantage of the opportunities available to me before I got married.  I wish I would have gone overseas to teach children English.  I wish I would have gone on a mission.  I wish I would have concentrated harder on graduating from college.  I wish I would have done a lot of things, but the mission is a big one.

Sometimes I envy my friend Katie.  She found Prince Charming and told him, "I've always wanted to serve a mission, so you'll have to wait for me."  She probably said it a lot nicer than that, though.  And that's what happened: she went to Spain, he waited, and after she got home, they got married.  And the really cool part is that she continued to go to school, got her Masters, and studied Chinese so that she could teach it to her children.  

So even though I'm happy with my life, and I know that just because I'm married with kids it doesn't mean I can't stop learning and growing and experiencing, sometimes I wish I could just go back and change things, just a little.  I want to go back and make myself more content with my physical appearance - to be less concerned with what is or isn't normal, and to be happy with my body.  I want to go back and really take advantage of being young - trying new things, and learning new things.

But since I can't go back, I want to make sure that I spend the rest of my life not comparing myself to others, being happy with who I am, and pushing myself to try and learn new things. And most importantly, I want my children to know that what they look like on the outside doesn't equal their worth on the inside and that they can be happy with who they are, even if they don't match up to the ideal.

5 Years on December 5th

Happy birthday to Carrie's Burden.
Happy birthday to Carrie's Burden
Happy Birthday to Carrie's Burden.
Happy birthday to you!  Cha -cha-cha

Ethan always adds the cha-cha's when we're singing the birthday song.  In fact, I don't think he sings any other part of the birthday song.  He just waits with a smile on his face for the correct part to insert his cha-cha's into.

I can't believe I've been blogging for five years!  It sure doesn't feel like five years, but I guess it has to be, because my archive list on the side bar is getting pretty long.  I remember sitting at the computer, reading Brooke's blog (the first blog I had ever seen) and thinking, "I want to do that, but can I do it as cool as Brooke does?"  Hopefully somewhere in all my 522 posts, I've at least come a little bit close to Brooke's coolness.

I have to say that even though I was scared to start posting - scared what people would think of what I had to say, scared that people might not even care that I had anything to say - I am so glad that I started this blog.  So glad.  I love looking back on previous posts to see what we were up to a week or a month or a year ago.  It may be vain, but I love reading my own blog!  I love looking at the pictures of my kids, reading about my trials, and especially reading about my blessings.

One of my first posts was about singing Christmas carols around the Christmas tree.  Ethan was a baby, and he sat on my lap, and Alyssa sat beside us while we sang.  Alyssa was still little, so I did most of the singing.

This year, Alyssa sings louder than I do, and I think she knows the words to some of the songs better than I do.  Ethan joins in on the chorus - Jingle Bells seems to be his favorite.  We've added Marcus to the mix, but he hasn't sat still for very long while we've sung.  We've also added Rebecca, who loves every minute of it, and Brian isn't busy studying anymore, so he joins us more often, too.  I love it.

I think one of my favorite things about blogging is how it helps me remember all those little snippets of time.  If I hadn't written it down, I probably would have forgotten sitting on the wooden floor of our little house on Hawthorne Street, singing carols with my babies.  I don't want to forget these moments, and hopefully this blog will help me to remember all the special times that are still ahead of us.

So This is Why the Cashier Gave Me Such a Strange Look

So last night Becca and I went grocery shopping at Winco while Alyssa was at ballet.  We bought chicken, some stocking stuffers,  some stuff for having friends over for dinner on Saturday, and pepperoni and sausage for homemade pizzas sometime soon.  Rebecca got tired of being in her car seat, so I was holding her while loading the groceries onto the conveyer belt.  The cashier lady was very nice, and we talked about babies and Christmas.

Just as I was paying for everything, Brian called.  I moved our cart through the lane, answered the phone, and heard Brian say, "Are you going to Target tonight?"  This made me remember that I forgot to buy Hershey Kisses for our Kissmas tree, and I gasped, "Oh no!  The Hershey Kisses!"

I grabbed the cart, with my cell phone balanced between my shoulder and ear, still holding Rebecca, and maneuvered around and through the next lane over, heading for the candy isle.  I crossed the entire store, talking to Brian, looking for Hershey Kisses, when I let out another very loud, "Oh no!"

I had left my groceries back at the checkout stand.  This is when I put Becca back in her car seat, hung up with Brian, then dashed back to the checkout stand, where a couple of workers were already bagging my groceries.

"I am so sorry," I said.  "I don't even know what I was thinking."  The lady bagging her groceries across from me chuckled, and she seemed to be the only one amused by the whole thing.  All the workers seemed to be, well, shocked and confused.  I really through them for a loop.

edited to add:  And I think I left  the Hershey Kisses at Winco, because I can't find them anywhere.
edited again to add:  I did.  I had to go back for them.