This baby needs your (Halloween) advice

We need your vote.

Last year's Halloween was fun. We finished our costumes in advance. Our cutie girl was a little airbender. And her parents...well, we were really big nerds.

But this year, we're not so sure. Do we go lazy? Or do we go cute? Or are they not mutually exclusive?

See, my awesome neighbor gave me this random pink bunny suit (that a friend randomly gave her). If pink, plus bunny, plus suit makes you think of this, you're right on the money:
















Hilarious, right?

But I had kind of hoped to dress her up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Why?

• Claire's first word was doggie (and as Dorothy, she'd get to carry a cute little stuffed one around in a basket). 

• Us two grown-ups would have plenty of costume options (witches, munchkins, flying monkeys) to choose from in case we want to make this an ensemble Halloween production.

• AND I almost don't want to pass up an excuse to buy glittery red toddler shoes (partly because I know she'll love them as much as I do—that girl loves her shoes).

Her Dorothy costume would be amazing. But it would also take some time, creativity, work, cash. And here's the thing: I already have a pink bunny suit. Not something I've ever been able to say before.

But are we starting an odd tradition by dressing her up as a boy two years in a row?

Are we giving her future issues by dressing her up as a boy who will clearly have future issues because his parents dressed him up in a pink bunny suit?

Or is she just too cute like this for me to waste my time on anything else?

christopher is a dad

And he's a good one.

The other day, I was putting baby girl in her car seat so we could go to Christopher's work. She complained and arched her back and made sure I knew she didn't like it.

I said, "You need to sit in your seat so we can go see your daddy."

She relaxed, turned to me, smiled, and said one of the four words she says: "Daddy." She only says words for things that she's totally in love with: doggy, chocolate (caw-coe), agua, baby—and daddy.

Our baby says out loud who's her favorite parent every day: "Daddy."

I can see why she loves him. He tickles her, he swings her around, he got her her own computer keyboard that she can pound on, rather than just telling her no when she tries to get her hands on ours. She knows, without doubt, that she's his favorite kid. At least so far.

I think he's pretty great myself. He switches off parent duty with me every other night, just in case our sweet girl gets up at 2 in the morning. He'll change the poopiest of diapers. He's protective of her in ways that I know will be important later in her life. And he makes life just plain fun when the three of us are hanging out together.

The other day, he said something about it being weird that we're just living our lives, doing our thing while this other tiny person is supposed to be getting a childhood. She's got Christopher as a dad, so I think her childhood is going to turn out just great.

ringing it in with a brand new tooth

  We rang in the new year with a teething, feverish baby. Instead of partying, we took her home, put her to bed, and looked at pictures on the internet of Nic Cage as Everyone (go here!) and watched Spy Kids, which had randomly turned up in our netflix queue (it was a lot better than I thought it would be).

Later, long after our new year's bedtime, I got up to rock her while she bawled in her sleep.

And the day after that, we tried watching a movie with Christopher's sisters before they left town. But baby girl didn't want to, so she screamed nonstop for half an hour until we just gave up and went home.

Conclusion: Teething is a terrible idea.

I know lots of you have great advice (which you're welcome to leave in the comments). In return, I'll pass on the best advice I've ever received, which my sister-in-law's boyfriend said teasingly, and which helped me not take myself so seriously: "You know that every time a baby cries, it reflects poor parenting. You should take her screaming very personally."

Oh, I had. I had even worried we had ruined her somehow. I asked Christopher, "Is she normal? What did we do to make her scream like this all day long?"

We didn't do anything. Her tooth did—at least for a few days. And now that it's popped through the top gum, she's back to her adorable self. She even woke up from a nap happy yesterday instead of screaming—a thing she had not done for at least a week.

A happy new year, indeed.

the geekiest halloween

 

If you've talked to us recently, you've probably rolled your eyes as we've tried to convince you that there's a Nickelodeon cartoon you really should watch—Avatar: The Last Airbender. NOT the blue-people Avatar (although the color of our costumes might mislead you). And NOT the Shyamalan movie (I'll never get those 2 hours of my life back). The cartoon is just a fabulous story about interesting characters, even if you think its medium is suspect.

And if you haven't talked to us recently, roll your eyes right now because I'm about to tell you to watch it.

(Any of you netflixers can watch it on instant play. And if you don't have netflix, come to my house and I'll watch it with you. Seriously. I've made rice krispie treats for friends who have taken me up on this.)

Anyway, we joked that we should dress up baby girl as the show's main character for Halloween. And then her still-bald head and my sister's power of suggestion convinced us that the idea was no joke:

She turned out to be the cutest little Aang. The only thing missing from her costume: teeth.

Christopher dressed up as what you might think is a giant, cheesy, anime monster. But when you watch the show, you'll be so invested in the characters that this will be awesome. Plus, it will probably remind you of us.

I wasn't sure at first about wearing a Halloween costume that a larper might use on any normal weekday. But when I realized I could be the moon princess, I pulled out my blue shoes. 

We had fun this Halloween. And we're well on our way to geekifying our daughter. Please go watch our favorite cartoon, or we might just let her unleash some wicked airbending moves on you.

ready for a new list

I don't think I've ever been as excited to make my list of New Year's goals as I am this year. I think my excitement has much to do with the fact that I wrote last year's goals in the front of my planner and then referred back to them nearly once a week during 2009, if I got bored in church. So my goals actually meant something all year long AND kept me entertained in sacrament meeting.

The weekly review kept me on track: here I am at the end of the year with a completed master's thesis, a large number of lit journal rejection slips, and a stack of family history papers completely updated.

Weekly review also helped me revise some goals along the way: in July, after we found out I was pregnant, I had to cross out "lose 25 pounds" and replace it with "have a baby."

In some cases, weekly goal review didn't help me much: turns out, I'm still an inconsistent blogger and a crappy visiting teacher. If you've got any tips on how to get better at either of these, I'm open for suggestions.

Until then, I'm off to finish making my list for 2010. By this time next year, you'll be surprised by how many push-ups I can do.

the 12 days of christmas, truncated and backwards (or, some christmas #'s that make us happy):

3. Our third Christmas as the Wests. (Also, our last Christmas before the Wests become a family of 3 and not 2.)

2. The second annual Christmas Eve family variety show.

Instead of drawing names to give presents to cousins, we put together a little talent show on Christmas Eve. I like this new tradition; instead of thinking about what everybody wants and what we have to buy, we get to appreciate who everybody is and what's been important to them in the last year.

This year, we listened to musical performances and written thoughts, saw artwork and fancy cupcakes, watched a yo-yo show, etc. I showed off some needle-felted crafts I made and C. showed off his muscles by doing push-ups.

1. One move, 35 miles up the road.

If you must move, I recommend doing so at Christmas time. We have boxes and boxes of books to open once we finally set up our bookshelves. We like the books we have, so opening them up later will feel like opening presents.

Also, if you must move at Christmas time, I recommend setting up decorations first—before unpacking anything else. Now, if I could only find some socks.

Tomato Christmas

We have drinken (drunk. K goes crazy when I use that word) a lot of eggnog lately. I even put it on my cereal.
School ends next week. I haven't posted lately because of the craziness. But I want to wish you all a merry Christmas. Here is a card that I made from tomatoes from our farmer.

Today I had a Christmas Miracle. I accidentally deleted all of my iTunes music, because I'm kind of an idiot. I was making a picture in photoshop, and it said that I needed more room on my hard drive. So I started deleting things like crazy. The next time I turned on iTunes, all of my songs had !'s next to them.

I wrote Apple and begged for forgiveness. A girl named Sarah wrote back an hour later and said that I could download everything again. Hooray!

Which brings me to a thought: I think once you buy a song or a movie, you should own it forever. If a new form of holding the song or movie develops (blu-ray, laserdisk, etc.), then you shouldn't have to buy it again, you should just get it for free. Okay, maybe the company wouldn't be required to send you a brand new dvd, but you should forever have rights to the data, so you could burn a new copy on whatever newly developed format. A lot of companies keep track of your purchases for a long time, so if your kid decides to put your dvds in the oven, you should be able to just download it again. That would be a real Christmas miracle.
Well, that's enough for utopian dreams. Merry Christmas.
p.s., I made a Christmas playlist, you can find it on the sidebar.

Happy Halloween

K sewed my costume. Our awesome cousin sent K hers.
I took my nephew trick-or-treating. His pa had to work :(
The Potters showed up to our party.

it's a halloween miracle!

In the neighborhood where I grew up, the "Great Pumpkin" would deliver Halloween treats to people's porches, with a poem that told them to put a pumpkin in their window and then pass the favor on by anonymously delivering treats to other neighbors.

I think my neighborhood now must have a Great Pumpkin, too—just a different kind—because a good deed showed up anonymously on my porch: yesterday, someone swept the stairs in front of my apartment. I thanked my husband, but he wouldn't claim responsibility.

So, dear pumpkin, if you read my blog, thanks for sweeping my porch. I think I'll pass a good deed along to another neighbor.

Santa, are you there?

K and I have been debating whether or not should teach our kid about Santa. We still have some time to think about it. K is about five months along. We find out the gender this Friday.

Here's a list of pros and cons. So far the cons outweigh.

Pros:
It's fun.

You get to eat cookies on Christmas Eve.

Our kid won't be the jerk kid who tells all the other kids that "Santa ain't real."

You can use him as a boogey-man to scare your kids into being good.

BOO-ze

And the best argument I've heard for Santa:
". . .has belief in Santa Claus ever closed the door to knowledge as loyalty to a scientific credo so often has? Is it better for a child to believe in Santa Claus with the understanding that someday he is going to revise his views than for him to be taught what is scientifically correct . . . from infancy, so that he will never, never have to revise his views on anything and thus go through life always right about everything? Which course is more liable to lead to disaster, the open-ended Santa Claus, or the ingrained illusion of infallibility?" —Hugh Nibley. "Sophic and Mantic," CWHN 10:332
Cons:
When K was a child, she was so grateful for her Christmas presents that she looked up and said, "Santa, wherever you are, THANK YOU!"

Her mother was rather put off. She had stayed up most of the night wrapping and setting everything just so, after countless hours of shopping, after months of working at the ER so that she could afford everything. After all that her kids thought she had just gotten them a couple of things, but that Santa, what a guy.

Santa can cause your child to lose their faith in God. (That's right, I just used "their" as a third-person neuter. Take that, grammar Nazi).

from Threadless

For example, a friend of ours wrote recently:
"Last night when J was helping the kids with personal prayers he started with [our 3-year-old daughter], who looked up [at] him, thought for a minute, then said "Dad, Heavenly Father's not really real anyway." Oh man. Darn Santa Claus. Darn the Easter Bunny and curse the Tooth Fairy."

K knew a family who didn't celebrate Santa, because Santa is an anagram of Satan. Of course that line of logic can get you into trouble. For example:

Abraham Lincoln is an anagram of Banal Charm Loin. So apparently that great president was some sort of boring yet hypnotic sexual deviant. Better not teach your kids about him.

Latter-day Saints = A Startled Sanity. Therefore Mormons are crazy.

Anywho. Let us know what you think we should do. Otherwise we'll probably teach our children this. (on youtube)


More fun anagrams (I got carried away on the website):
Thomas S Monson = Most Hansom Son
George Bush = Be Gore's Ugh (Just ask Al Gore)

Why'd the Chicken . . .

We had an Easter miracle on Saturday morning. I came home from the store to find a baby chick in our yard.
I ran inside to tell Kathy, and the chick ran after me. When Kathy came out it ran up to us and started chirping. We fed it soggy oatmeal and put it in a box to protect it from the cat that lives in our garage.
We asked our neighbor if she had chickens. She said she wished she did, and came over to see it. She named it Lucky, because it was lucky to find Kathy and I.

We called our farmer, Julie, at the Clifford family farm. She said her chickens had just had chicks and that lucky would fit right in with them.
She just sent this email:
christopher,
just wanted to let you know lucky is doing fine. if you want to see lucky or look around, feel free. my phone is ___-____ if you call then I can show you lucky. he's in the outside brooder with the other "big boys" He's probably a leghorn and a little older than we thought -I'd say about 3 weeks. thanks- julie
Happy Easter. Make sure to watch this soon.

i'm back

Here are my fingers in Chicago:
















The rest of me was there, too, for a few days. The writing conference was fabulous, the weather chilly, the architecture gorgeous and the food SO GOOD.

While I would gladly go on 100 more such trips, I was just as glad to come home. Poor Christopher—I made him stick around here by himself for a few days. While he waited for me to come back, he made this for me for Valentine's Day:

















No, it's not modern art of the blank canvas variety. It's a Plinko game.

For some reason, the Price is Right fascinated me as a little girl. I seriously wanted to grow up faster so I could be a contestant. Whenever I visited my grandmother, she let me play with her round coasters—perfect plinko chip size. I slid them down all sorts of inclines.

Now, I have the real deal—none of this pretend stuff at grandma's house. I just drop a ping pong ball down this peg board, hear it bounce around against the pegs, and watch it come out the bottom. I won a hundred bucks just this morning. I wonder what will happen the next time I go out of town.

the inner organs of my new year's goals

If I had known that Body Worlds would be the perfect New Year’s Eve activity, I would have recommended it to all of you beforehand. But I didn’t know. You can still go before they pack it up on January 11th.

The show was a perfect ring-in-another-january thing to do, mainly because it tweaked my age-old, lose-some-weight New Year’s goal cliché. The Body Worlds exhibit displayed the inner workings of the human body in a way I had never seen. And when I saw how intricate and intertwined the body’s systems really are, I wanted to take care of my own like never before.

Yesterday, I ate cucumbers and exercised. I could imagine the way my stomach needed to break down food; the thought made me chew more thoroughly. While I moved around, I could vividly picture my heart and the millions of little capillaries pumping blood all around inside of me. Even now, the quick, coordinated movements of my typing fingers astound me.

Body Worlds inspired me to take better care of this body of mine. Whoever said that knowledge is power must have been good at keeping their New Year’s resolutions.

Hyvää syntymäpäivää! (or why it's not fair to share your birthday with christmas)

This is Christopher:




















He's the coolest guy—for a million reasons. Reason #64, 376? He's so chill about his birthday.

He kind of has to share it with Christmas. He wasn't born on the 25th, but he might as well have been because his birthday falls smack dab in between Christmas and New Year's, which generally leaves people all partied out.

This year, he's more than a quarter of a century old. For a quarter of a century, he hasn't griped that his birthday presents get wrapped in Christmas paper, or that the kids in elementary school never sang him happy birthday during class because school was out and they were all visiting their grandmas out of state. I totally would have.

And that's just one of the billion reasons why he's the best, why I'm so glad he was born—and why I wrapped his present in a happy birthday bag with a picture of a cake on the front.

christmas: early morning edition

When we were younger, the kids in my family convinced my parents to let us stay up late together in the basement to play games and watch movies on Christmas Eve. The later we stayed up, the longer they got to sleep. While most of us have grown out of the i-can't-wait-until-christmas insomnia that plagued us as children, my little sister, Sophie, still gets worked up. It's kind of cute. Until 4am. Here's a pretty accurate play-by-play of my first four hours on this year's December 25th.

12:32 am
We are finally situated in the basement with an Xbox, games, many large blankets, one hyper little girl and hours ahead of us. I have a feeling I will not get to read my book tonight.

1:27 am
Sophie and I finish five games of slapjack and three games of Barney memory. She creams me in memory; all the pictures of Barney and Baby Bop look the same to me.

2:33 am
Sophie will never fall asleep. She wants to play house now and insists on feeding me my own lines. She is quick to remind me that, while I fit inside her little play tent, I'm kind of big for the door and I take up most of the space.

2:54 am
Sophie and I write winter words because (in my tired delirium) I believe that spelling is an effective way to distract a child from Christmas. We write tree, ornament, present, sownflak, star, elf, light, pajamas, hot chocololate, eggnog, whippedt cream, rudolfph, and blancket. Exactly like that.

3:04 am
After climbing into and out of Sophie's little play tent, I insist that I am tired and lie down. In an effort to keep me awake, she resorts to fart jokes and hysterical laughing. She finds the word 'toot' particularly riotous. I do not know why.

3:10 am
The boys tell Sophie that they will banish her to another room in the house if she doesn't calm down. They do not remember being eleven years old on Christmas Eve. Tonight, they get to do what they've always wanted (play video games ALL NIGHT LONG) while she has to wait another five agonizing hours to do what she wants (open presents).

3:13 am
My sister, Anne, is still asleep through it all. I'm not sure what sort of soundproof cocoon she spun around herself before she turned in on the couch a few hours ago.

3:37 am
I start to fall asleep. Sophie calls me lazy. I say it's not lazy to fall asleep at four in the morning. She shouts, "It's already morning!?" No, Sophie. Not yet.

the closest i get to a christmas card

This year, I planned to make muffins for the neighbors and deliver them on beautiful plates with festive Christmas napkins. I was going to send hand-written Christmas cards—some of them to Brazil to people I miss there. I was going to—well, it doesn't matter now. Most of my neighbors jumped town as soon as finals got out. And I haven't bought cards, nor collected the mailing addresses where I would even send them if I had.

I wish I were on top of things.

I am. Some things. My finals are finished and grades are submitted. My house is semi-clean. Most of the gifts are wrapped. And I haven't crashed the car in any recent snow storm. We're doing ok.

Not just ok—we're happy. We've been married for over a year now; we have the cutest nephew; we write to a missionary brother in India; we love the new apartment we moved into; we're a year closer to graduation (only two more semesters); we both love our in-laws; we have good friends; and we can't wait to curl up with a few good books during the break.

I guess that's the closest I get to a Christmas card.
I'll bring you muffins next year.

happy thanks, ya'll

My family has a series of Thanksgiving traditions, which include 120 orange rolls, and a screening of Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacation. Nothing beats watching my dad try to edit the inappropriate parts (which includes the moments that talk about Santa not being real: for the kids).

But some of my most memorable Thanksgivings include those when tradition got tossed out the window--mostly because I was far away.

My Thanksgiving in Hawaii involved a room full of 30 or so Mongolians, eating turkey and laughing at jokes I couldn't understand, and then a drive back home along a beach.

My Thanksgiving in Brazil included an odd, stringy pumpkin pie which a member made FROM ACTUAL PUMPKIN. She probably bought the pumpkin, baked it, and did something magic to it. I say magic because I don't know how to make pumpkin pie from anything but a can.

And that's why I think that my brother's Thanksgiving this year will probably be pretty memorable. He emailed us this week from India to say that he's thankful for carpet. I'm thankful he's not going to be there forever.