Twenty-Eight

I turn 28 tomorrow. I like that. I finally feel like age is helping me to find my niche in the world. I like that I have two kids, one of which is almost 4. It makes me feel like I finally have some real world experience under my belt. I actually happy that 28 is one year closer to 30. I'm excited for 30. I feel like maybe when I'm 30 I won't be trying so hard to prove myself as a grown-up. I'm looking at it as a destination, not a dreaded number.

Last year I got a lot of nice gifts---but mother nature offered a couple not so nice gifts. Namely: snow on my birthday and acne. I woke up on my birthday with acne. It was like I was 17, not 27. So for the last year each night before I go to bed and every morning when I wake up I have to decide if I want to use products to prevent acne or wrinkles. I'm yet to find a acne/wrinkle dual product. Maybe the folks over at Oil of Olay or Mary Kay or whoever can work on that. So far I am yet to keep either at bay. However with how my eye has looked in the last few months, I doubt people are noticing my skin.

I've already had a great birthday with my Symphony trip and today my parents surprised me by being in the Chapel during our temple outing. We spent the day with them and had a nice time at the final party with Taylor's cohort and faculty. It made my mind go back to two years ago when we had our first party. The whole program seemed overwhelming. Now we have a new family member (Kyle) and Taylor will defend his thesis in about 12 hours. I'm so proud of him. He managed to complete a very difficult program and internships and write a thesis and other huge projects while still spending plenty of time with us. We never felt neglected. Happy Birthday to me---we're done!

And then I have my surgery Friday. While I (not-so) secretly enjoy the down-time, I'm a little nervous because I think I'm getting allergic to Percocet, and I don't know what I'll have for pain management. That scares me. But I know I'll manage. Claire is going down to St. George with my folks for Suzy's graduation (yeah, Suzy!), so that will really help her. She worries a lot about me. I intend to spend my down-time putting together all of the newspaper articles from my pageant days. I have two entire huge bins to go through. I've already sorted them, so just a bunch of cut and glue work. I'm excited to finally get it done after 8 years. Did I mention that during the sorting I found a card which still contained $50 cash! I did a happy dance. And I promptly spent it on page protectors, cardstock, and other things needed to organize all my stuff. I'm doing a minimalist scrapbook. Nothing special, because I just don't have the time, money, or desire.

So all I want for my birthday is for my surgery to work this time. I'll take as many prayers as I can get. Oh, and for the acne to go away so I can concentrate on the wrinkles :)

The good and the bad

We just got back from a great weekend trip. My birthday's coming up (the 30th, hint, hint) and last night my mother-in-law took me out for an early celebration to the symphony. This (embarrassingly enough) was my first trip to the symphony that I can remember. And what a night! They played MY concerto---Rachmoninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto in c minor. The one I played at Miss America (okay, the last four pages of which I played at Miss America). It was fabulous. Better than I had hoped. I loved it. I love that song. Click on the above link and just listen to a bit. You'll love it too.

Oh, and more good news was that I happened to catch my friend Libby (hairdresser extreme) in a kind of free moment while she was doing my mom's hair, and I got some highlights to cover my ever-growing roots. And i have bangs now too. I'll have to post a picture soon. With sunglasses, of course).

And the bad new is that I saw my doctor on Friday. I was concerned because I have a random suture sticking up in the corner of my eye. I found out that it just so happens to be the MAIN stitch that they did the surgery for. It had come loose from where it was stuck to my tendon or whatever. Anyway, the whole surgery didn't work because of that one stitch. So two weeks from now, May 1st, I get to do the WHOLE stupid thing again. Awake. Lovely. And the fat filler didn't go as planned either, so he has some fun thing planned to fix that too.

And so go the days of our lives, huh? At least my life. It seems like everything happens the hard way. I'm willing to take suggestions on the lesson I should be learning from all of this. I think I've learned a lot, but I must be missing something big.

Peep Show

Thanks to Holly, I just spent 15 minutes of my precious free time looking at this year's Peeps Show dedicated to dioramas made with Peeps (the candy). It's pretty funny.

Easter

I braved WalMart this morning for food and Easter essentials. I thought if I went early it would be okay. I'm glad I did. Their Easter aisle was completely gone. There were just remnants scattered in random places throughout the store. I had to look up and down every aisle to find the plastic eggs that weren't already pre-filled with gross candy and/or bubble gum (neither is wanted at our house). Plus how lazy are we that we can't even fill our own eggs anymore? Anyway, I made the whole trip in about 90 minutes. I even found Kyle a cool little set of real-looking keys (his latest obsession).

At the big Salt Lake Primary meeting we went to they encouraged us to listen to the message in the primary songs. I've tried to do that this week. Weird how you can sing songs your whole life and not really hear them. Here's my confession: We sing "The Wise Man and the Foolish Man" a lot at our house. I HONESTLY have always considered it a lesson on obedience or intelligence. Obviously someone told this wise man to build his house on a rock. He did. It stayed still. Good obeying everyone! (As Mickey would say.) That or he was just wise enough to do so. I'm hoping that I just made that assumption before I was old enough to understand metaphors and have never looked for more meaning.

So yesterday I'm listening and re-considering the message. "He built his house upon the rock..." Wait a second...Rock....Rock of Christ...Building a house on the Rock of Christ...Holy cow! That's what it's talking about. I even revealed this to Taylor, who looked at me like I was teaching him the alphabet. Okay, not new to him. Anyway, it meant something to me. Our Primary is currently learning How Firm a Foundation, and Claire and I practice it constantly; it's fun to sing. But I was thinking about how when we build our spiritual homes using the rock of Christ as our foundation, then when the rains come down and the floods come up (the trials of life) that our spiritual homes will remain still, untouched by the storm because of the firm foundation.

That lesson just really stood out to me. We've had a really hard couple of years in many different areas of life, but one area of our life that has remained untouched by the storm is our faith. We have never doubted God's love or His plan for us. In fact, if nothing else, all of our hard times have made us love Him more. If our home had been built upon the sand, all of these things combined could have totally "washed away" our faith. I'm so grateful for the gospel and for Easter time. How perfect to renew our faith and hope as the spring season renews the earth. How wonderful that the atonement is there to complete us when we fail. And how great was conference? I love conference. As we face the next stage of our lives, graduation finally have a career and maybe even a home of our own, I am grateful for Easter, Conference, and spring; all of which combine to make us ready and excited for the steps to come.


PS A little thing to think about...Sing "When He Comes Again" to yourself. If you'd like skip ahead to, "I'm sure he'll call his little ones, ________________ round his knee." Fill in the blank. Are you singing the right words? Are your sure? Check it out: Click Here.

I'm guessing you were singing the wrong words. Weird, huh? Though probably not as weird as my own misheard lyrics for this Primary song. When I was little I was convinced it said, "Little purple PANTIES touch with yellow gold." I had the whole thing invisioned in my mind. It didn't seem odd to me. I still can't hear it saying pansies. I even made a little graphic for you. Maybe it's not the most fitting way to end an Easter post, but...

Precious

Claire has grown probably five inches since last fall. This means she can finally reach the pedals on her bike. She scoots all over the place on it with Kyle falling behind, again proving his nickname of Puppy. For some reason he likes to have a hand on her while she rides. I can only assume he thinks he's protecting her. The other day she had this dress on. He untied it and held onto the tie throughout most of her ride. Good thing she's still pretty slow! Isn't it sweet though? And I took this picture with my cell phone. I didn't know what a great camera I got!

Yesterday Claire said to me, "Mom. I am so glad you guys have two kids." Me too.

I made it through

Surgery without anesthesia. That was fun. I had about 20 or more shots around my eye socket and eyelids. One was in my eye socket, that sucked. I didn't feel about 3 of them. The rest were nasty. But I didn't feel the cutting, scraping, stitching or cauterizing, so that was positive.

The juvederm filler was the worst. I think Taylor's hand were wondering when the baby would be there because I was squeezing so hard.

Either way, it's over. I have to ice it for three days now breaking as little as possible. And sit sleeping up. (I just saw that I wrote that wrong, and I think I'll leave it as a testimony to my percocet---And that's also a good clue to stop typing before I hurt myself or my editing reputation :) ).

I'm an aunt!

I totally forgot to post about the most exciting thing ever. I became an aunt on February 13. My brother Jake and his wife, Britten, had a darling tiny tiny tiny little girl named Bailey Eliza. Here is a picture of her, and a scrapbook page to commemorate:

Mother I love you...

Conversation I had with Claire yesterday:

Me: "Claire, Mom is going to have surgery in a few days. I will have a hurt little eye, so I may not be around for a few days. Will you be okay without me?"

Claire: "Oh yes! I would love it."

Me (hurt a little): "Oh. Well, I will miss you."

Claire: "Well, I won't miss you!"

I'm hoping she was trying to make me feel better. But I think it was a little too much honesty. Aren't moms special?

This goes hand-in-hand with how when Taylor gets home he gets happy dances and shouts of jubilation. I get the silent treatment or yelled at.

I'd just like to publicly apologize to my mother for all of the mistreatment she's surely experienced from me. Sorry Mom.

Congratulations are (almost) in order

FYI: I haven't blogged for a while because I've been hard at work on Grandma's book and away from home.

For the last 6 months (okay, the last 8 years...) I have been working on my grandma's life history. TODAY it is at the printer! Yeah! Well, not officially to be printed, just for a proof, but still---all I have to do is read through it, fix the mistakes, and it's done. I'm so excited to see the finished product. And I'm so excited that it's almost done.

I worked on it every spare moment all last week. The kids and I stayed in Lehi while Taylor finished up his thesis. My aunts each took a day to watch Claire and Kyle while I worked on the book. As expected my children truly charmed their great-aunts, but were a little less-than-favorable after the long week.

In other big news Kyle has finally stopped calling me Daddy. He brought back Momma (his first word) on Saturday night, and I couldn't be happier.

Last week also marked my return to the public speaking circuit after a 16 month hiatus due to my temporary facial disfigurement. I spoke on Monday and Thursday at luncheons for different groups of women. It felt good to be speaking again, so feel free to refer me to all of your friends who are in young womens or have other needs.

Also, on February 13 I wrote a letter to a couple of the directors of the Moran Eye Center complaining about what happened during the last 16 months. I've received three replies none of which admit any errors (how could they with lawyers these days [sorry rob]). However they did sincerely apologize a number of times. The surgeon (who shall remain nameless, though not faultless) offered a big old crappy reason for why all of his decisions were correct. He used a lot of big medical words in an effort to show me that I don't know anything---but I'll have my current surgeon translate soon.

I wrote the letter not really just to complain, but to give them a patient's perspective, and also to offer up some suggestions as to how to improve their program. I'm sure my suggestions will be implemented, and it's my hope that no one will experience the things that I did.

And as continually ongoing this eye stuff is, I will have my next surgery next Tuesday, March 24th. I opted to save several thousand dollars and forgo anesthesia. We'll see how fun that is! But it will make for a faster recovery. I am so grateful to have Dr. Engen as a surgeon. He explained every portion of the procedure in detail to me. He also told me that they'll be filling my eyelid hollowness with Juvederm--a synthetic filler. The silver lining to all of this is that (although I have to pay for the entire vial of Juvederm when they won't use even half of that and it's only good for a few months) in the future when I have this procedure (it'll happen almost yearly) and my face is a little bit older, they'll use the rest of the vial to fill my wrinkles! Wahoo! It's something I'd never just sign up for (well, probably not) but if it's offered and paid for, I'm signing up!

My little business

I'm so proud! I just got my first order on my pageant paperwork business. And not a small order either. This is just what we need right now. What a blessing!