Jury Duty

Have you ever been summoned for jury duty?  I have.  Seven times, in the last ten years.  Twice, in the last five months.  Random selection?  HA!  I spit on their random selection.   

Camera Practice

When I completed my master's degree, my radtastic parents gave me a congratulatory fancy-shmancy camera.  I love it!  But my photography skills have gone through only sporadic spurts of growth and backsliding since then, as my interest in (and time for) taking pictures responded to other pressures in my life.  

No more!  In this phase of my stay-at-home momminess, I feel like I have more latitude for personal development than I used to.  So one of my goals is to carry forward the interests I've previously invested in but jettisoned when life's current shifted directions.

Enter my D-SLR.  And a goal to have one photo shoot each week.  Eden will certainly be a prominent guest star, as with today's practice, but I've got other subjects in mind as well. How about some drool-worthy food?  Spring flowers? Dare I say a landscape or two? 
 

I think I'll get serious about guitar again too.  And eventually work in some time with the piano we own but no one plays.  One thing is sure: I'd better not push Eden's patience too far.  No one wants to report their cause of death as "homicide at the hands of a rogue member of The Lollipop Guild".   Today, ladies and gentleman, it came close!

9 Months

Good-bye tranquility, hello adventure!  Eden reached the 9-month mark a couple of days ago, and it ushered in a whole host of new milestones.  

In the short space of a week, she beat roseola, gained two bottom teeth, learned to push herself up to a seated position, learned to crawl, and began climbing everything.  Everything.  Here you can see her on the bookcase, just as she noticed me noticing her.  See the sheepish expression? 

This is the look that always follows shortly after sheepish.  I'm not sure of the exact adjective to describe it, but I'd say it's something along the lines of "I do what I want!  And P.S. what I want is AWESOME!"

At Eden's well-baby visit yesterday we confirmed that she is in fact a tiny little bobble-head.  To be precise, she weighs in at 15 lbs. 14 oz. (8th percentile); her height is 25.5" (almost the 5th percentile); and her ginormous noggin is in the 70th percentile.  The doctor said that she obviously has plenty of room for brains...I'm not so sure.  After all, her favorite activities include scaling the shower curtain, attempting to crawl (i.e. plummet) down the stairs (to her death), tipping over the dog's water, using Hunter's head as a step-stool, and eating whole magazines. Oh, and stranger danger?  Forget that.  Like the dog, this child earnestly believes that every single soul is her BEST friend.  If you're looking for a baby to kidnap, this is the one (so long as you don't mind that her daddy is very good with a shotgun). 

Bless our hearts, I can only foresee her adventuresome ways getting worse with time.  Eden just might be the death of her old-foggie parents.  But dang-it-all, that smile of hers is absolutely irresistible, and we just can't help but think that she's the bees knees.  I guess it's love. Sigh.  What's one poor mother to do?

First Sleepover

That's right. Over President's Day weekend, when "da Boss," "da Mrs," and "Ms Eden" all went skiing, Mr Hunter had his first sleepover. Here he is, ready to go.

I may or may not have shed a tear. It's pretty big business, after all, sending your best good dog out in the world...

Stay Back! I'm an Introvert.

My first discovery of this term as an identity occurred during a sport's physical when I was in high school.  The doctor (a dottering old fussbudget who habitually spoke to himself in the presence of other people) had seen my little sister just before I came in for the alls-well.  After no fewer than five largely silent minutes in my presence he muttered, "Yes, yes, very interesting...one an extreme extrovert, the other an extreme introvert..." For all I knew, he was diagnosing my patellas, but either way I had the distinct impression that he would likely record this insight in a covert notebook and eventually harvest me as a specimen for some mad-scientist convention.  Outrageous, you say?  You didn't see his turkey-tailed gray mange, smell his coffee breath, or fall on the receiving end of that penetrating and scholarly stare.  Trust me, the dude was whack. 

Introvert.  An article recently featured in Time describes it this way: "prefers to be alone or in small groups; is quickly exhausted by parties and other large social situations." This in contrast to the extrovert, who: "finds large crowds and social situations energizing; becomes easily bored when alone."  When I was a brand new missionary, one of my senior companions suffered from acute homesickness.  She would always ask me, "Aren't you homesick?  Don't you miss your family?" But although I loved and missed my family, the separation wasn't unbearable.  No.  What nearly did me in was talking all day long...to PEOPLE.  They were everywhere!  And it was my job to engage them.  I loved sharing the gospel, but it was always exhausting. My daydreams during that time inevitably led to somewhere silent and open, a mountaintop where I could see the sunset and just be. 

We live in an extrovert's world. A world of ten thousand Facebook friends and a job market where you have to stand out if you want your application to have any hope against the other hundred in the  stack. Both of the principals who hired me for teaching jobs told me later that despite all of my education, qualifications and glowing recommendations, they nearly passed me by because of a quiet voice and reserved demeanor.  Ironically, their instincts were true although their reasoning wasn't.  They feared that my quietness meant I wouldn't be able to control a classroom of rowdy kids; so not a problem.  I'm an introvert, not spineless!  But they were right in the sense that teaching in a public school was a terrible career choice for me.  For me, not for my students.  I did it, and (with no false modesty) I did it well.  But by the end of most days my need for serenity was so cavernous that I couldn't even stand to listen to the radio on the way home.  For some other teachers their load of 230 students was a crowd-surfing, social half-time show.  For me it was a four-fingers-deep shot of stress.  I guess it's never easy to be what you are not.

And that's the crux of the matter for us introverts.  In a culture that values loudness and the socially prolific, there's a lot of external pressure to be that.  Internal pressure too. I spend excessive time fretting about how many friends I don't have (though my few friendships are sweet and golden).  I get all excited to cook and clean and host big family gatherings (and then get totally stressed out when they occur). I envision the most gorgeous tablescapes for parties (then feel like a failure at life because it requires more than three people to make a party). Sounds like I need better expectation-management, huh?  But I can't always be the hermit on the hill with the sunset. 

And then there's Eden, bless her exuberant little soul in a household of introverts.  She's never met someone who isn't a friend.  Her favorite activities include being tickled, "dropped", tossed, squeezed, and every other baby daredevil stunt.  The girl is fearless (with the exception of the blender's noise, which sends her into freak-fits).  See they say that whether you're an introvert, extrovert, or somewhere in between is inborn and manifest by 4-1/2 months. And I do believe we've got a little extrovert on our hands here.  Which sounds a lot to me like a life-long invitation to a party.  It's delightful now, but where one extrovert is gathered, more shall surely follow.  Should be interesting! :)

SO what about you (if you even made it to the end of this extremely long and self-obsessed post).  Are you an introvert?  Extrovert?  Tweenie?  What pitfalls do you run into based on your nature?                  

Good Book?

Kris and I made what may possibly be the most fool-hardy and self-destructive New Year's Resolution on record: to read more in 2012.  I know, sounds wholesome, right?  What's that thing about the devil luring you in with flaxen cords, later to become chains of steel...Yeah, that's the trouble.  While reading may be a whole hearty lot better for your brain than TV, it's a bottomless pit for time. And it's sucking us dry!  I've already consumed somewhere around 2,000 pages in the last three weeks.  That sounds like a pretty moderate pace, considering I used to read about that much every two days in college (word to the wise, NEVER take 18 credits of English in one semester, and especially DO NOT make French and Russian Novels three of them).  But still.  I've got a baby to care for and play with, crafts sitting undone, Sunday school lessons to prepare, dinners to make and bathrooms to clean and, heavens, I don't have time for this!  I think that I may have to give up on this resolution for the unheard of reason that I'm actually keeping it!  Sigh. 

So what's been on my reading binge list?  Here they are, with brief reviews:

• East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.  I think that this might possibly be the best book I've read in ages.  The prose is as sublime as the characters are flawed and fascinating.  It's a 600-page re- imagining of the Cain and Able story, and I adore the layers and shadows Steinbeck develops through the narrative.  It's pretty dark in some ways (full of murderous wretches and "ladies" of the night), but there are also characters like Lee and Samuel who fairly shimmer against the story's backdrop.  Plus, it's about truth, which is my #1 requirement for a great book.  Not that a story has to lay down an obvious and deliberate moral for me to enjoy it...more like I need to see the characters wrestling with the very nature of truth and coming up against their own flaws in search of a thing that life's messy circumstances can make appear so ephemeral, but which in reality is so adamantine (the subject of an excellent Roethke poem, but I digress...).  In short, I loved this book.
• The Book of a Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale.  This was an impulse read, nabbed when I chanced to see it in the YAL section as I picked up some books for Kris.  I guess I just remembered that one of our nieces loves the author, so I decided to try it out.  Pretty good.  The narrator has a strong, engaging voice and it's a neat retelling of an old myth.  If you're looking for a princess locked in a tower, this one's all you. 
• Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. I've been trying to check this one out for two years now, because I liked Enger's second novel so much.  I was not disappointed.  It's the story of a family in search of their outlaw son/brother, but it's highest appeal is in the quirky characters and playful narrative voice.  This is another truthy book, though much lighter and easier to read than Steinbeck.  And if you don't laugh during the goose hunt, there might be something wrong with you.    
• The Ranger's Apprentice Series, by John Flannagan.  Kris absolutely adores these books.  He imagines himself as the knife-toting, arrow-slinging hero, off to save the world.  Me?  I'm not too big on fantasy.  It's just that the genre tends to rely heavily on stock characters and trite plots, each dressed in some funky new name from book to book, but not fooling anybody.  The first two books in this series seem doomed to fall right in line with every other fantasy book, but by book three there is definitely a welcome shift toward new paths for worn feet to follow.  This still isn't my favorite set of books (and obviously I'm not their target audience), but they're good for light reading.  Hey, Twilight kept me from dying of boredom during a SLC-ATL-Columbus flight, even with it's vain repetitions of amber eyes and russet skin...every book has a time and place :) 

So that's the skinny.  What's your definition of a great book?  What are the best books you've read lately?  It's ok, you can tell me, since I promise not to read them.  I'm quitting...remember? :)

Glamour Shots, By Mom

At seven months Eden is a connoisseur of fine solids, master roller, supreme cord chewer, expert dog tormentor and general ruffian.  But she sure is pretty!