Something to think about

Okay, so I know it isn't Thursday, and I do know that it is Christmas, but this post is going to be about neither of those things (try back on Thursday for something feel-goody and Christmas-y; my husband just left me and my daughter at my parents to travel two hours to his parents and beat the snow storm so he can go to work tomorrow and I can enjoy my favorite day of the year which isn't such a favorite since I don't get to spend it with him, but probably I should stop whining and be grateful that we've had a wonderful day and that he has a good job and that it isn't snowing yet so I don't have to be overly worried about him driving down to SLC in the dark...but I digress).

Some acquaintance on facebook posted this article about children and online privacy today and I thought I would share it. Why? Because these are some of the things (among many) that Scott and I took into consideration when we discovered we were having a baby and had to make a choice about whether or not to "put her on facebook." We both felt very strongly about not putting pictures of her on facebook. We felt like once we did, we couldn't control her privacy--who knows who would see her and find pictures of her and decide to steal her? She is that cute, after all. At the same time, it kind of broke my heart to not be able to share her with friends and family that live far away. We reached a happy medium with our private family blog--our friends and family can still stay in touch and see pictures of her, but they have to have my permission to do so. I try to keep her name private on this blog and you won't ever see pictures of her here.

I'm not saying this is the best choice, nor is it right for everyone. I like how this article touches on that. I try not to judge anyone for posting pictures of their children on social media. I can fully understand why they do it. I just know that there are probably people out there who don't understand why I do not.

Sometimes (okay, almost daily), I get jealous of all the "she's so cute" and "you're such a good mom!" comments that I see on my friends' facebook pages when they post pictures of their children. I miss having people adore my daughter's cuteness and my mommy skills (which, let's face it, aren't all that awesome anyway). Sometimes I long for that validation, especially when I am at home all day with limited contact with the outside world. Sometimes, like after we got our family pictures taken, Scott and I revisit the issue--would it be okay for our photographer to post some of our family's cute pictures? Would it really hurt that much?

But then I think about what I want the world to know about my daughter. Personally, I hope she never becomes a "Sophia Grace and Rosie" YouTube?Ellen sensation (I have no doubt she is adorable enough and talented enough to do so someday). I do not want her childhood tainted by stardom, nor do I want her thinking that online validation is the only kind of validation there is. There are things about our family that I want to keep private. I don't want just anyone admiring (or abusing) her pictures. I want people that are strangers to me to be strangers to my daughter. I want to have some control over her while I still can.

And so, for us, and for now, Kevin remains known to us and anonymous to you.

Good Will Toward Men

It is hard to feel good about the world today. I have been especially disappointed this past week as multiple people seem to be telling me, an avid Aggie fan since birth, how I should feel about Gary Anderson ditching the Aggies.

I said it.

He ditched us.

And no, I will not be happy for him just because he tripled his salary.

You can tell me what you want. I will listen politely, but I probably won't change my mind. Then I will tell you what I believe (because in Aggie Nation, it is all about what you believe).

I believe the man lied. I believe I could have been happy for him to move up in his career, had he not strung us all along for the past month about him staying here.

But, no, he said he would stay and then, once the big offer came, whoosh! He was outta here!

Personally, I don't think anyone who hasn't been an Aggie fan for at least ten years can really comprehend how much this hurts us. You can say that it's just the way it is and I should be okay with it, but I will tell you why I cannot be happy that this "is just the way it is." This small situation is just a sampling of what is wrong with the world today on a larger scale. His choice exemplifies a lack of three basic morals that we desperately need in our society: integrity, loyalty, and contentment. Let me outline them for you:

1. Integrity means you say what you mean and you mean what you say. You are true to your word. And if you don't intend on being true to your word, you don't share those words.

2. Loyalty means sticking with something. Aggie fans (at least those that have been around more than the past three seasons) understand this: loving something not because it is victorious, but because you believe in it. For example, I believe in goodness, but "goodness" isn't always the winning team in today's world.

3. Contentment. It means being satisfied with what you have. Today's generation is all about entitlement. We deserve bigger, better, faster, stronger, more more more. There is such a thing as being happy and not being rich.Contrary to popular belief, money isn't everything.

I have been asking myself over and over how I am going to instill these values into my daughter when every time she steps outside our door she will be confronted with ideas that tell her the opposite. And how am I going to keep myself believing in these things when good people--even my friends--are telling me I should be okay with less than this?

My insides are in knots. There are no easy answers.

This is the time of year when I am supposed to have good will toward men. Obviously, if you've read this far, you know I don't seem to have much of that going on. I know. I feel awful about it. I want to be happy. I want to know peace. At some point, I would like to believe that people really are what they say they are, that they really will do what they say they are going to do, that they won't leave it all when something better comes along.

Maybe I am overly emotional right now because I am slowly tearing apart the only home my daughter has ever known to pack her up and move her to a place almost completely foreign to her (and to me). Last night I finally had enough. Knowing that my husband would be staying the night with his parents down in Salt Lake because of his new job, I decided to do the only thing that I knew would make me feel better.

I packed up my daughter and I went home to the home that will always be home.

And I asked my mom, "am I right to feel the way I do? All these other people are telling me I should feel the opposite." And she said just what I needed to hear--that integrity, and loyalty, and contentment should still count for something, that my feelings were valid, and it was okay that it didn't feel okay.

And for the rest of the evening, I wrapped presents while watching White Christmas and keeping an eye on Kevin, who is trying so hard to crawl and expand her world. Early this morning, when I was trying to get her to go back to sleep for a little while so I could too, we cuddled on the bed in my old bedroom, surrounded by the yellow walls I love. I read to her stories out of a Christmas Treasury that my mom bought for my family in 1993 (I am probably the only child who has read this treasury). Sleepily she smiled up at me, content to look at the pictures, listen to my voice, and run her hand along her yellow fleece blanket until she drifted off again.

And I realized, the best thing I can do for her is what my parents did for me: give her a home to come home to when life gets tough and she needs just a moment of peace before she can pick herself up and move on.

And now, I am going to pick myself up and move on.

Kindergarten

I didn't post on here yesterday.

It just slipped my mind.

I was having too much fun doing other things and before you know it, it was Friday. And Friday meant that we spent all day in a car travelling the roads of Idaho with the rest of Aggie Nation. Tomorrow is a big game day.

But I don't want to talk about what I did today. I want to talk about yesterday, and what happened yesterday in light of what happened today, this morning, in a little Elementary school in Connecticut.

Yesterday, Kevin and I visited my mom at work.

She's a Kindergarten teacher.

We meant to stay for five, maybe ten minutes. But here's the thing about a good Kindergarten classroom. Once you enter, you just want to stay and stay and stay. Because, in Kindergarten, you feel good about yourself. You feel good about other people. You see little children that give you hope in an ever-discouraging societal future. You learn new words. Like vertices. Until yesterday, I had no idea what that was. And when I told one of the little girls that, her blond curls bounced as she gave me a look that said, "you really didn't know what that meant? Where have you been? Duh."

So we stayed.

For almost two hours.

And we learned.

My mom introduced the children to her granddaughter and then explained that the baby's uncle called her Kevin. "Why do you think he calls her Kevin?" She asked.

Little hands shot up into the air.
Because she looks like a boy.
Because she has blue eyes like him.
Because Kevin is a good name.
I know a Kevin.
Because she looks like a Kevin.
Finally, I explained the connection to the bird named Kevin in the movie UP! who is, in fact, a girl.
Because she's a girl!

Good job. You know, there aren't really wrong answers in Kindergarten. At least, nobody feels as if they gave a wrong answer in Kindergarten. You can give not-quite-right answers, or almost answers, or answers that are completely off-topic, but the important thing is, you give an answer.

There are no answers for what happened this morning. It's heartbreaking that in today's society, we expect shootings at public gatherings. We expect them at shopping malls. Even a movie theater, although hard to comprehend, is comprehendable. We expect them at middle schools and junior highs.

But you never, ever, ever expect them in a Kindergarten classroom.

Kindergarten classrooms are meant to be full of life. The very best kind of life. The kind of life where you can be anything you want and every day you learn something new. The kind where you learn to be a friend and a helper, to fulfill your responsibility and save your Turtle Tokens for the Turtle Store when you do something good, and hand them over as a punishment when you are naughty.

My mom's classroom has a motto: Slow and Steady wins the race.

The race of life is never easy and it is always unexpected, but like it or not, this is a marathon we didn't sign up for, but we still have to run. We run it together. Some of us are given harder routes than others. But we all have the same destination in mind. We hold each other up. We cheer each other on. We love. We make good choices. We learn new things.


I have read three different blog posts in the last hour, all friends of mine, each asked to run a different race. One discusses the recovery of one of my missionary friends, who recently had surgery to remove a tumor from behind his ear. Everyday, he is battling to do simple things: sit, stand, walk on his own.

Good news. He is winning.

I read about a friend's wait for his sweetheart, who is off fulfilling a calling to teach the people of the Phillipines about Christ. Everyday that she sits in a classroom and learns a foreign language, she is winning.

And then there is the post of the older sister of a dear friend of mine, whose baby boy will turn one year old tomorrow, in the hospital where he has spent almost every major holiday of his life. He, also, is fighting. She, her husband, her family, her friends...we are all fighting with him. Every time we see that boy's smile and we smile, everytime we hold a child closer and are more grateful for what we have been given instead of what we don't have, we are winning.

Somedays our races are harder to run than others.

And when life stops making sense, we ask a teacher.

Tonight, we ask the Teacher of all Teachers for help, peace, and understanding. In return, He will help us find life.

We can be on the winning team.

Change, change, change

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind for our family. Over the past two weeks, Scott has been applying for any job he can find in the state of Utah. His current job has steadily gotten worse and worse. The best way I know to describe it is to say that if there was such a thing as working for a soul-sucking dementor from Harry Potter—well, Icon is pretty close.

Both Scott and I have been praying and pleading for him to find a new job so that we can adequately provide for our family and help Scott get started in his chosen career.  He will graduate in May, but his final semester consists of three classes: one online and two distance education. We designed it that way on purpose so that he could potentially get an internship for next semester.

Well, he didn’t get an internship. He was blessed with a job!

On Tuesday night I came home from teaching a YW lesson (on sister missionary work, I may or may not post it sometime soon), to find him…smiling? What is this? He said that the guy from one of the jobs he’d applied for had called while I was gone and they talked for like 30 minutes and he had an interview in Salt Lake the next day (he was already going down for a different job interview). On Wednesday, he had a great interview (good thing Scotty knows his Aggie sports) and before Scott had even gotten a chance to drive back into Cache Valley, he had the job!

I haven’t seen him smile so much in…well…years. The happiness in his voice is contagious (well, at least it was until he realized he’d only been going on three hours of sleep and finally got grumpy around ten pm last night). I am so happy for him and for what this means for our family. 

But there is part of me that is having a meltdown.  For the past 24 hours I have been analyzing this move and putting different blessings into two categories: the “bitter” and the “sweet.”

Bitter: I have to move to the Salt Lake Valley. I have never wanted to live there. In fact, if there was one place on earth I never wanted to live (other than Waco, TX, I never wanted to serve there either…for no particular reason, I just didn’t want to go to Waco) it is the Salt Lake Valley.

Sweet: Salt Lake isn’t as far as...well…Texas, where we hope to end up someday. I’m sure Kevin’s grandparents aren’t quite ready for us to take her that far away, and when I admit it to myself: neither am I.

Bitter: I am more than slightly afraid that the panic/anxiety attacks of my childhood (that stemmed from a move to the Salt Lake Valley when I was nine) will come back.

Sweet: Perfect excuse to find a new OBGYN, since I didn’t like my last one and the one I wanted to switch to was part of the same practice. (There’s your TMI for the week).

Bitter: Leaving Cache Valley. I am not stupid. I know that there is only a very slim chance I will ever live in my valley again. I am 25 years old and finally leaving home for good…and I am sad at the thought.

Bitter: We have to find a new place to move.

Sweet: the new place better have bigger closets and a second bathroom. Eventually we would like to have more children and there is no way I am sharing a bathroom with my husband through another pregnancy!

Bitter: We have to move. We have three times as much stuff as we did when we moved into this apartment 18 months ago. Yuck.

Sweet: Now I don’t have to worry about finding a place here for all of Kevin’s outgrown baby stuff.

Bitter: I have to clean up our apartment and keep it clean so that our landlords can start showing it. Note: it has been a wonderful place to live, but be warned, if you move in, you will most likely get pregnant with a beautiful little girl. That’s the magic history of the apartment.

Sweet: We can still have Kevin’s first Christmas in her first home.

Bitter: I have an abnormal fear of driving in Salt Lake. Six-lane freeways in Texas? No problem. Utah Freeways and Downtown Salt Lake?  No thank you, I’ll walk.

Sweet: We’ll need to get a new car. I’ve never gotten to go car shopping before. I am not sure this is a “sweet” thing, but I’ve never gotten to buy a car just for me to drive before. Note: It will not be a mini-van. At least not at this point in time!

Bitter: Not being around to help my family. Not having Auntie Liz babysit on Tuesday afternoons when I need a nap. Not being able to go out my parent’s house on nights when Scott has school until 10:30. Not being able to go to Flan’s basketball games. Not being able to go to Aggie basketball games.

Sweet: Now, when we go visit my parents, it will be for a couple of days instead of a couple of hours.

Bitter: Being in the same valley as most of Scott’s family.

Just kidding!

Sweet: Being in the same valley as most of Scott’s family and not having to miss out on Fowler Family FHE anymore!

Sweet: Being close enough to get to know my nieces and nephews better and help out my sister-in-laws when needed.

Sweet: Three words: Target. Chipotle. Zupas.  

Sweet: Winco. Gummy Butterflies.

Sweet: A pay raise!

Sweet: Graduation without the worries of finding a big boy job!

Sweet: A change of scenery.

Sweet: Having a husband who is happy.

Sweet: Knowing we are exactly where Heavenly Father needs us to be.