Do as I'm doing

The activity on our advent calendar yesterday was to visit Temple Square. We checked the weather at 4:00. It looked alright so we started to get ready to go. This involved dinner, putting on our fancy frocks, getting a wedding present ready for Grant and Janae, changing Rachel's diaper more than once, and so forth. Our goal was to be ready by 5:00, but we didn't get out the door until 5:30.

While we were wolfing down our dinner, I glanced out the window and noticed it was snowing.

"Looks pretty icky out," I said, "Should we still go?"

"Sure!" said Andrew, ever optimistic.

We continued dinner and it started snowing harder and harder. Visibility was such that we could see the building across from ours but no further.

"Hmmm..." I pondered aloud, "I'm not sure the roads look really good...."

"Oh, they're fine," said Andrew and he checked the road conditions online just to be sure. They looked ok, so we decided to go.

Then Andrew took some garbage out.

"It's freezing outside and rather slippery," he said.

"Do you think we should go?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe we should phone your dad and ask if he'd go. He drives up there everyday."

"No," Andrew shook his head, "He'd just say no. He hates driving, remember?"

"Alright, then we'll ask your mom if she'd go."

"No. She'd also say no."

"Maybe we should ask my parents if they're still going to Grant's reception..."

"No. They'd tell us not to go."

"So we're still going then?" I asked.

"Yeah, I can handle it," said Andrew with a little less optimism.

We headed out the door, but soon we were back home again. Let's just say it took us a full hour for us to make a cute little loop onto the freeway and then off again at the next available exit. We were driving 20 miles per hour and our lane was going fast.

I guess the moral of the story here is, "Do what you think your parents would do," or "If you don't ask your parents for advice because you know they are going to tell you not to do something you probably shouldn't do it." Lesson learned.

We got out of the car, sad that we didn't go see the lights but happy that we made it home without getting stuck in a ditch. Andrew grabbed the diaper bag and all the other stuff we brought and left me to get Rachel.

Usually I make him get the baby because I find carrying the car seat incredibly awkward and difficult. I don't understand how people just pick those things up with one hand like it's a feather. I have to support the car seat against one leg and kind of bump it along as I limp toward my destination. Thus, I usually take Rachel out of the seat and just carry her. It's much easier.

Anyway, as I was struggling with the car seat I suddenly got pelted by a big ball of snow.

Andrew started laughing, "Ha, ha! I just snew a throwball at you!"

He's been talking like that a lot lately. I think it is probably because he has been writing so much lately. I was worried about his capstone paper that he has to turn in on Thursday because he is always switching around his words and leaving words out. Since we wasted so much time slipping about in the snow, we decided to count that as our Christmas activity and got right into editing his 23 page paper as soon as we got in the door.

We took out all of his apprehensive statements and put pants on them, so to speak. The best example of that is where Andrew said, "Surely the phone call did take place..." I was like, "MmmmmHmmm...we'll be changing that to 'The King phoned the President of Lebanon...' okay, sweetie?"

There were some others like, "This could be representative of the possibility of..." We changed that to, "This is..."

My favorite, favorite, favorite thing that he said in his whole paper was,

"This clearly exasperated their helplessness..."

I read that two or three times before I was like, "Andrew, exactly how does helplessness get exasperated?"

"What?" he asked. I showed him.

"Oh!" he said, "That supposed to be exacerbated, I think."

Well that changes things, doesn't it?

I knew when he snew that throwball at me that his thoughts were kind of muddled. I think we have his paper all cleared up now. It's a good paper. He uses a lot of big words. He always uses a lot of big words. He's so smart!