Ramblings

Last night Zoë conducted Family Home Evening and she selected herself to choose the opening song.

"Welcome to Family Night, everybody," she said cheerfully. "Mommy will say the prayer and I will choose the song—ABCDEFG!"

"It needs to be a church song," Andrew reminded her.

Zoë narrowed her eyes at him and snarled, "A.B.C.D.E.F.G."

So we sang the alphabet song because...what option did we have?

Then she had us sing I Am a Child of God, which is a church song. Then she asked us to sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (which she calls, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, How I Wonder What You Are because she's not very good at song titles yet) but we told her we'd pray first and then would sing Twinkle, Twinkle and then that would be it for singing time.


For our lesson we reviewed our goals from 2018 and noticed that we didn't do very well. We neglected to ever make a chart for it so we forgot about our goals and focused more on staying alive than anything else (which is sometimes all you can do). So we talked a bit about how to make manageable goals and that goals aren't necessarily a destination but a journey. Working on goals is more important than achieving them (though that part is also nice).

President Nelson recently posted on Facebook about four invitations for progress that he gave the women of the church in October. He said, "I hope each of these invitations has brought you closer to the Savior. If you have struggled with any of them, please don't be hard on yourself. You can start today. The Lord is happy with any effort we make to draw closer to him."

So we may not have done fabulously on our 2018 goals, but here we are in 2019, ready to put forth a good effort at improving ourselves once more.

One of my goals is to become a better writer. Andrew signed me up for a writing class for Christmas and that begins next week and I'm hoping to send a story or two out for publication this year (I'm definitely expecting rejections, but will at least be sticking my neck out).

I'm also planning on taking the GRE, which I'm incredibly nervous about. I haven't taken a college class since 2007 so I'm afraid my college skills are a little rusty. I've been reviewing quite a lot recently, especially math, which feels overwhelming because there's just so much to review, but today while I was nursing Alexander and doing...something (either scriptures, Duolingo, Magoosh, or Manhattan Review)...I thought, "It doesn't matter what score you get. You can just take it and be proud because you did it."

Just thinking that made me feel better about it, as silly as that sounds. I mean, it would be nice to get a good enough score to get into the program I'm looking at (which isn't even a phenomenal score), but if not, I can always take it again.

Andrew took it a second time before apply for PhD programs so that he could improve his score, so if I have to take it a second time it won't be the end of the world (but obviously taking it once would be ideal).

Anyway, back to Zoë, who didn't want to get dressed this morning. I finally consented to help her get dressed when it became clear that she was not going to do it otherwise, so I bent over to help her pull up her pants and she decided to jump up at that exact moment. Her hard little head smashed into my mouth, causing my teeth to cut into my lip. My lip was bleeding quite a bit so Zoë took one look at my face and screamed, "I'M SORRY, MOMMY!" and then ran to her room and hid.

I didn't even say anything, I just let all the oozing blood do the talking. And also I was too busy scrambling for tissues to bother reprimanding her.

Our bedspread is blue on one side and white on the other. It's been on the blue side the entire time we've had it, but we recently rearranged our bedroom so when I was remaking the bed yesterday (after washing the sheets), I decided to flip the duvet cover as well. Naturally, I would get a bloody lip the very next morning (but fortunately I managed to avoid bleeding on the bed).

I've been unhappy with where our bed has been in our room since our very first night of having it there. Our air vent is on the ceiling, you see, and our ceiling is sloped and I have a theory that the air would come out of the vent and then slingshot across the ceiling and blast directly in my face.

Allow me to illustrate:

Evidence of why I'm not an illustrator

The air didn't seem to bother Andrew at all but it would wake me up whenever it came on (well, perhaps not every time, but several times a night). It was like being hit with a wall of air and it was awful. I kept telling myself that I would get used to it but...I didn't. So a couple of days ago I said something about "that darn air vent" and Andrew was like, "That's still bothering you? Let's move the bed!"

So we moved the bed and it's so much better!

Now our headboard is against the short wall and I'm about as far away from the vent as possible. 

As an added bonus, I don't have to hunch when I get out of bed, and then squeeze my way between the bed and the dresser in order to get out of the room to get the baby in the middle of the night. My poor knees have been so bruised up from hitting the bed frame over and over again the past...however long our room has been arranged like this (a year and a half almost). Now I can just get out of bed and walk straight to the bedroom door so getting the baby is a lot easier. Or at least it should be...

Last night I got up to get Alexander and I walked around the foot of the bed, just as I'd done every night for the past however long, but instead of finding our bedroom door I wound up by the window and I stood there, feeling around in the curtains for a few terribly confusing minutes before my brain woke up enough to remind me that we'd moved the bed and I no longer had to walk around the foot of the bed to get out of the room.

Poor Andrew did the same thing when he got up to shower this morning. He walked over to the curtains and was like, "What...what...what's going on?!"

Apparently we're getting too old to rearrange our bedroom furniture...