In honor of this Leap Day

It seems fitting that the thoughts of my present mind have been about 'leaping' into a new adventure of life.

I have held out for awhile on the excitement of moving to Indiana, but now that we have more questions answered I am getting excited. Of course, I am an intense planner. I like having a road mapped out - and that is not just talking mapquest or GPS. I like the security of knowing where I want to go and who I want to be. I have always loved New Year's resolutions. I set new goals each week and I am constantly looking around me to see what I can change to make things better in my house, my kids, my yard, myself.

I paradoxically love change - for change warrants a fantastic opportunity for creation. The cool thing about moving frequently is that I have a very good little bracket to put on the changes that have been made while in a given area in me. I get to look back and say..."wow. while living in Boise I learned to..." or "jeepers. when we lived in Texas I grew because of..."

Now our Arizona chapter closing and I am happily pleased with progress made. It feels as though I have done a bit of the 'two steps forward, on step back' method. I will accredit that to radical surges forward with excited energy followed by physical set-backs. Here's how it plays out in my memory of personal growth in 2.75 years in Arizona:

-I embraced my new surroundings and found new and interesting cultural things to do such as take the kids to museums and multiple libraries.

- I decided to be a 'mover and shaker' in the ward, everything a member-missionary should be and involved and helpful, and I did a good job of it in our first ward.

- I loved kids that weren't my own in such a way that I wanted to help and love more kids that were not my own.

- We bought a house and we worked hard learning about horticulture and agriculture to make a backyard blossom.

-We decided to pursue foster parenting.

-I took myself seriously as a runner for the first time ever and got good at running fast. I competed in my first race over a 5K and placed in my age division.

-I provided drop-in day care services for 4-6 families and made some decent money while staying home with the kiddos.

-I made a comeback to the stage, pursuing theatre again first as this:

a bell-hop and a manicurist

-I made more friends, mostly outside of Church. I took homemade preserves to neighbors and started a couples game night which has become our closest circle of friends.

- I started a 'Less Impact' movement in our house and we decided to wash dishes by hand and air dry all our clothes. We bought food from co-ops and ate only home-made things, no boxes, no bags.

-I became a certified Zumba instructor and taught at a YMCA.

-We got fully licensed as foster parents and had our first placement within the week, Viv.

-I played my first Witch, she was loveable and I sang a solo on stage - a lot.


-We bought a dishwasher.

-Josh switched jobs and some of our stress went away.

-I finally recognized the signs and symptoms in myself that was throwing me into depressive states and decided to try something personal to change it without medication. I became aware of my body and listened.

-We phased out drop-in day care in compliance with foster regulations and lived well because Josh worked hard.

- I started taking tap lessons with my daughter.

-I played a Witch again, not so nice this time, but honestly connected to the character in a way I had never done before. It was a big role and it pushed me a lot.

I was released as a ward missionary in my ward after taking part in a baptism in a very dear friend who took the discussions with us and then was happy to sit behind a piano in the primary and not worry about talking to anyone.

-I started a 'Happiness Project' and read all about the psychology of happiness and how I could take control of my life again.

-I also studied more and more about personal finances, parenting, and gardening getting pretty smart in each arena.

-Josh got another job.

-We got another foster placement, Earl.

-I played a French maid, fully decked in short skirt and fish-net tights and felt like I totally rocked those tights.

- We ate more things out of boxes and spent a lot more time thinking about parenting.

-I went through treatments for fertility and learned even more about my body, more importantly I learned a lot more about what God really wanted us to do with my body and with our family.

-Earl went to his adoptive family and we went on vacation with the kids to the ocean and Sea World.

- We did some in home construction in which I learned to tile and spackle. I created the perfect pantry and loved stocking it with new canning creations including: peach cobbler filling, gherkin pickles, bottled meat, bottled chicken, sucotash, homemade spahgetti sauce, enchilada sauce, asparagus, peppers, and beans, all of which I had never canned on my own before while still maintaining my stock of peaches, pears, applesauce and apple pie-filling.

-I turned 30.

-Josh got another job and we frantically got our house ready for sale.

-I got another one of my dream roles and enjoyed being my own bit of Julie Andrews playing Anna Leonowens.

Heck, with the costume changes alone in this past year I have been over 12 different people! And happily, I have become a better me under it all too! It was cool to think about all the different changes that have been made in just a few years. There is so much to look forward to and so many even better things I want to do yet and become better. The prospective list for Indiana is looking pretty good: professor, gymnast, writer, debt-free, coach, positive.

LEAP FORWARD!

Home Cultured

Hmmph....that sounds a bit like I were making homemade yogurt (or yo-gret if you ask Viv), sadly I have not done that in a good while. I speak more of the culture that is easily created within a home.

Every family creates a culture all their own. It is either assimilated or actively drawn out. As with much of modern culture- culture is passe'. To be cultured is to be a mimic. People have lost the art of real art form. They just watch what others are doing and pick it up. That would be delicious if everyone else wasn't just following the person next to them. If examined long enough, we might just find the tail of the snake in its own mouth. (You could reasonably say that the head is more eastern and the tail more to the west explaining while Idaho always seemed to be about 6 months behind current trends)

Having noticed the slithering forked tongue of main-stream culture slipping into our home, I took a pitchfork to the beast. I refuse to have my children running around the house mis-quoting some of the worlds musical miscreants. Truly, I have no idea where they get it. How is it that in the matter of two days Viv fell in love with Justin Bieber and then asked if any male musician on the radio was Justin Bieber? I swear I had never heard his song myself. I'll blame it on that random girl at the park who she made fast friends with for five minutes.

That scares me. Not just mainstream, but having a child that will be an obsessive follower naturally. Befitting my right wing mothering instincts, I have pulled rank and pushed my tastes on my children. The kiddos have always been in love with any musical I have been in as an actress, so we just kept the ball rolling. Great thanks to Aunt Jill and they added Annie to the ranks of our movies (yesterday they presented me with Wizard of Oz, Newsies, and Annie for my judging as the movie of the day, yeah!). It struck me as the kiddos ran around the house singing "The sun comes out tomorrow, bet your bottom cobweb that tomorrow..." that I would much rather hear that repeated than "there's a fire, starting in my part..." (and I do love some Adele).

On the rush of realization I sat down last night after reading them to sleep from The Secret Garden and bought all the most kid friendly songs from the musicals my kids have seen or musicals that I have seen and know the best songs from. Now our kids' playlist is an A list Broadway mix! It is a bit of an upgrade from the Children's Songs which are the regular after dinner soothing songs. All day long there is something to sing, there is something to repeat, and small peals of joy when the recognize the musical from which it comes! That is a home culture I could dance to all day! I will take full blame if my kids turn out some weirdos who have no idea what music their friends are listening to... that's home cultured for you.

stick your nose up at that!

Design flaw of Mortality

I just put down the "Teach Your Child to Read in Just Ten Minutes a Day" after having read a maximum of 40 pages. As is common with me and my 'self-smart' books, I read just about as much new and stimulating information as I can before I feel like I am at capacity. The panicked feeling that if I read any bit more I shall forget everything I have just read sets in and I need to stop to process it all and implement it as well. Hence I am always simultaneously reading educational books because they take me a bit longer to process.

The ironic point of just having put down this particular book today was that I had just finished reading about how young children may need a great deal of time to process what we teach them in the game of deciphering the sound code we call reading. As a mommy-educator I do not allow that justifiable time to process learning. I am too demanding. The book just told me that. Perhaps that is why I needed more time to process it ;). Guilty take the truth to be hard.....to process.

The underlying principle to all learning, I believe, is patience. I wonder how God feels, as a perfect parent, needing to be endlessly patient with the lessons He must give me over and over again, and most frequently on patience itself. Just this morning I was having a muttering discussion with my conscience about the epistle of James chapter 2 discussing faith and works. The basic formula is 'faith without works is dead.' Lately I have been feeling like we have been doing all the work and perhaps today my faith was dwindling. Is that possible? Reverse the equation and you get the negative result? Works without faith is certainly deadening - you can work your self to death for sure. But where is the faith? I concluded, thankfully, through my impatient internal rants that we had felt enough glimmers of a miracle such that we can prove that our faith is founded and our works are good. But oh the dreggery of having to wait.....and continue working....walking one more step in darknes.....wait....hop and have faith......oh yes, and just be patient.

Why is it that we are sent to this finite mortality, a speck of time in the eternities, and we just can't wait for it to be over! I just can't hardly contain my anxiety about a pending move or an indetermined timeline on the adoption. I feel irritated when my child has forgotten in a mere two minutes what I taught them because I need them to be a genius now. And heaven forbid my kids hold off on the pizza for then next five minutes so the cheese doesn't burn their tongues! There is something within this mortal state that drives us forward. Perhaps it is the pending end of mortality and the daily decomposition of our bodies as we get older. It is mysterious and maddening. Somehow, we all feel impatient towards something, or about something or at something....who knew that impatient could even compose a prepositional phrase.

If the flaw is mixed in the pudding, is then the purpose to knead it out through mortalities moments of patient consideration? Is that all the more I need to learn to be twinkled into the sparkly heavens? Just be patient. Aw, heck, I can't wait for that to happen! Better get to work.

My scripture Heros

I am really liking this consistent FHE thing! My kids are getting better at singing songs, and faster at learning them. And we are having those loving scripture story moments that kids need and love. Josh was giving the lesson on making good choices (our theme for the month, and hopefully for life!) and used the example of Nephi who always chose to 'Go and DO!" what the Lord commanded.

Josh chose our Danny boy to be Nephi. Here he is, triumphant after listening to the Spirt of God, slaying Laban with his own sword, and acquiring the brass plates :

You can probably guess who Laban was. Danny hasn't quite met the 'large in stature' requirement for a prophet yet, but he has the heart!

Grammatical Assimilation

Most native speakers of any language do not realize how it was that they acquired the skill of speech. We may assume that we learned it in school. That is flawed, for how did we know what we were being taught if we couldn't even understand what they were saying. Unless, or course, you were taught in a school of hieroglyphics.

Most speaking peoples picked up the language through imitation and assimilation. They mimicked the sounds they heard around them (coos and gurgles) and later associated them with objects or concepts. That is some fantastic learning! Particularly because so many languages are so very complex! As a speaking adult you don't think that your particular language is so hard, until you start learning another language.

I remember very distinctly my first attempt and understanding what a 'verb conjugation' was. Freshman year in college. French 101. I was appalled! What an absurd concept, why English didn't have to change the verb up with every pronoun or gender. Ha. I was ignorant of my own language. I sat laboriously and rebelliously fighting against a concept I had gathered into my brain as natural when I was too young to know it. I faked my way through French well enough to fulfill my requirements in my BA requirements to earn a degree in English, but didn't really learn a lick.

It wasn't until I served as a missionary in Brazil for 18 months. There's a language lesson slap in the face. A Latin based language (thank heavens I had at least the introduction with the French stuff) spoken by some particularly sing-songy and fast-spoken people. HUH?!@ Forget that I could barely grasp the idea of changing the syntax and structure of a sentence to communicate, I was certain that the Brazilians weren't breathing, let alone enunciating enough separate words to allow me a moment to compute what was being said. Yet, just as a child learning language through imitation and assimilation. Sink or swim. And I swam, folks!

After a year in Brazil I found myself not only falling into the listless song of a flowing language, I absolutely became interested in what I was speaking. I not only recognized that people were speaking in the future tense, but I wanted to try and do it myself. It was fascinating to organize all the pronouns and verbs and everything else. Then to sing it, to feel it roll around in my mouth and come out correct was beautiful. I fell in love with language.

I was officially geeked out when I continued the last year of my BA studies in English in Hawaii after my time in Brazil. I had a history of the English language class from a professor that was a veritable God of Old English and could speak Beowulf as if it were a lullaby. Spoon the cherry on top of a grammar class full of equally geeked cronies in my department and a Hawaiian/Chinese/American professor who taught impeccable grammar lessons and I was hooked! Yes, of all my texts that I have saved from the college years, I would not give up "How the Irish Saved Civilization" or "American Grammar."

Thus, when I picked up on a learning nuance of my son's own English assimilation journey, I laughed. Danny has not quite mastered possessive pronouns. His default is plural pronouns. The favorite "yours." Regardless of what sentence we may say, when repeated,the pronoun is misplaced with a possessive pronoun. 'That is your coat.' 'That is yours coat." It is a cute nuance, even if I do have an itch to stop it. Heaven knows I won't let my kids get away with a lisp! Perhaps, I can let a few extra S's hang on a bit longer.

In the spirit of recognizing learning blocks or defects - I have been acutely aware of Viv's past tense conjugation of verbs. In most languages, the past tense of a verb is very clear and cut and rule based. Oddly, because American English is such a conglomerate of Germanic, Slavic, and Latin based words all into one language (ultimate melting pot that is continually added to), there is no standardized conjugation for our kids to learn. The almost have to learn by trial and error. The default past tense is adding 'ed.' You can imagine how confusing it would be to figure out why 'hitted' is not appropriated. It is equally annoying to me. I am trying very hard to stop myself from getting frustrated with her, it is just learning, even if it is a bigger thorn in my grammatical side.

Lest we believe that Faith is fully perfect (or me for that matter, I am the queen of malaprops), she has been a bit confused in the prefix and suffix department. My favorite lesson in prefixes this week was with the childhood interchangeability of de-struction, con-struction, and in-struction. The kids were playing pretend. They were sailing on a boat and had a treasure map. Before making any wrong turn I would hear 'Wait, we need to read the destructions!' I corrected them from the kitchen and their boat progressed forward (the boat was the love-seat and Danny was driving, I would say sailing it except for the fact that each time he turned the wheel there was a great screeching and splashing noise that he made to accompany it, which lent itself more to a motor boat, which is, after all, a much more effective way to work piracy) with constant referrals to the 'constructions' until I could stand it no longer. Yes, right in the middle of a treasure hunt we had a grammar lesson. Prefixes are important people! It can mean the difference between exploding something or building it up, not to mention the correct assembling of either! Of course, it dawns on me now, I could have just told the kids to look at the MAP.

p.s in all my zealous corrections of spoken grammar I concede that I very very often do not write correctly on this very blog - ha.....did I not mention I was lazy and hate editing? Hopefully I can compose correctly the first time...or else.

p.p.s On a similarly silly note - the simplest language I have found to learn is Smurf in which when a person is in doubt you can substitute the word 'smurf' for any part of speech. Nice. And yes, we did make up sentences in our 300 level grammar class and diagram them completely using the word smurf. A high class education if you ask me.

Stacking the Cards

I realized recently that our children's memories are significantly skewed by their photo albums. Willing to capitalize on this little niche of a nuance, I decided that from now on I will only record the really awesome things we do as parents. Thus, when the kids look back on their childhood - as written by me - they will have no ammunitions for a therapists couch. Who's to say it isn't true if they can't remember anything different? Is this not the point of family history?

To be fair, I have made it perfectly clear up to this point in my personal histories that I am not completely perfect. Whoops. Well, there has been no evidence to prove that Josh has not been the perfect father. See --

He makes cookies with them on Sunday. Yesterday he took them to Walmart and the park and ran around in circles and over and under every bit of the playground with them. He loves playing with them.

Besides, kids always blame their mother no matter what you do..... ; ).

Financial Ostrich

There are times when I think to myself - have I been doing this


for the past millennium?

It generally hits me when I am reading my self-smart books. Go figure. Thank heavens I am dumb enough to know that I am not completely smart, or smart enough to know that I am dumb. Either way, I's gots a lots to learn!

In all the frugality of my youth I may have misspent my zeal in remaining 'debt free.' I absolutely am glad that I never got a false impression at a impressionable young age that money was effortless to acquire and illusive to pay back. Yet, I did miss something.

I very distinctly remember one of the first financial discussions I had with my budding fiancee. I knew he was financing his college education with student loans, yet I about hit the floor when I heard that he had voluntarily taken out a personal loan from a credit union at the very young age of 18 (maybe it was younger, I may have to check my facts with Josh) so that he could build his credit score even while serving a mission. You WHAT?! And what was the loan for and for what amount. Oh the money was for nothing and the loan piddly. Then WHY?! Oh my naivety!

Josh's second loan, and this was before we even got married, was spent on this beauty:

I know, the stud was so super confident that he bought a station wagon to drive off to college in, and boy was that guy super handy during all the moving years. Back to point: again, I was shocked he had taken out a minimal loan to pay dinky payments on a car he could have bought cash from his grandfather. In fact, when I saw the balance left on the loan when we got married I promptly paid it off.

Sad tale brought to present day; I have spent the last hour looking up information on credit cards with a disgusted further akin to studying for a mid-semester test in a foreign language class. It is all Greek to me! What Josh figured out early, I am just figuring out now - all that mumbo-jumbo about needing a good credit score (good thing I married the guy with the good one right? oh, he comes with even more perks).

Granted, it has been pretty handy in these first few 'scrappy' years of marriage to have a Scrooge cash capitalist at the family financial helm (that's me, well, Josh is more of the Scrooge) so that we have not run ourselves literally into a hole we can't get our head out of. Not to say that the large gap of student loans ahead is not formidable. BUT I will account the timing of my learning of the efficacy of credit cards and credit scores as perfect and enjoy the fact that I am not so dumb anymore. It will be a good while before I talk this language of credit fluently and master the art of automatic transfers and watching more than one statement, online even, from more than one bank. It does feel good to know that as our experience in finances grows so is our knowledge too, and a bit of the desire to figure it all out.

And if you are wondering - the current self-smart financial book that has spurred this all is "The 10 Commandments of Money" by Liz Weston