Sunday, May 28, 2006

My Life Monday - Week 4


My Life Monday - Week 4- In Memory of . . .

Soldiers, Good People, Freedom, Gratitude. What can I say about Memorial Day? While I have never had anyone I know personally die in a war or go to war, I am so grateful for the freedom that I have because someone did something to combat evil. We can wish oppression away, we can hope for a utopian society, we can try to keep our noses out of other countries and their business and turn our backs on each other, we can pray that evil people will change their wicked ways but will that happen? I hope someday it will. The world truly is filled with good people who have sacrificed so much for the better good. People who have tried to be a voice for others who do not have one. Do I always agree with the way things are done, no? Do I have a right in my country to make changes or protest about those things, yes? In the days to come, I know that great sacrifices will be made by many for my benefit and by people I do not even know and they will make those sacrifices for someone that they have never met. For that, I am truly grateful.

I am so glad that I was born in a country where I can express my opinions, where I can make something of myself, where my children can grow in safety without an emanate threat on their lives. Yes, bad things still happen here. Americans are not immune to bad things happening to them. My husband lived in a third world country for two years. I will tell you now that I would rather have our problems here in America than where he was.

This post though is not exclusively about Americans, but it is about people that have worked throughout time in all parts of the world for the better good of others. We could all sit and argue until we are blue in the face about what exactly that means because one persons good is not necessarily another's but most of us really do know what is right and what is wrong. I hope that makes some sense.

What I am trying to get to is this. Whether we believe in war as a means to an end or that using peaceful methods will bring about the desired results or a combination of both, I just wanted to say that I feel so much respect for those who put themselves on the line for me. In some small measure, I hope that I can do the same. So, while we are enjoying our freedoms today and our wonderful families and that yummy hamburger or veggie burger or hot dog or whatever your pleasure is, please remember those who have died before us, who have given something of themselves for a cause that they believed in whether that was fighting in the trenches of their own communities or in the trenches of the battlefield.

I found this quote by our church president, Gordon B. Hinckley, in an article from the March 1971, Ensign:

As we contemplate the human misery created by war, we need to recall our debt to those who have sacrificed so much for human liberty.

War means so much more to me than WWII or the Vietnam Conflict or our presence in Iraq. I want to remember the soldiers and I do, but I want to remember those people who have fought so hard in so many ways throughout the world to help others. Take a moment to think of them. Think of the men or women who have sacrificed some of their lives to make ours better throughout the world.

Frozen

It is so blasted cold here right now. My arse is freezing.:) This is what I get for living in the place that I do. It was 90 degrees on Friday. Right now, I have a long sleeve shirt on! My nose is cold. My heater may even get turned on. The high is supposed to be something like 56, I think. It is so weird. I feel sorry for the campers around here trying to enjoy Memorial Day weekend and I am sure are freezing up in the mountains. Well, I am going to enjoy it because the temperature will rise here soon and I will be complaining about the heat I am sure. I will be back for My Life Monday tomorrow. I also have to share that I have the house all to myself. All.To.Myself. Oh, the joy. I would not want it like this forever, but I am relishing the peace and quiet. Hope you are all having a wonderful Sunday.:)

Monday, May 22, 2006

My Life Monday - Week 3 and Then Some!

Week 3 - My parents named me _____ (Carrie) because . . .

I am named after an aunt. A great aunt, I think, on my maternal grandfather's side. There is only one picture I have ever even seen of her and she looked like a very nice lady. I really should learn more about her, but I am a sad excuse for a geneologist or family historian. I am working on it though. In all my life, I have only come across one other person with the same spelling of my name and she was a good friend of mine growing up. Usually, it is spelled Kerri or Keri or Karrie or some version starting with the letter K. My parents wanted to use the name name Cassie Louise if they ever had a girl, but my Dad's nephew named his daughter Cassie a year before I was born and so I am Carrie Louise instead. I have always liked my name and have never really wanted another name. I had friends who always wanted to change their names to something exotic or mysterious or just plain weird instead of the typical names we got in the 70s like these*. In my opinion, these are good solid names. Not that I do not find some of the names out there now really cool, but I like your average Joe names, too. My name is #55 on the list for that year in popularity and with the same spelling to boot, which is weird because like I said, I hardly ever come across that spelling when I run into a Carrie or a Kerri or a Keri or well . . . you get my drift. Well, that is it. The story of my name.

In weekend randomness -

1. We were sloths. Yes, sloths. I did get some things done like play with my children but most of the weekend was pure slothfullness.
2. Saturday we went for a drive up the canyon and ate copious amounts of way over priced Mexican food, which was good but they sure have raised their prices and I can go to another place down here in the valley and get food that tastes just as good for half the price.
3. We also drove to a park in the same city to let the kids play where I talked my hubby into staying away from the nearby Granny's Drive In to share a couple of small shakes between us all to settle that Mexican food. In times past, we may have but I could not justify it since we couldn't even finish the Mexican food we had bought because it was just way too much food. for any of you who know what Granny's is, it is no longer closed as stated in the above link. I am not as big of a fan as the hubs because I like hard pack ice cream shakes better and love BYU Creamery shakes 10 times more, but the house was built by his great-great grandfather or something, so we like to go for the novelty of saying when we go to Granny's, we are really at Granny's. The kids think this is hysterical. Okay, whatever makes them happy.:)
4. Saturday night I made whole wheat bread with raisins, sunflower seeds, walnuts. Oh my, it is so good. My hubby also made banana bread on Sunday morning for all of the families that he home teaches and the kids. Can we say glycemic coma? By the way, my total weight loss for the past two months is 20-25 pounds. Yippee. I do let myself go a little overboard on occasion and that is why I am hitting the gym again tonight. Was it worth? Yeah, baby.
5. I missed church on Sunday. My eye was still crusty and I was tired and not feeling well and I work in the nursery where I am sure all the parents would appreciate me giving their kids pink eye and I had stayed up late watching an Andy Griffin marathon and . . . well, just strike me with lightening, I stayed home from church.
6. I spent some of my time Sunday doing a movie marathon by watching Anne of Green Gables with my daughter. What is it with that movie? I cried about 15-20 times yesterday while we were watching it. It must be close to that time of the month or something or it is just a freakin good movie.
7. Sunday, we needed to get out of the house and we tried to feed ducks that were not interested and were mostly gone. There is a great duck pond that I used to frequent and haven't been to in a while and I had a bunch of stale bread, but there were not nearly as many ducks as usual and the ones that were there were probably overfed.
8. Can you believe that this . . . ?Could cause this . . . . I am the meanest mommy in the world because I will not let him destroy some other child's toy. My goodness, what has the world come to?8. So basically, I ate too much, did not do many chores around the house, ditched church (which really I hardly ever do), played with the kids, and laid like a sloth in front of the television watching one of the best movies ever. Productive, no? Fun, yes?

*I could not get the link to work directly to the page with the most popular names for 1971, but if you scroll down you can put in the year you were born and it will give you anywhere from the top 20 names for the year you want up to the top 1000.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

$$$$

I am so glad I have insurance and very grateful, but this little bottle of medicine was still 35 dollars. How is that possible? The pharmacist made sure to tell me that my insurance brought the price down from around 65-70 dollars. I think she was trying to make sure that I did not have a heart attack on the spot! Pink eye is my disease of the day now and I need the antibiotic drops. Okay, enough of a vent but I feel like I am getting gouged right and left. I might as well just take a match and light my money on fire as fast as we are burning through it this month. We are not destitute or anything, but gee I feel like it is flying out the window faster than we can make it right now. I promise, no more rants!:)

Monday, May 15, 2006

My Life Monday - Week 2

The question this week is - Week 2 - The story of my spouse.

Man, my story is so boooorrrring. It's a typical Mormony way of meeting. Can you guess? I bet some of you can! We met at a drum roll please - singles ward! At the time, I did not know that a lot of Mormons met at singles wards like we did. I really didn't know what a singles ward was. My time with Mormons had been short. At the time, I was a new member of about seven months and had been converted to the church back in the Peekskill, NY Area. There was no singles ward back in the area that I was in at the time, so when I got back to Seattle and I was trying to figure out what ward I needed to go to one of the bishops directed me to the singles ward.

Lets start from the beginning though. In the early summer of 1991, I had just gotten back from living in New York for about a year and a half. It was a riot. I loved it and it was one of the best experiences of my life. To make a long story short, I had gone there to be a nanny for a family from India and then stopped doing that and started working as a bill collector/secretary/physical therapy aide for a small physical therapy/spine clinic office. I still lived with this family and rented a room from them and they hired a new nanny and she was LDS and that is how I ended up being introduced to the church and joining.

Right before I got back, I had been going through some struggles on whether I wanted to stay and settle down in that area or go back to Seattle because I really liked it and I had friends and a good support system in place, but I did miss my family and the Seattle Area a lot. Anyways . . . one of my friends suggested that I get a blessing from his dad. For people in our church, you can ask a priesthood holder for a blessing for guidance, for illness, etc. Well, as soon as he was done with the blessing, I knew that I needed to go back to Seattle. It just felt like the right thing to do.

When I got back home, I started going to the singles ward in my area and started going to activities and met my husband Jon. We were at a dance and he asked me if I liked fish and if I had ever gone to Spud's and wanted to go with him and a couple of his friends. Another interesting fact is that Jon and I went to all the same schools until high school and grew up a few minutes from each other, but our paths never crossed. His sister and my sister, from what I remember them saying, rode the same bus to school. We just never met.

At that time and in the way he asked me though, I was not really sure if he was asking me on a date or not or just to come as a buddy. I was clueless. Well, he picked me up and his friends were not with him and he said that they couldn't make it. Likely story. We still debate about this one. Was he just trying to lure me into his trap, which I thought was a safe bet because there would be another couple with us on our date or not? This question has never been truly answered.

On our first date, we went to play miniature golf, ate at Spud's, and we went for a walk on the beach and he sang. That was it, I was sunk. Before I tell you the next part, which is corny and probably cliche Mormony stuff again, I have to tell you that I had no designs on getting married. I am a very non-romantic person. My husband is far more romantic than I and I have come to relish his corniness. I am a very realistic, non-fluffy kind of girl. I always felt that my feet were planted firmly on solid ground and no one was going to sweep me off my feet. I did not want to even get married until I was 30 or 35 or maybe never. I would also like to add that my husband had gotten out of a relationship and broken off an engagement with a girl that he had grown up with a few months before I came home and had no plans to be engaged/married anytime soon.

On our second date, we went to his uncle's house in Yakima with his sister and brother. When you go to Yakima, you drive by the Seattle temple. Anyways, on the way back, I looked up and saw the temple and I had the strongest impression that Jon was the man that I was going to marry. In all the time since then, I have never had an impression that strong. Yes, I have had impressions about things but NEVER that strong. It was a very different experience for me. God needed to get his point across to me and it took a sledgehammer for him to do it.

Well, two weeks after this, we were at his parents house and he asked me (please don't think less of him) hypothetically, if I were to ask you to marry me, what would you say? Okay, how lame is that proposal but I said yes. We were only engaged for about five months. I had wanted to set the date for my grandparents anniversary which is April 2nd and then we moved it up a few months and a couple more months until we settled on December 18, 1992. He did surprise me later that summer and asked me to marry him at a beach in Oregon with my ring that I did not know he had yet.

I never would have thought that I would get engaged to someone two weeks after meeting them and married five months later. This December, we will have been married 14 years and I have never regretted my decision for one moment. We have had good times and bad, but I knew he was the one for me and I am glad he is my partner. My life has been better than I ever expected and we have three fantastic kids to show for it and I am looking forward to growing old with him. He truly is my best friend.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow.

Hopefully, this parting will only be temporary. No, I am not going anywhere and will still be bloggin away. Hopefully, it is good news that I will still be blogging.:) Because of the high gas prices, I must let my big mommymobile sit only to be used on family outings when we all need to fit in a car together. It, I swear, is probably causing a gas shortage. I wish those prices would go down, but it costs me 50 dollars a week to fill it and I use the entire stinkin tank. Preschool three times a week, several trips to Walmart, trips to the gym, just running around doing errands uses every last drop. This sucks. My van can carry all that I need. I feel safe in it. It is filled with strollers and snacks and swim gear and toys and kids. Now, I must switch to our little more economical car because it will fit me and the kids for our errands and running around. I had to do this once before but then gas went down for a bit and now it is back up and it sucks. Okay, enough of the rant. Can somebody bring those prices down please?

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Hair!

Got my hair chopped off for summer. I have not had my hair this short in about 14 years. I love it. So easy! Have a super day everyone.:)

Monday, May 08, 2006

My Life Monday!

Rachelle has started a new weekly topic. It is called My Life Monday. This is way cool. For this week, the question is my most memorable childhood experience. This was tough. I have a lot. My childhood was not always ideal. I can't say that there weren't good times, but the bad times far outweighed the good. I have a wonderful father and a mother who is also wonderful when she is not sick. It has been a struggle with her and her inabilities to cope with life. There was a lot of abuse that I will not get into but as I was thinking about this question, one person kept popping into my mind and that was my maternal grandmother. I have wonderful memories of times with my parents when things were well, but the best memories that I have stem from my time with my grandmother.

I know we were supposed to focus on one event or time, but I have a vast amount of memories of her that make up some of the best times in my life. She was not a perfect woman, as none of us are, but she was a wonderful grandmother. In October 1990, she passed away and I still think about her. Sometimes, I still wish I could just call and talk to her on the phone. I get glimpses of her in my children and I remember all of the things that she was about. Here are few things that I remember about my grandmother. She really did help make my childhood a little more bearable and at the time, I probably didn't appreciate that fact as much as I do now.

1. Hugs and kisses.
2. Homemade birthday cakes.
3. Summer and spring breaks going to Ocean Shores or occasionally Lincoln City or Cannon Beach with her friends and their grandchildren.
4. Violets in her backyard that she brought from the farm that she grew up on in Yelm, Washington.
5. Blueberry picking.
6. Bowling and swimming at the Elks Lodge.
7. Wonderful homemade stylin suits that she made on her old Singer sewing machine. They were stylin at the time anyway. She was a very good seamstress. I still have that sewing machine and while I no longer use it, I could never part with it.
8. A round blue cookie jar filled with cookies.
9. Staying at her house and being woken up by her and she would always walk in and say, "Wake up merry sunshine." When it was both my sister and I, it was "Wake up merry sunshines." Now, I love that memory. I didn't love it so much when I was a teenager.
10. Sitting and talking in her backyard, which was gorgeous and just enjoying the company of family.
11. Blackberry picking.
12. Homemade applesauce and jam.
13. Fighting over watching Lawrence Welk or The Wonderful World of Disney on the Sundays that we were at her house. Maybe not so much fighting as debating.
14. Wonderful home grown tomatoes and a fried steak.
15. The smell of her Estee Lauder powder. The day after she died I was at the store and a woman behind me had this on. I half expected to turn around and see my grandmother standing there.
16. Playing for hours in her basement on a rainy day.
17. Long walks along the water or around her neighborhood.
18. I loved that she always took my sister and I out with her "friends."
19.Trips to Never Never Land. Yes, really Never Never Land. This was a cool park.
20. Her laughter.
21. Trips to Knapp's Restaurant for an awesome hamburger and good conversation.
22. Going to the Puyallup Fair with her.
23. Christmas at her house with all the trimmings and her tiny little tree. One year, she decided to buy a fake tree and thought that it was going to be the size of a regular tree and it ended up being like two feet tall. She thought it was cute and kept it. So, she had this dinky little fake tree for years that was almost buried by presents.
24. Train trips to Portland, Oregon to see family and for the fun of riding a train. My grandpa work for the Great Northern Railroad for years.
25. I loved how she told me about her life and the things that she did and how she grew up on a farm and about her life with her brothers and sisters.
26. She always seemed to have time for me.
27. Candy stashes at her house that she never cared about me or my sister getting into. Yes, Grandmas are sweet and about the treats sometimes.
28. White pillowcases or doilies that she embroidered with flowers. I loved watching her do that. I still have some of those.
29. I loved hearing about her trips with my grandpa around the world. They went to Mexico, Africa, Europe, Hawaii, etc.

There are so many things that I could say about my grandmother. This small list seems an inadequate tribute to the person that I knew. I know it would give her the biggest thrill to hear me say that she was/is my most memorable childhood experience. She always took time for me and talked with me and gave me some of the best experiences that I had as a child. There is so much that I would love to say to her now. I wish I had spent more time with her when I was older but when we are young adults, we really don't realize how life is and that people really do die and leave, but I know I will see her again someday and we will create new memories together. Hey, can you dig the stylin clothes that we wore!

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Sunday Thoughts

Sundays, in the church that I belong to, I spend my time in the nursery with the 18-month to 3-year-olds. This is after our regular meeting where we all congregate together and have talks and take the Sacrament, etc. Some Sundays just seem like a battle. In the LDS church, we have callings and are asked to serve in various capacities and this changes periodically. Through this, I have learned so much. I have worked with children, young adults, teens, adults, etc.

I love church. Going gives me peace and strength and a knowledge that there is something greater at the helm of my life than myself and that there is something bigger that I can count on always and forever.

Since I have three children, Sacrament meeting can be interesting to say the least. The younger two really do not understand the need for sitting for an hour and listening to people talk and give prayers especially when the sun is out and there are toys at home. They were not listening and being extra challenging today. Not in the best of moods, if you get drift.

I was noticing the same problems with the nursery age kids as we were trying to get them to listen to the short lesson that we have for them on Sundays. Today was about the creation. Me and the other people in the nursery were trying to get the children to sit still on their carpet squares, to stop running around, to stop doing other things and listen a bit. It was quite chaotic. In my mind, this seemed like a fruitless attempt to teach them something spiritual. During Sacrament meeting, I spent more time trying to get my four-year-old to sit still than I really got out of the meeting and nursery was no better.

As I was thinking about all this in the nursery, I remembered a conversation my husband had a year or two ago in another nursery in another ward with a man that was working in there. They were having the same problem at the time and this man said, "Is teaching them a lesson really worth it?" He also said to my husband that it just doesn't seem like they are really getting anything out of it.

My husband then asked him this question, "When did you first realize that Jesus loved you?" This man's reply was, "Well, I have always known that." My husband said, "Whether we think they are getting anything out of it or not, they really are." The children really are learning. They are learning things that they will carry with them forever through good and bad times. That man had learned in his youth a valuable lesson because of diligent teachers and parents. Whether we think are children are listening or not, they really are. It is worth the effort, the struggles, and the challenges to teach them about good things.

Children are such a blessing. I am glad that I can give them a gift like this and that when things are hard they will always remember that Jesus loves them and God loves them. The hard things in life are so worth the effort. It is a privledge to teach little children about the good things in life and how to strive to be a good person and to give them skills to cope with an ever changing world.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Backwardness

I think my kids have things backwards. This is my assumption anyways.

When my little almost 2-year-old boy is doing something he isn't supposed I will ask him if he wants to end up standing in the corner and he always shakes his head yes and goes over and stands in the corner. He actually seems to like it. I guess this form of punishment is out for him.

My 4-year-old in the heat of a debate with me over whatever is causing her to have a debate with me (she debates everything and is extremely opinionated) will shout, "I.Am.So.Grounded!"

It seems to me that they are doing all the work for me, wouldn't you think?