Just how my week's gone...

Well, it’s been a busy week. J. is suffering with his leg, school, work, etc. E. has gotten sick, gone hiking and studying little teeny organisms in the water under a microscope, getting stung by a bee and a wasp and falling and scraping her leg. She changed jobs back to the restaurant. Both she and J appear to be co-dependents of the owner. On top of it all, she got her hair cut. It is really cute, but it is short. I think it’s the first time she has short hair by choice, and so it’s different for her. G and C are settling in well at the new school and work on the outside is moving along. D&D are busy and doing well in their class, amusing their teacher. One day they got too out of control fighting each other or something. So they got pulled outside and the teacher said, “Do you know why you are here?” One responded, “Because our mommy brought us to school!” D1 has made friends with some roly-poly bugs who are guests in his room. He talks to them like you talk to a dog or cat. Both those boys are the crocodile hunters of the insect world.
I’m just trying to survive and take care of the piles of files in my room. I managed to actually move one file box across the floor and look for a paper I needed, then it stayed there till D1 ran into it and hurt himself and I had to move it back to the spot it was at before. It looks like I will be going to an interpreter conference in Las Vegas the weekend of the 20th to get my continuing education hours in.
So I went to the dentist, but I didn’t get to sleep because it was a check-up and the hygienist was entertaining me with stories about her kids. That was as fun as sleeping, and my teeth feel so much better without all that tartar and stuff. I also read about sleep in the Reader’s Digest and saw a picture of a guy who tied enough helium balloons to his lawn chair to fly something like 9 miles through the air. So fun. Hopefully I will get to push a slinky down the Tikal ruins in Guatemala someday too. :)

The night before my birthday I was up late trying to find a shoe for a twin. I wish someone would start selling them in 3’s or 4’s. Is it just me or does anyone else have the lost shoe blues? They have two left Elmo sandals, no rights. And keeping track of 4 tennis shoes is so very hard. I might actually have to pull the weeds out of the garden that are supposed to just disappear under that 4 letter word that starts with S that we keep having sightings of this fall. I cannot tell how many times I have almost had to go out in slippers or two shoes that don’t match thanks to my kids’ playing with them. My new sandals lost each other till fall so I didn’t get to actually wear them really. One year a shoe disappeared one fall only to appear under the living room window in the flower bed next spring when the snow thawed. D&D have actually swapped one shoe with each other to wear mix and match, or if their favorite pair has lost one, they just mix with another pair. Right now they only have the sandals and the tennies and I can’t seem to bear to let them mix them. I’m not sure why open and closed shoes can’t mate, but I guess I’m just old fashioned. Eventually the missing shoe turned up, but it’s gone again now. In any case, I got to bed only to be woken up in the wee hours of the a.m. by a barfing child. Then when I got back to my bed, 2 little people had taken over my place. (sigh). The next day I realized that one switched beds because he got his own wet. More fun for me. I got everyone off to school and worked in the a.m. and then I met with the Blogging Babes for lunch. It was fun. I haven’t had a chance to sit with a bunch of ladies in a long time and they are a group of great and interesting people. I was so excited I won the basket with the chocolate and Candace Salima’s books. I love bittersweet chocolate and drinking the Xoçai is way better than drinking Glucosamine with Chondroitin. I’d like to thank Candace for getting us all together. Then it was off to get the kids, then off to speech, then back to get visit taught, and my VT brought me a cake, which we loved and then I finally got the chance to notice that I got a gift from the Relief Society presidency and from my husband, a wheeled portfolio that holds a laptop and other files together. Cool! My kids meanwhile were rearranging furniture and breaking windows. I gave up on getting a real meal together and just let everyone make kid foods like macaroni and hot dogs. The bishop came by with a birthday card too and then it was time to get everyone to bed again and start the whole shoe routine, which is where we loop back around to the beginning of those 24 hours and start all over again. Yesterday J. took me to Outback and I still have leftovers to eat now.
(AND NOW A REAL UTAH MORMON MOMENT:)
While conference is going on, I’m trying to organize my room and hope against hope something miraculous will happen to the files. The weather isn’t helping my kids go out to play and stay out of my hair, so it’s sort of one of those days where you want to kill the kids so you can hear the talks about how to love the kids and raise them in loveJ. However, it is way easier to hear than Sacrament meeting where they are forced to sit right next to me. At least I can tell you what the talks were about, and thanks to the internet in a day or two I can just go to lds.org and relive the whole experience in just about any language imaginable. So cool. I have to say I think Brother Eyring will be a great counselor. I heard part of a news conference afterwards on the BYU channel and someone said people were out blogging about the new apostle E. Cook being called, because he’s another born in Utah guy. I don’t know him that well, but Brother Eyring assured the press that not to offend anyone but he never thought of Brother Cook as a Utahn. It was something he got over young in life, he went on to become a Californian. Ha! I rest my case. I’ve been sort of bummed that I haven’t had an overwhelming response by people wanting to join :

UTAHNS ANONYMOUS.

(See my very first blog post.) I suppose a lot of people of course don’t actually even live in Utah so they are excused. Of the people who are, a big percentage are born and raised here so what in the heck else could they be? If they weren’t Utahns, the rest of us wouldn’t have anything to avoid being. But where are all the transplants? Were you all just Utahns somehow born out of your element, or have you become closet Utahns who are living in denial and can’t even admit to yourselves what you have become? Or maybe you are just stronger than me and are entirely untainted by the environment in which you live. I would really like to know. These meetings with myself are getting lonely. Yes, this is an overt invitation to you to join, please sign up via comments or e-mail.
Actually, I have a theory about why international people are not being called much to apostleship and it is simply because they are so desperately needed where they are being called to serve in the Seventy callings, out in the world. The growth is so very fast and crazy out in many of these places and more stability is needed there, up close and personal. Whatever the reason, I figure God knows what he is doing, or at least what his kids are up to, and I trust him to handle it just fine :)
And last of all, I have to tell my funny Henry B. Eyring story. When I was a teenager I had a bizarre dream that the second coming of Christ had already happened and I was in a room and someone was telling me that I wasn’t married yet, but I could of course make it into the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom anyways, because they were setting all us single people up with spouses, and they presented to me my spouse who looked a whole awful lot like Bro. Eyring. I said, “I’m sure he’s nice, but don’t you have someone closer to my own age?” When he was called later on to the General Sunday School I recognized him. What a hoot! We actually learned about him in a religion class and he is pretty cool. Gotta go, conference is back on!

UTAHNS ANONYMOUS

Hi, I'm Shellie, and I'm a....I'm a (sob!) Oh my Heck! I'M A UTAHN!! There, I said it! I shall face the truth and swallow my pride. I thought I could be IN Utah but not OF Utah. Pride comes before the fall. No offense to all you other Utahns. After all, you were born here, and it's the natural thing for you to be. For all the quirks, I love you guys so don’t send me hate mail!!!

When I moved here in late 1979, I went into culture shock. Being from the state of "Gypsy"(Thank you IBM for employing my father), I was used to _____________________________________(Any of the 49 states that don’t start with U).
Probably a big part of the shock was that being an idealistic (How old was I in 1979?)1 year old at the time, I expected the kids at my new high school to conform to my idea of what a school full of fellow believers of the dominant religion of the area would be like. Of course I’m generalizing, but there were a lot of Sadducee and Pharisee attitudes around. And how would you say narrow minded in politically correct? Their limited exposure to other ideologies, geologies, and lifestyles made their thinking patterns somewhat nearsighted. Then there was the fashion issue. Apparently, not much had happened on that scene since Brigham Young. This designer named Jessica Mc Clintoc (sp?) was making a killing on these guys by designing revamped pioneer clothes. I walk in with my long straight, sun-streaked California hair and tight ditto jeans, seam running up my leg, around my derriere and down the other leg, and jaws dropped. My toes were going through their own culture shock as flip-flops met snow. O.K., we adjust our attire a little. But the frame of mind bewildered me. I stood in line waiting to graduate with one married girl, one engaged girl, one about to be engaged girl and they are all reassuring me that I would be engaged by the end of the summer! Over my dead body! What were they THINKING? I was just about to start living. Not that we die when we get married, but we ought to at least figure out who we are before we attach someone else to our hip, get a little experience under our belts. Apparently, you are not a whole person though until you get married. But wait, then you’re not really whole till you have a houseful of children. I just didn’t get it. SO, the next day I moved out of state.

Unfortunately, parents have a way of getting their kids to live near them, so I kept finding myself back in Utah. I escaped to Arizona, I escaped to Chile, I escaped to Montreal. Then I got caught. I got married. In Utah. Then we were too poor to escape. But we were by no means Utahns. We just lived here. We waited 2.5 years to have a child. We only had one child for 7 more years. I was smug. I was sure I wasn’t a Utahn. Then we went from 1 to three children. My husband ran right out and got mini-van. We stopped trying to move away. We got complacent. I should have realized I was a Utahn by then, but I was blind to the fact that this living in Utah thing was getting to be a habit. I’d forgotten I’d swore to never raise my children here.
Two years later, I found myself in the OB’s office, completely in denial, wondering what in the heck was wrong with all these pregnant women holding an almost toddler in one arm while a preschooler trailed behind. Seeing as how I had the common sense to leave my 2 and 3 year olds at home, I could forget about that little detail as I sat as alone as a first –time mother. Then I had twins. Now people were asking me how I managed and telling me how brave I was. What a dizzying turn of events. Our mini-van was full. Any more slip-ups and we’d have to move on to a hefty van. I kept catching my firstborn talking about getting the “mell” out of the mailbox and so and so “sluffing” school. We started speech therapy. And then I made the most horrible realization. I might have lived in 8 other places in my life, but over half my life had now been spent in Utah. Not only that, but I would actually miss it if I moved away. (sniff!) BUT I’D GET OVER IT!!!! Which part of the 12 steps am I on?