Curly Fives

Here's Zoë first thing in the morning on Sunday, just after taking out her curlers. She was excited to go to church with curly hair. It was a fast Sunday, which meant it was testimony meeting as well, and yet even with those gloriously sproingy curls Zoë stayed glued to her seat. 

Miriam got up to bear her testimony, though, which made me think back to a story I've never written down because Miriam was so embarrassed about it years ago...but she's mostly finished being embarrassed about it, I think, so I'll share it now. 

When Miriam was about Zoë's age (a little younger, perhaps (we were still living in Spanish Fork)) she asked me to curl her hair for church—on a fast and testimony Sunday! During the testimony meeting she surprised us all by standing up to bear her testimony. She regally skipped down the aisle and bounced up to the podium. With some enthusiastic head bobbing she bore her testimony. Then she skipped back down to sit with the family.

Later, around the dinner table, Miriam was talking about what she'd learned at church and mentioned that she'd particularly enjoyed sacrament meeting, "because everyone got to see my curls when I went up to bear my testimony!" she gushed, bobbing her head a little more to let those curls bounce.

She was just so excited about those curls! Here's Miriam on Christmas Sunday 2019 (at ten years old, the same age Zoë will be in a couple of months!) with curly hair:

Coming back to this Sunday and Phoebe took out her braids for a different kind of curl (we're working on her "gentle" smile):

She wasn't very happy in this picture because she—ugh—wet the bed, so I was deciding whether she needed a full-on bath before heading to church and it just wasn't something I wanted to have to do in the limited time we have to get ready for church in the morning (so I was a bit short with her...but she's smiling her best for this picture).

And here's a lovely drawing she did during sacrament meeting:

She also was whispering to me during the meeting and needed (for some reason) to count to five (she's rather hard to understand when she whispers, so I didn't quite understand why she needed to count to five, only that she was). Rachel and I both thought it was so funny the way she—multiple times!—used her fingers to show that she was counting. 

Here are my hands showing you what she was doing (because she's not very good at recreating moments (in fact she can be downright uncooperative when I ask her to do things for me...weird)):

One...

Two...

So far pretty normal, but now here's three...

Okay, okay, so she's added a little European flair. That's fair. But—hang on!—here's four...

Didn't see that coming, did you? And five, well, was just five...

Whatever works, I guess. I'm not going to dictate how she sticks up those fingers to count. The American way is pretty tricky (you have to admit—and three is, like, the hardest and she's three right now so I don't blame her for leaning on the Europeans for that one...but that four though...I dunno). 

Anyway, we were counting to five today because while I was researching the author of this paper I was using (which I will be citing in a paper I'm writing), I came across an entire book by this author on the exact topic I am writing about. It just came out in December 2024 and I hadn't encountered it in my research before and I was like, "I need to read this book."

Like, I didn't know if I would use the book, necessarily, but I at least needed to read it, right?

So I logged onto UGA's library website. They didn't have it. 

So I checked GSU's library website (because they don't make people sign in to see whether or not they have something, which I appreciate, because I feel like catalogues should be public whether or not a patron can actually check something out, right? I check stuff out from GSU all the time, kind of. Like, when I was doing my master's degree and never went to campus, I would have Andrew check books out for me from GSU because he did go to campus regularly). They didn't have the book.

So I checked BYU's catalogue. Their catalogue is also public. But they didn't have the book. If they had, though, I could have at least had my mom look through it for me. 

Next I checked BYU-Idaho's catalogue. They wanted me to sign in. Blah. But Rachel's a student there so that wasn't a problem. Except that BYU-I didn't have the book either. 

So I went back to UGA and filled out an ILLiad (interlibrary loan) request for the book and resigned myself to...waiting. Blah.

But then I thought to myself, "Hey! We also have a student at ASU! They have a library, too! And I know a scholar at ASU who only recently completed a project on this topic as well, so perhaps their library has a copy of this book."

I checked the catalogue (which is open to the public, thank you very much) and—lo!—they had the book! They had the book-book and the eBook! 

So I had Miriam sign in (she's a dual enrollment student in their universal learner program, which is wonderful, if not a little pricey—she just finished an anatomy there). She borrowed the book for me and...I think it will be very helpful for the literature review I'm currently writing so I was very happy to get my hands on it in a timely manner. ILLiad can take a while.

If you were counting, that was five university libraries I checked. We sure like to spread out our academic affiliations, don't we? (Those tuition dollars have got to be good for something, right?)