A burning in your bottom

There is a scripture in D&C 9:8 that reads, "But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right."

This scripture has popularized the phrase "a burning in [one's] bosom" in church parlance, as being a mode of receiving inspiration from the spirit. I believe I have felt many such promptings in my life—akin to knowing "in your heart of hearts" that something is correct, but more like knowing that your very spirit is receiving affirmation that something is right—but several years ago I attended a youth conference where a friend confided in me that she'd never felt a burning in her bosom—not once!—and she was worried that, perhaps, something was wrong with her.

"You're sure you've never felt the spirit?" I asked her.

"Never!" she said. "Well, maybe. Truthfully, I don't really know what a bosom is!"

We were both sixteen at the time, so I was a little shocked that she didn't realize yet what a bosom was but I figured now was as good a time as any. I put my hand over my heart (and, by extension, my bosom). "Right here, Kristin,"* I said with utmost reverence.

Once again to my shock, Kristin burst out laughing.

"What?" I asked.

"I thought!" she gasped for air between fits of laughter. "I thought...! I thought...! I thought that maybe bosom was...was... was your..."

"What?" I asked, giving into laughter myself.

Around the house

Zoë doesn't particularly enjoy crawling on the hardwood floor so she's now doing the bear walk everywhere she goes. Here she is demonstrating her skill:



She recently stumbled upon an open dishwasher for the very first time and found it quite enjoyable. She's gotten to that age where it's easier for her to be getting into the tupperware while I'm cooking, rather than have her wandering around the house. She doesn't take kindly to being penned up so instead of listening to her scream from her high chair or exersaucer I will sometimes just open the cupboard and let her play. She hasn't figured out how to open cupboards on her own yet, though I'm sure that day is coming.

Speaking of not liking being penned up, I left Zoë crying in her exersaucer today while I was figuring out dinner and the kids were playing hide-and-seek. I knew they'd left marbles out and with their game going on I couldn't be sure which doors were staying open or closed so taking away Zoë's mobility seemed like the safest bet. But then she stopped crying so I peeked out of the kitchen to check on her and she was gone, which explains why she was happy. I went on a little hunt for her and found her exploring the bathroom.

Having older children is great when they're helping but not so great when they're not helping. I explained to Rachel that she was in the exersaucer specifically because I needed her to not be underfoot for a few minutes and to keep her safe while I wasn't supervising her. I told her that if she happened to take the baby from a safe-zone that I put her in—the high chair, the exersaucer, her crib, whatever—then she was accepting the responsibility to watch the baby until I came back for her.

"But she was crying!" Rachel said. "She wanted out!"

"But she can't just wander around the house unsupervised," I pointed out, rehashing the choking hazards and other dangers curious babies find.

"Good point," she conceded.

Rachel's always quick to acknowledge when I make a good point, which is just one of many things that I like about her.

Anyway, it annoys Benjamin to no end when Zoë mucks around with things. He's constantly taking things away from her (collecting choking hazards is his favourite past time) and shutting things (and on the flip side giving her things she shouldn't have and taking her places she shouldn't be).

Here's Zoë in the middle of doing a dishwasher happy dance:

Weekend blogger

I seem to have become a weekend blogger lately and I suppose that's because there's not much to tell. We've been passing around a sickness and have been stuck at home doing not much at all. I'm bored out of my mind but until we stop coughing I don't think we'll be going much of anywhere.

Benjamin and Zoë are keeping me plenty busy at home both day and night. It seems like I go to bed frazzled from the day and wake up in the morning frazzled from the night.

Benjamin's been enjoying Sunbeams. He had a timeout in his classroom during sacrament meeting on Sunday (he was misbehaving, apparently) and he wrote his name on the chalkboard in big letters (once he was out of timeout) for Andrew. BEW.

He's never quite sure when to stop writing up-and-down lines for the N. Sometimes his name turns out BEN. Sometimes BEW. And sometimes BEWWWWWWWW.

Twinners

Last night my friend Laura emailed to ask if Miriam would wear her dress that matches Carolina's. Carolina had been growing and her days of wearing that particular dress were numbered. I responded saying that I would suggest it to Miriam—and that she'd probably take me up on the suggestion since she's wanted to coordinate dress-wearing with Carolina since she first picked up the dress at Trading Tables (about two years ago) and then saw Carolina wear the same dress a few weeks later.

Every time Carolina wore her dress (and Miriam hadn't) Miriam would whisper to me about how cool it would be if she had worn her dress, too. Evidently the same whisperings were going on in Carolina's pew.

So this morning Miriam put on her dress and, lo! Her days of wearing this particular dress are also numbered. It's a good thing we got them coordinated today because I'm not sure either of them will be found in these dresses ever again!

Miriam (6) and Carolina (9)

Miriam's dress doesn't look too short here, but let's just say it was a very good thing she was wearing thick tights! It was fun for the girls to feel special and be all matchy-matchy at least once!

(Also, apparently Carolina's little sister had pink eye last week, so that's apparently making the rounds which might explain Zoë's eyes this morning).

No church for Zoë

Zoë and I are staying home from church this morning, because reasons.

Swinging, swinging, swinging...

We have a swing set in our backyard but the kids still like to walk to the neighbourhood playground to use the swings and slides there. We've had some lovely weather this week so the little ones and I were able to make it to the park a couple of times this week. Here they are swinging, swinging, swinging...

I'm so pumped up

Now that Zoë is mobile—and therefore getting into everything all the time—I've been cutting back on pumping, working my way down to once a day, then once every few days, and now only when I need to. Andrew took in my last donation to the milk bank this week. By my calculations I've donated 4855 ounces to various milk banks (one in Colorado, one here (and a little bit straight to my friend Annie's little boy)).

4855 ounces is equal to approximately...

• 38 gallons
• 143.5 litres
• 135912 grams
• 300 pounds
• and eight months of pumping every morning and night.

In health class (back in high school) my teacher once defined passion as being the first thing you think of doing when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you think of before you fall asleep at night. If that's the case then I've certainly been passionate about pumping the past several months. 

I've pumped at home, in the car, at my mom's house, at my in-law's, at church, at a hotel, and while camping. For the longest time I wasn't able to do anything until I'd pumped in the morning and I wasn't able to fall asleep until I pumped at night—like literally could not—so I'm not sure pumping really falls into the category of passion unless eating and breathing are also included. It was more of a necessity than a passion.

Just yesterday morning I decided I couldn't live one more second without pumping again, so I did. Fifteen ounces later I could put my arms down comfortably. And that was after Zoë had had her fill.

Clearly I'm not free of the pump yet but it's nice to not be so tied down. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my free time now. Oh, wait. Yes, I do. I'll follow this cutie around cleaning up all her little exploration messes...

I've felt at once guilty and liberated by the decision to stop donating milk but, as it says in an article I read about giraffes yesterday, "since milk is costly to produce...a mother is expected to save it for her own offspring." It's time to put my extra milk energy to use elsewhere.

******

Edited to add that I just got my certificate of appreciation from the WakeMed Milk Bank and they say I've donated 4,379 ounces to them, which means I missed something in my records. My total is probably more like 5560 ounces altogether, which is more like 43 gallons (only 5 gallons off...no biggie, right?). 

Worry wart

I've been rehearsing for the stake musical recently and it's been refreshing to do something that's not mothering for a little while. I just finished reading Anne of Ingleside (finally! (after losing my copy multiple times and reading several books in between!)) and I daresay I've been feeling a bit like that Anne lately: tired, washed out, "sick-and-tired of never-ending, monotonous duties . . . "

Last night I left the children (all save Zoë, who still comes with me everywhere because all food is disgusting and bottles are evil and she'll never learn to eat and I'll still be nursing her to sleep when she's in college) at home with Andrew and drove to my friend Marian's house, where she and Laura and I had met to carpool to the stake centre, all three of us leaving our husbands at home with our bunches of children.

We stopped at a traffic light and a man started approaching our car so we quickly locked our doors.

"I just want to ask a question," he called to us.

But the light turned green and off we went. It sounds callous but you can never be too careful.

"You'll have to ask someone else," Marian said. "Perhaps a car not filled with women."

I suppose there are strength in numbers and we could have protected each other, should it have come to that, but still. It was dark and we felt vulnerable.

"So, I kept having these thoughts today," said Laura, a self-proclaimed non-worrier. "Like, imagine if Marian drove us off the road and we all died. Three mothers of young children. All in one ward. How tragic would that be? What would our husbands do? How would the ward even cope with that?"

"And I'm the compassionate service coordinator!" I tacked on.

We had a good laugh about that—who would coordinate the needed service?!

To be fair, I'm co-coordinator, so my co-coordinator would take care of things. Still, it lightened the rather dour mood that had settled on our car after Laura shared her thoughts.

Andrew laughed when I told him about this because I'm always dreaming up worst-case scenarios when he goes out of town (or even sometimes when he's late coming home from school). I'm always like, "Let's take a picture of you with the kids for no reason at all right before you leave." And he's always like, "It's in case I die, isn't it?" And I'm always like, "I have no idea what you're talking about. Okay. Yes. That's the exact reason."

But I'm a self-proclaimed worrier so I expect myself to have thoughts like that. Somehow it's reassuring that a self-proclaimed non-worrier sometimes has the very same thoughts.

Spicy

Andrew's on a quest to perfect basic Mexican recipes—like refried beans and such—because, as he professed the other day, "We're too poor to go out to eat at authentic Mexican restaurants and Mexican food is my favourite!"

"It is?" I asked.

"Well, I forgot about Italian food," he said.

"And pancakes?" I asked.

"Oh, and pancakes."

But Mexican food is a close third. His quest has opened our pantry to many exotic ingredients, which would surely be spurned if I were to bring them home (but apparently if he chooses to bring them home himself they're okay), such as epazote and, most recently, tomatillos. We've probably eaten these things before (tomatillos are the main ingredient in salsa verde, for example, and all my Mexican friends raved on Facebook that you can't cook without epazote). We simply haven't cooked with them. Until now.

On Saturday Andrew used the tomatillos in a dish called chicken tinga.

Yes, he made chicken.

He also made beans, as a backup, in case he, uh, chickened out. And in full disclosure he didn't eat much of the chicken, but I thought it was really good although it was really spicy.

"Taste this," he said. "It's spicy!"

"That is spicy," I gasped.

"Yeah, I can't figure out why," he said, "Except that it said to to put in two to three chipotle peppers and I just dumped the whole can in. It looked like only a couple of peppers were in the can when I opened it, but I think there were about a dozen or so. They just kept plopping out. Do you think that would make that big of a difference?"

Maybe a little bit.

Benjamin and I were the only ones who ate any significant amount of chicken, so there are a lot of leftovers (and I'm the only one eating those, which I don't mind). I wonder if it would have won over a broader audience with a little less spice...

To usher in February on a positive note...

We finally made it to the library this weekend! We dropped books off the first weekend of January before we went up to the mountains and then, for a number of reasons, we hadn't found the time to go back until this Saturday. It's been fine because we have a healthy collection of books in our house so it's not like story time stopped. We've been re-reading books.

Miriam really got into Harry Potter. Rachel read Dune. And between all of us we read dozens and dozens of picture books to Benjamin and Zoë.

Still, it's nice to have something new to read.

One of the books we picked out was Fine As We Are by Algy Craig Hall, a darling story about welcoming new little ones into your family. As a hint, it's based on the feelings the author had when his stint as an only child was forever interrupted by the arrival of quadruplet siblings. But it features frogs. And it's seriously adorable.

It's amazing how welcoming a new baby (or babies) into your life is at once easy and so very difficult. Time passes slowly yet all too fast. They enter the world a perfect stranger but you find yourself loving them more passionately than you ever could have dreamed, and although you justifiably worried about the upheaval this new person would ultimately wreak on your delicately balanced family dynamics, it doesn't take long to feel like they've always belonged right there with you.

And no matter how hard you might wish things didn't have to change or how much you wish things could go back to the way they were before (Benjamin, I'm looking at you), it's soon impossible to imagine life without them and things once again seem...fine the way they are.

This book was so sweet. I highly recommend reading it. Especially, if, let's say, your three-year-old has an open vendetta against your eight-month-old.