Cow Fields

We call these the cow fields.  Our favorite place to walk.

A.R.'s graduation

My husband turned to me in church a week ago and said that he couldn't believe how well A.R. turned out.  He is so proud of his son-- Eagle Scout, high honors, kind and talented and funny and good to the other kids.

18 years are between these two brothers.  We don't call them half brothers.  They are just brothers.

Here's A.R., the baby, D.H. and me.

Five years from now, the amount of interest we pay the Chinese will be bigger than the Chinese defense budget

My father sent me this article. Here it is, edited for length:

We Ignore Reality At Our Own Peril

by Stephen Combs in Birmingham, Alabama 

Though he lacks the prominence of Winston Churchill, European Parliament Member (MEP for South East England since 1999) Daniel Hannan is sounding an alarm of Churchillian proportions with his warnings of impending economic collapse in Britain and the U.S. Is anybody listening?
           ...Mr. Hannan is not alone... Informed people who actually study these matters have been warning ... failure to confront uncontrolled government spending will result in destruction of the U.S. dollar and all the collateral damage that goes with it (You know, things like hyperinflation, high interest rates, ruinous economic depression, debt our grandchildren will never be able to repay).


             They have been ignored partly owing to major media's inability to distinguish trivia from substance, their paranoia of Sarah Palin, and their urgent need to prop up the failed presidency and persona of Barack Obama...
             While Rome burns, Nero continues to make one campaign speech after another, because it's really the only skill he has.  
            But the day of reckoning is near. The British pound took a dive Wednesday after Moody's, the credit rating firm, warned that the U.K. may lose its AAA credit rating because of slow economic growth and delays in promised government spending cuts. The announcement follows a similar warning April 18 by Standard and Poor's for the U.S. credit rating.
            "I look at who holds your bonds, and I tremble," Mr. Hannan told Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends Thursday. "Five years from now the amount of interest that you are paying the Chinese will be bigger than the entire Chinese defense budget."
            Holy batfire! Must we repeat this, or could you just go ahead and reread that paragraph?            

      ...[P]eople are just borrowing money and spending it rather than making things..... We need to be, first of all, turning off the printing presses. We need to stop printing money. We need to raise interest rates. And above all we need to cut government spending."  -- Combs, The Friday Letter

Who feeds Haggis to a nine-month-old?

Who feeds Haggis to a nine-month-old?

We went to the Scottish Festival at Thanksgiving Point this weekend and my brother had an idea:  let the baby eat haggis.  HAGGIS???!* 




Oh yes, indeed.

I served an 18 month mission in bonnie Scotland twenty years ago, but the family had never eaten haggis.  (For some reason, it never made the menu rotations at our house.)

Well, the only one who loved the haggis this weekend,  and went back for handful after handful was the baby.  


This was the first time he'd had any meat at all.  Nine months old, eating haggis.  I was a little nervous, but he did not get any digestion problems the next day.

C.E. and A.J. liked the fish and chips better than the haggis.

 

Bagpipes-- the best Scottish export.



The baby loved the bagpipes, too.

Here they are, listening to the bagpipes at very great volume.

The baby and his uncle





The baby and his father

HAGGIS!



Yum, Yum --More haggis, please!



(*It's cooked inside a sheep's stomach!  Haggis --a Scottish national dish containing sheep's guts, onions, oatmeal, barley, suet, spices and salt, simmered in the stomach of a sheep for three hours and served either in the stomach or in a casing that will look like one.)

Astrid och Agnetha

http://www.agnethaarchives.com/articles/ANonsmokingGeneration.htm

   I thought this was fun to read:  an article (in English, not Swedish!) where both Astrid Lindgren, one of the best writers of children's literature, and Agnetha Faltskog, one of the singers in ABBA, were interviewed about their lives and about why they felt young people should not begin to smoke.    

http://www.agnethaarchives.com/articles/ANonsmokingGeneration.htm

Can anyone be a great writer and also be a great mother?

Flannery O'Connor never married.  Neither did Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, or Willa Cather.  J.K. Rowling was a parent, but single, when she wrote "Harry Potter".  Katherine Anne Porter married, divorced, remarried another, but never had children.  Zora Neale Hurston was only married for a few months, and never had children.

I am sure there's someone out there who has made a great research project out of my question.  But I haven't stumbled into the book that answers this question, (and I don't like Virginia Woolf) so I'll still ask it:

Is it impossible to be a great mother and a great writer?  Does great passion for one of the two sap and subsume the other, rendering it weak and dysfunctional?

I say this because my personal favorite great writers are either 1) men, or  2) single women.  The successful, married-mother writers I know of aren't any good (in my admittedly snobbish opinion.  For what I consider a poor example, mother and wife Stephanie Meyer, the "Twilight" lady, has great story ideas but such hard-to-stand, cliched, lifeless writing.)

With three children of my own plus two step-children, I almost never write.  I have the rare commodity of a kind, faithful, handsome, doting and adored husband.  And while nursing a 9-month-old, listening to a the non-stop narrating, track-meet-and-scouting 3rd grader; keeping up with a swim-team-and-cross-country running ninth grader, and enjoying the two stepkids who spend summers here, there isn't much time to read or write.  But I do jealously carve out a little time.

And I would not, not, for millions and billions of dollars or for masterpieces with my byline, ever trade my wonderful life as a mother, and all these smiles and noises and laughs and hugs and joys, not for any glorious writing life. 

But I would love to be able to do both!

If only I could cut out sleeping.  Or sweeping under the kitchen table.

Sometimes I wistfully think about my acceptance, two years ago, to the University of Utah's Ph.D program, where I would have continued my Master's Degree's work on ethnographic literary journalism. (When I found out I was pregnant, I declined that Ph.D opportunity.)  I would have liked to have done both, but it would never have worked, not in my heart nor in my schedule.  I sometimes take out my thesis and read some of it. 

So.  Here's my question for the day:  Is there hope?  If we writer-mothers keep reading and studying and writing in small tidbits, as well as we can, on our own, still putting our family first, yet rarely actually writing at all, will we still one day have the richness, knowledge and articulation to write great books? 

I hope so.  I hope mothers can begin with great motherhood and then, when we smaller mountains of laundry to fold and fewer meals to cook and carpools to taxi, then we'll also find great writerhood.

If not, it will surely happen in heaven.

Heaven is now

Better than a byline

Me and my smallest masterpiece

School's Out For The Summer!

Yesterday I couldn't find my camera, when A.J., Baby H. and I went to the aquarium.  But I took mental pictures:

• The baby's happy fascination, once we took him out of the stroller, with moon jellies, penguins, coral, sharks, seahorses and fish that were right in his face on the other side of the glass.
• A.J. working up the courage to touch the stingrays in the petting-pool.
• The baby's bare feet in the petting-pool
• A.J. working up the courage to touch the electric eel - mimicking buttons
• The baby's interest in all the bird sounds; when you pushed buttons you heard different Utah bird calls.
• A.J. not being able to decide between two tiny toys at the aquarium gift shop because both of them were telling him with their big eyes, he said, "pick me, pick me".
• Going grocery shopping with a tired, cranky baby:  A.J. raced with him in the shopping cart and fed him pieces of animal crackers to keep him from screeching
• Telling A.J. stories as he lay in bed in the dark, after prayers.  And him telling me that that story was dumb and creepy; tell me another.  Next morning, he showed me he'd illustrated my story, with a 6 page book, (not the creepy and dumb one; the other story). 

Today, I found the camera.  So this is what we did:

Nine month old toes



A.J. contemplates his path



The baby slept for most of the hike in this position





Baby's first meeting with a horse

 



I wish I could record the way the water sounded.

 



Sprimmer - half spring, half summer

 



More gorgeous sprimmertime scenery





As green as Scotland



This isn't a more loving and caring child anywhere





Today, at nine months old, Baby H. did his first crawl.  It was in pursuit of a cell phone with ring tones going off.





My dear friend, her little dandilion-blowing girl, and A.J.



A.J.