Santa, are you there?

K and I have been debating whether or not should teach our kid about Santa. We still have some time to think about it. K is about five months along. We find out the gender this Friday.

Here's a list of pros and cons. So far the cons outweigh.

Pros:
It's fun.

You get to eat cookies on Christmas Eve.

Our kid won't be the jerk kid who tells all the other kids that "Santa ain't real."

You can use him as a boogey-man to scare your kids into being good.

BOO-ze

And the best argument I've heard for Santa:
". . .has belief in Santa Claus ever closed the door to knowledge as loyalty to a scientific credo so often has? Is it better for a child to believe in Santa Claus with the understanding that someday he is going to revise his views than for him to be taught what is scientifically correct . . . from infancy, so that he will never, never have to revise his views on anything and thus go through life always right about everything? Which course is more liable to lead to disaster, the open-ended Santa Claus, or the ingrained illusion of infallibility?" —Hugh Nibley. "Sophic and Mantic," CWHN 10:332
Cons:
When K was a child, she was so grateful for her Christmas presents that she looked up and said, "Santa, wherever you are, THANK YOU!"

Her mother was rather put off. She had stayed up most of the night wrapping and setting everything just so, after countless hours of shopping, after months of working at the ER so that she could afford everything. After all that her kids thought she had just gotten them a couple of things, but that Santa, what a guy.

Santa can cause your child to lose their faith in God. (That's right, I just used "their" as a third-person neuter. Take that, grammar Nazi).

from Threadless

For example, a friend of ours wrote recently:
"Last night when J was helping the kids with personal prayers he started with [our 3-year-old daughter], who looked up [at] him, thought for a minute, then said "Dad, Heavenly Father's not really real anyway." Oh man. Darn Santa Claus. Darn the Easter Bunny and curse the Tooth Fairy."

K knew a family who didn't celebrate Santa, because Santa is an anagram of Satan. Of course that line of logic can get you into trouble. For example:

Abraham Lincoln is an anagram of Banal Charm Loin. So apparently that great president was some sort of boring yet hypnotic sexual deviant. Better not teach your kids about him.

Latter-day Saints = A Startled Sanity. Therefore Mormons are crazy.

Anywho. Let us know what you think we should do. Otherwise we'll probably teach our children this. (on youtube)


More fun anagrams (I got carried away on the website):
Thomas S Monson = Most Hansom Son
George Bush = Be Gore's Ugh (Just ask Al Gore)

am i a wimp...

...if my favorite part of yoga is the part at the end, when we lie on the floor?









I like to think that I'm learning how to better appreciate the resting part of hard work. I mean, lying on the floor after my body works hard is more than just lying on the floor. It feels earned and lovely and necessary.

Or. It could just mean I'm a wimp.

surprises

I went on a bloggie fast this week (easier said than done). And when I opened up google reader today, I found a little surprise—584 new posts waiting for me to read. Feels like a fitting end to a week of some other surprises:

• I, um, really liked relief society enrichment this week. I have generally maintained my prejudice against it, due to a long line of awkward-bordering-on-catastrophic enrichment moments in a long line of awkward single adult wards. Thanks for converting me, Misti.
  
• I survived the week. Monday looked a little daunting with a 350-page book to read, two workshop pieces to finish writing and submit, 20 student papers to read, 20 student conferences to hold, the introduction to my thesis still unrevised, etc., etc., etc. It's Friday. I'm still here.
• A funny little feeling in my tummy. Yep. There's really a baby in there.
  

sometimes i cry: a map

In the first week of this semester, my professor asked us to create an autobiographical map. He gave vague instructions about how we might construct one, and then asked us to bring whatever we came up with to class in a few days. When I mentioned my task to Christopher, he asked if my map would contain a river of tears (I was crying at the time—NOT because of the assignment).

When I considered his question, I imagined I might be more accurate if I just colored the paper blue, left off any hint of continent or island and handed in my map as a vast ocean.

I cry. Often, okay.

My map ended up looking less like a road (or ocean) map and more like a page of text—sort of in the spirit of John D'Agata's "Flat Earth Map," only shorter and less clever. I outlined some points of interest in the country of myself. And apparently, I charted them on a sad day because my map drew attention to my consistent experience of being talked over in large groups of people, moments in which my story trails off in the middle and nobody notices. That put a damper on the class-time show-and-tell.

But I included no river. And today, while thinking about maps yet again, I realized that my omission may have been a mistake. The river flows at a pretty constant rate around here. I might be sad. I might be happy. But the tear count remains steady. It is a permanent landmark.

I read the news today and noticed how many different ways people hurt or attempt to hurt one another: I cried.

I watched a video on my friend's blog of her wedding and remembered how good people can be to each other (and how fabulous her taste is): I cried.

I'm not going to create another map of me, but if I did, it might look something like this one, of the changes in the Mississippi River's course over time. The route or the reason might shift (can we say pregnancy?), but this river won't dry up anytime soon.


















(Found this map at http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/)

my husband reminds me to be patient with myself

Me: I tried so hard, but I didn't get everything done today.

Him: Everything? Even God didn't finish everything in one day.

My sister's new blog

My sister changed the address of her blog without telling anyone. So here it is for any of you who read it:

http://stalexia.blogspot.com/

you know what sounds good right now?

These days, my tummy feels a bit willing to re-open its culinary horizons. So, I baked some salmon, made some rice and took them to campus with me today.

I thought I'd have plenty of time in my office to eat lunch, but I didn't. So I pulled the food out of the microwave and ate it while I walked in the crowd of students that moves en masse across campus between classes.

I would tell you about the two guys walking right behind me, and how they must have been really hungry, because I heard one say to the other, "You know what sounds good right now? Chicken curry with couscous." And I would tell you that the other one said, "No," and offered some other protein/pasta variation as the ideal meal. And I would tell you that I almost felt guilty that my lunch smelled REALLY GOOD.

But I realized before I wrote it what a pointless story that would be. So I'll just say this: I was thinking today of how much cooler my lunch would be if I had a Remains of the Day lunchbox. Does anyone know where I might find one?

marriage is a papa murphy's pizza

In the 3 weeks that our blog sat dormant, we've had plenty to write about—most importantly, our anniversary. We've been married for 730+ days, which simultaneously seems like no time at all and our whole lives.

Time does weird stuff. I've tried to reflect on the previous year, to bring images and moments together into some sort of conclusive statement about what the 2nd year of marriage is like. But I can only think of rather current moments. Most of them involve food. I don't know if I should go with food as a 2nd-year-of-marriage metaphor or not.

Here are a few happy, recent, marriage-defining moments that stand out in my mind (which should not stand in for a mushier and more endearing post, but will anyway):

• My husband has boosted Papa Murphy's profits this quarter because he buys me their gourmet chicken garlic pizza nearly once a week. He hopes not to maintain this habit. But for now, he values the pizza for its unique property of remaining in my queasy tummy after eating.

• He told me to buy the maternity dress of my dreams, even though it was full price (which I am opposed to) and I haven't started sporting a poochy tummy yet.
  

• When our car was in the shop, he walked to the grocery store to buy milk, which I just HAD to have. And when I insisted on going with him, he stopped to hug me for ages when I cried on the side of the road, because I imagined that our children might like him more and think I was the boring, ugly parent of the pair. What a trip to the store THAT was.
  

Another anniversary from now, some of our most important moments these days (preparing for our last semester of school, hearing our baby's heartbeat at the midwife's office, picking out names, looking for real-person jobs) won't be quite so present, and we'll be on to different projects and seasons of life.

Something tells me that, while the scenery might change and some additional children will pop in for a visit, we'll still do what we always do: read lots of books, work on projects, spend time together. He'll consistently take out the garbage and water the plants. I'll be as erratic as ever with laundry and vacuuming (though I'll continue to claim that keeping up dependably on both are important to me).

And we'll eat. Maybe I'll cook up something better for us than Papa Murphy's.

God smote me today

Last night our car broke down on the Provo exit. We called our amazing neighbor who came and towed our car home with his truck.

When we got home our neighbor found out that I had to get to work by 8 am. He helped me fix my bike so that I could ride it in the next day. He fixed the brakes, the tires, and the handlebars, then he greased the chain and wiped it down. I kept on expecting him to say "That will be $29.99," but he apparently works for saint points.

The next morning I woke up an hour and a half late because my alarm didn't go off (or didn't wake me). I dressed and hopped on the bike, and tucked my pant leg into my sock so it wouldn't get stuck in the bike chain.

it didn't take me quite an hour and a half to get here

I got to work and didn't notice, until I had walked down two hallways, that my pant leg was still tucked into my sock and my fly was down.

So it's been an amazing day.

On the bright side, we found out that our neighbors are still awesome. And I got to ride my bike to work - which I've planned on doing for a while - to get into shape, save on gas, help the environment, and prevent foreign wars.

two thoughts on billions of people

1. HOW does the world contain SO MANY people? The number of people driving around my little city or walking around in the grocery store blows me away. How many women had to throw up for months at a time just to make enough people to populate this single town? And how many of those women volunteered for this process multiple times? That's a lot of barf, people.

2. Why on EARTH does war even exist? If all those women had to barf up their guts and then go through labor and spend years and years putting care and love into little people until those people got big enough to defend themselves, doesn't it seem an immense waste to blow said people up?

If women ruled the world (and in order to become president or queen of any country, a woman was required to bear at least one child), I'm pretty sure we'd get rid of war altogether. The women in charge would know what sort of energy (and endless nausea) their population required to create and bear. And if anyone so much as whispered war from the other side of an ocean, the rest of the presidents would say, "No way, sister. We know what your women went through to make those people. We've been there. We're not about to blow anybody up."