nagging what ifs

So lately I've been kind of introspective, for weird reasons. It seems people from my past keep popping up, and weird feelings keep plaguing me. It doesn't make any sense, because these things shouldn't be bugging me, but yet I can't get it all off my mind. Specifically, there are 3 instances to note:

• I had a dream in which one of my old boyfriends found me and told me he wrote a book about my breaking up with him, saying it took him 33 years to "get over" me (yeah we only dated in 2000, so my dream must be in the future). How hilarious is that? In my dream, I just shrugged my shoulders -- I had to! -- because I am married with baby Wesley. I had to say, "yeah I feel bad, but, we're all moving on here."

• In real life, a guy I was "madly in love with" (meaning, he barely knew my name if at all and I was terrified to even talk to him) in college just got engaged and it's all over his Facebook page. There's just this little pinge of "je ne sais pas" that I can't quite place. It couldn't be jealously or regret or who knows (or could it be?), because my life is great now, but it is something.

• In real life, a friend of mine from high school ended up marrying another guy I was "madly in love with" (same definition). I've figured it out since we're all invited to our 10-year reunion, which I'm not sure if I'll be attending. Anyway, in this case, I know the girl; in fact, I like her! I'm happy for her! She was sweet and we were buds. But still... he was "my guy" (ha ha, in my head!), and so there's just something in the back of my mind driving me a little batty after this marital news update.

I guess the fact of the matter is that we all grow up, we all have experiences, then we all move on. It's not like either of the latter two scenarios would have ever worked out to equal "me" plus "crush of the minute," but there was, of course, part of my brain in that part of my life that sure wanted it.

So when Shanester came along and things changed, I had to (and am still, obviously) reconcile with myself that these "other paths" of my life are never going to happen. It's a weird feeling.

Another good example is when we first found out we were having a baby. One of my friends kept asking if I had any "vibes" if it was a boy or girl. At first, I didn't... then one day I did. It was a girl; I knew it! I picked out a baby name, I started daydreaming, I was convinced I was having a girl. I was totally floored when our sonographer told us we were having a boy. I now had to "mourn" my daydreams of a "baby" who would never be born.

Some literature I've been reading recently says it happens to moms post-partum as well. Every expectant mother has this idea of what the perfect baby is like. Then, she has her baby, and if he cries a lot or has big ears or never sleeps, the new mom "mourns" her idea of what "could have been," since reality is quite different.

Fortunately for me, I'm lucky that Wesley is all I could dream of and more (although he isn't a girl). But the concept is the same.

It's just an interesting thing to think about, so I wanted to get my thoughts out there for you Internet folks to chew on. I guess the trick is to take the cards that are dealt to us and live our lives, no matter what, with smile on our faces and optimism in our demeanor. Perhaps that's the only way to take what could have been, let it go, and celebrate what is.

six things

OK, Wendy tagged me. This is the first time I've been tagged.

To duly embarass her for tagging me, I'll share this fine memory: me and Wendy, standing on chairs in our third floor apartment's kitchen, singing Jimmy Eat World into spatula microphones. There Wendy, that's what you get for tagging me.

I'm supposed to share six random "unimportant" things about myself... then tag six of you. I think I'll make all my random things about food (does that take away from the randomness of it all?). Here goes:

1. I had lima beans for the first time in years and years and years last week. My dad would be proud. He used to serve lima beans all the time for us kids.
2. I'm really noncommittal when it comes to fruit. Not that I don't like fruit, it's just that I don't like LARGE fruit. I prefer smaller fruits. A clementine to a real orange. A gala apple to a red delicious. I'm just afraid I'll get sick of it half-way through.
3. I took a class once to learn to make ice cream from scratch. And no, I don't need an ice cream maker to do it. Brilliant! You can bribe me to get the recipe.
4. Only once have I made a dinner that was 100% inedible. I just took too many substitutions liberties. All I remember is that I substituted a cup of lentils for a can of beans. I thought it would be OK. It turned out so so so very awful; I threw it all away.
5. I don't like mayo or mustard. I'd rather eat a ham and cheese sandwich with nothing on it than with either of those disgusting condiments. I prefer butter or margarine actually.
6. The funniest funniest thing I ever saw at BYU was a group of coeds serving "ice cream sundaes" from the second-level balcony of our apartment complex to the ground floor below. One partner would be on the second level, and one lying on his/her back on the ground. Parter 1 would drop a spoonful of ice cream into Partner 2's mouth. Then Parter 1 would turn over a bottle of Hershey's syrup and get it in Partner 2's mouth. Then a container of whipped cream. Then a cherry. It was HILARIOUS.

So two of my random tidbits were about ice cream. So sue me. I love it.

OK, I'm tagging Hoffer Doffer, Wandering Nana, Amy the World Traveler (in an effort to get her to POST already), Stacey, Nicole, and the Goofy Goffs. Apologies if you guys have done it before!!!

putting all my hot air to good use

Ever since I started this blog I wanted to do a post about a particularly awesome experience of mine, but I needed the perfect opportunity to do it.

(the view from outside our building -- look carefully! ha hahahahaha!)

I suppose the one-year anniversary of the event is the perfect opportunity. Before I begin, Happy Birthday JJ!

A year ago, myself and many others were excited to celebrate a monumental birthday for our dear work friend JJ. Let’s just say it wasn’t her 49th birthday but it wasn’t her 51st birthday. Somewhere in between.

We decided to fill her office with balloons. “How cool!” you say. Yes, it was very cool. Unfortunately, we didn’t know how to go about it. First, I called a company that does “this kind of thing” and they quoted me a $2,000 price tag to fill her office with balloons. Whatev-a!

So, I set to cyberspace to find out how to do it. It seems no one had ever done this before, or if they had, they had neglected to blog about it. So, here I am, paving the way for any of you who wish to do this in the future.

• Step 1. We took measurements of her office. I seem to recall that it measured 9 feet wide by 12 feet long by 12 feet tall, or 1,296 cubic feet.
  
• Step 2. One of “us,” the partners-in-crime, has another life where she does weddings and parties, etc., and she was able to secure balloons for us at wholesale cost. We decided to go with 13-inch balloons, in a multitude of colors. (All black seemed a bit too morbid.)
  
• Step 3. How many balloons did we need? Let’s do the math. If you pretend that 13-inch-diameter balloons are actually square (which would make them 2,197 cubic inches), and you stack them in a 1,296-cubic-foot room (or a 2,239,488-cubic-inch room), you’d need 1,109 balloons. But, since balloons AREN’T square, and they’d fall in on themselves a bit, we added a couple hundred to that number. I think we bought 1,400 balloons and actually blew up 1,200.
  
• Step 4. Showtime. The thought of blowing up 1,200 balloons by hand is quite daunting, so we decided to rent a compressor. Not only that, we were able to get a splitter for our air compressor and two hoses, so we could use one compressor and do double duty. It was awesome. Lucky for us, the day before the celebratory birthday was a Sunday, so we all gathered Sunday afternoon and went to work. Some people brought their fitness ball airpumps, we had our compressor, and others went with good-old reliable mouth airpower. There were six of us. We got started at maybe 1 or 2 and went until 4 pm? Yeah, it only took us ~3 hours to blow up 1,200 balloons!!!
  

(Shanester, doing his blowing-up duty)

The things we didn’t count on (for those of you trying this at home):

• A lot of the balloons popped. Casualties are just to be expected. It seemed for every balloon we threw in the room, one or two would pop underneath it. Luckily, the pile somehow kept growing so we were making progress.
  
• The further along we got, the harder it got to keep the balloons in the room. We had to set up a “retaining wall” per se using a huge piece of cardboard, just so we could keep the door open and keep the balloons in.

(the joy spilleth over)

• Tying them all by hand got to be quite painful. If we did it again, we’d buy some plastic ties or something. They do make those.
  
• We didn’t get all the way to the ceiling. We were just so pooped. But it was a lot of balloons.

Of course, the next day was just priceless. She was so surprised. We all laughed and laughed. And, the entire office smelled liked latex (we even got complaints).

(the whole office looked like this pretty much all day)

Happy Birthday, JJ. Let the good times roll!

P.S. Re: cost.... the compressor only cost about $40-$50 to rent. Add that to the really nice cake that someone bought, plus the cost of balloons, and in the end, I think the 6 of us chipped in about $20 each for the event. Way better than $2,000 right? I should go into business.

ok fine

Let's go with gmail instead.

Baby pics here.

no common thread here

Some random thoughts....

On the Brain

A bulleted list of songs that have been stuck in my head this week, at various times and off and on:

• “(Everybody was) Kung fu fighting”
• “Fake it,” Seether
• “All that Jazz,” from Chicago
• “I am like a star shining brightly,” the primary song
• “This River is Wild,” The Killers

A very very strange group. I knew a woman once who said she was excited to get up each morning to find out which Church hymn was stuck in her head, as that would set the tone for her day. I made that a goal once, and managed to get Church songs stuck in my head for awhile. But usually, I wake up to the Killers or Seether and, well, I’m not going to be singing Seether lullabies to my baby, that’s for sure. I really didn’t want some of those songs in my head. But how does stuff get stuck in your head anyway? I heard probably the last 10 seconds of that Seether song on the radio last Monday and it’s been in my head all week. Grr!

Also, interestingly, if I wake up in the middle of the night, my head is usually blank and I can get right back to sleep. But, if I wake up closer to morning, somehow there is a song in my head, I can't get it out of my head, and it won't let me sleep. I might as well get up anyway.

Congratulations

A big fat congratulations and “yahoo!” to my mom AND my dad, who both joined Facebook. If you know them, or even just know me and want to know them through me, add them as your friends. I’m so proud.

Baby Pics

Speaking of Facebook, here’s a link to a public album if you want to see more baby pics. And I'm sure you do. Dang, that kid is cute. I can't believe he's related to me!

Stuff He Does

A bulleted list of some funny things Mr. Wesley does:

• He always sneezes twice, or sometimes three times, just like Shane!
• He gets the hiccups between 3 and 5 times a day
• The other night, he messed three diapers in a matter of 10 minutes… I was on the floor laughing at Shane’s reaction to clean diaper after clean diaper getting soiled, and cute little Wesley just grinning and cooing, oblivious to what was happening
• He likes to “talk” to us, and Shane says he’ll be “just like his mom” (one can only hope!)

Better run. Need food.

another post about fish

One of my favorite parts of Finding Nemo is when Marlin is explaining to Dory that he promised Nemo that he would never let anything ever happen to him. Dory, being cluelessly blatant, says (and I paraphase, but I’m sure some of you readers can tell me the line from memory), “well, that’s a funny thing to promise someone. What will ever happen to him if nothing ever happens to him?”

(Sidenote: another one of my favorite parts is where the little classmate of Nemo says “I’m obnoxious!” I love to repeat that line over and over in the obnoxious little voice. Shane always agrees with me when I do.)

(Back to my point.) Dory makes a valid argument. As a new mom, I’m trying to reconcile this with myself! I just look at that perfect little baby, and I don’t want anything to ever happen to him. He bawls when they prick his heel to draw blood, and I wish I could prevent it. He’s upset when he gets so hungry and so tired he can’t think straight, and I wish there was something I could do – instead of letting him figure it out on his own. He sports little battle wounds on his face where he’s scratched himself with his sharp baby fingernails; and no matter how much we file them down or cover them up with baby socks, they always seems to get sharper or he always seems to Houdini his hands out, and he hurts himself again. I wish I could fix it. And, we were so so scared earlier this week when he was thisclose to getting hospitalized for jaundice, and he was rapidly losing weight. If I could have made it all better magically, I would have. I don’t want anything to happen to him.

But that isn’t how life is.

The reason, I think, we have to fight these little battles for ourselves (i.e., our moms can’t save us every time), is because we’d never quite know how good the good times are unless we feel how bad the bad times are.

I would never have rejoiced so enthusiastically to hear my baby weighed 6 pounds 3 ounces after 8 days of life, if the day before had been just a regular day. But instead, the day before, he weighed 5 pounds 15 ounces – meaning he had lost almost an entire pound in just a week. I was scared to death! But because of that one scare, that night when we fed him and nursed him and fretted over him, the next day felt so so good.

(Second sidenote: If I lost a pound a week, or two pounds a week, I’d be overjoyed! But for little Wesley, only weighing not quite 7 pounds to start with… it was a big deal.)

I had a friend once who went through an awful ordeal. I remember chatting with her and saying, “well, at least you learned something from all this.” My friend disagreed. She didn’t think she had learned anything. Her ordeal was absolutely upsetting/life-altering/unbearable, to say the very least, and I don’t know how I would have reacted had something like that happened to me. Do we learn something every time something awful happens? Can anyone answer the age-old question, "why do bad things happen to good people?"

All I know is, the absolute joy that comes from meeting a new loved one (e.g., babybabybaby) wouldn’t be so joyous if I hadn’t felt the sorrow of losing a loved one. The absolute joy of feeling like I had lost 15 pounds wouldn’t feel quite so good if I’d never had the realization I was 15 pounds overdue for a weight-loss regime. The absolute joy of finding Nemo wouldn’t be so miraculous and happy unless Nemo was lost in the first place.

Life isn’t perfect, and I think the reason is that we have to have the bad to really really know the good.

I’m blessed to have so much good in my life. May we all not be so afraid of the things that “happen” to us.