8 Learnings from Yours Truly

I've learned a few things recently. I'm thinkin' most of it's good. :)

1. My family rocks. Seriously. Maybe every family lets a family member bum around their place and randomly leave or stay a night without short notice. Mine has been doing that for 2 months now. I've tried to be helpful where I can, but I feel lost without a place to call my own and I'm afraid that puts a shadow on things.

2. I can be really lazy. Like I said, I'm feeling lost and so my thought process goes something like this -- What should I do today? .... Well, what CAN I do today? Check email... read status updates on Facebook... feed my people on Restaurant City... check my crops and trees on Country Story... breed some animals in Zoo World... help defeat monsters in Castle Age... plant some crops in Farmville... okay, yes. So I spend way too much time on Facebook. What else can I do? Read cookbooks. (Random story that isn't in my usual thought process: Jared thinks it's funny and Nana thinks it's cute that Jamie and I read cookbooks like novels.) Sew more of that last wiseman (who is wearing, by far, the least favorable clothing out of the three wiseman). Care for Kaelyn. And then back to Facebook...

3. I can also remember to study my scriptures daily at the same time. I've been reading a PDF I found for free somehow at some point last year. It's a book called Pass the Scriptures. I'm not good at studying my scriptures. I'm not even good at reading them. And to be even more honest, I'm not very good at reading very many books with substance to them. Give me a Robin McKinley or Tamora Pierce and it'll be read in no time. Give me Robert Jordan or Leo Tolstoy and I hope you have a lot of patience because I'll be a while. So I want to help cultivate my mind to better comprehend things like poetry and Charles Dickens. And I'll start with the scriptures.

4. I love being a mom. Even when I'm crying at 5 am because I wake at every movement and sound that Kaelyn wakes (it's a good thing, I know, but not when she starts 30 minutes after I just fed her) or because Jemima was losing her footing on the duct work (or whatever the heck it is that's metal-ish between the ceiling of the basement and floor of the main floor) or because Kara had to check out what Jemima was doing which always results in some hissing fits or because Jaeden was being very needy because they were out of food or because Jemima tried to come back downstairs after being taken upstairs after the Kara incident and Jemima and Jaeden had a little spat (which resulted in Kara and Jaeden being shut into the other half of the basement without Jemima or Murphy) or because lack of any substantial sleep was giving me a headache. (Oh yeah, it all happened last night.) Despite moments like that, Kaelyn is awesome.

5. Kaelyn really is awesome. When she's fussy, she wants to go to sleep. When she wakes up, she wants to eat. When she's awake, she's happy. She has figured out how to suck her finger (sometimes two) and does so quite noisily. She knows what the camera is and when it's pointing at her, she takes her finger out of her mouth (which actually defeated the purpose of why the camera was pointing at her). She has been giving off a few wonderful laughs lately. None with Jared around yet, but it will happen.

6. "Patience is a virtue." After the bank denied our loan three times, we're hoping this is the final icing on the cake. The long and short of it is that they didn't like hearing that our basement had ANY potential problem. The seller decided to pay for the beams to get put into place. The city passed inspection on Monday. Yesterday we shelled out more money for a second inspection by the structural engineers (but at least we didn't have to pay for the basement). The result was "your basement was structurally sound before and now it is very VERY structurally sound". The people who worked on the basement went above and beyond what needed to be done. I don't know in what ways, but in truth, I don't really care.

7. What I do care about is where I'm going to place all my stuff when I have it again and how I'm going to decorate. I haven't breathed too much to Jared yet. A little bit at a time will be better for him. I just now told him (in passing so I don't know his response) that even though the walls are already painted, I was thinking of repainting. Some of those colors are a little too taste-specific and it's not my taste and I don't have any decorating ideas to go along with them. I also want a sander.

8. Squirrels make surprisingly loud noises for such little creatures.