Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The top 3 reasons how I know my daughter has OCD:

1: She puts her movies in neat rows. She does the same thing with shoes.

2. When choosing a straw to drink from, first she picked all of the yellow ones (except the one she missed) then moved on to the blue ones, then she will use the red ones. If you grab the wrong color she gets mad and picks out the right one. Next time I buy straws I will try to find a pack that's all the same color.

3. Since she was a baby, she has had a soft blanket and as a comfort she puts one corner of the blanket on/in her nose and feels it and "sniffs" it. She always uses the same corner and she knows if it's the wrong one. She will feel each corner until she finds the correct one to hold.

I'm sure Art and I are to blame for her personality since I am the type of person who likes things very clean, uncluttered, correct, and organized. Art is the type of person who likes things just how he left them and doesn't want anyone to touch his stuff. Keira seems to be a pretty particular person too, and hopefully she will be able to harness that to her benefit in life.

Progress Report

I have been practicing my flute nigh unto every day since it arrived 3 weeks ago. Here is a sample of what I can do so far.

Happy Birthday for Kyle since today is his birthday.


Love is a Song - Bambi


Over the Rainbow - Wizard of Oz

The Bird Box

Today Keira was playing with an empty box that jewelry comes in, pretending that there were birds inside. So, I made her imagination come to life and printed out birds and a nest for her to play with.

The nest and mama bird are attached and the hungry baby birds are loose. She calls it her "Bird Box" and she thinks it's pretty cool.

A Dream Come True

When you're poor like me, it seems more often than not that you have to focus on what you need and make yourself forget about what you want. No income is ever "extra" so when money comes along, there is always some bill or need to eat it up. So, naturally, when I got the idea that I wanted a flute, I thought it to be a distant dream instead of something I might acquire anytime soon. Lucky for me, my Uncle Mark decided to make my dream come true and surprised me with a gorgeous Gemeinhardt 2sp - the number one top selling student flute. It arrived at my house one week and two days ago and I can hardly put it down.

My only prior experience with a flute was in about 7th grade or so at which time I played clarinet in the school band of about 8 kids. I think we had 4 clarinet players, 3 trumpet players, and one trombone. We were a pretty pathetic band and our teacher only taught us to play by finger numbers instead of notes so we really didn't learn properly. Well, one time we came across a song that had a short flute solo in it and the band teacher recalled having come across a couple flutes in the school shed so my friend Ashley and I volunteered to learn the flute solo and play our clarinets the rest of the song. The flutes we used looked like someone had been bludgeoned to death with them... twice. They were awful. So, I guess you could say my desire to own a flute wasn't entirely a wild hair, and may or may not have been fueled by a flute performance at church on Easter Sunday.

Despite not learning to read clarinet music, I had taken some piano lessons as a kid and have enough choir experience to be able to read music at a very slow pace. On the piano, I can't sight read and it is very difficult for me to play anything I haven't heard before. I struggle through the sheet music until I learn it then I memorize it so I don't have to look at it again. Thus, I can play a few songs on the piano complicated enough to trick people into thinking I can play the piano, but it is only a facade. I am most talented at playing my vocal cords.

When I first assembled my flute, I found I have a natural ability to blow a tone and a good ear to pick out a couple basic songs based on the notes that are straight forward enough to play without instruction. Then, I began the task of learning the names of the notes I was playing and the fingering for more notes. Flutes aren't as simple as one might thing. They aren't like a recorder where the more holes you cover, the lower the note is- not in all cases anyway. It seemed like a daunting task, at first, but I was surprised at how quickly I was able to memorize the fingerings and even learned to read and play the music to some easy arrangements. One thing I am really enjoying about playing the flute is that you only have to worry about one note at a time, which is great for someone like me who is not fantastic at reading music.

Playing the flute hasn't been everything I hoped it would be, it has been even more. Thanks again, Uncle Mark, for paving the path to another musical adventure.

Full Circle

Despite my best attempts to be 100% stay at home mom, I couldn't escape the fact that we remained unavoidably a couple hundred dollars short every month. I really didn't want to go back to work 20 hours a week- it just takes too much out of me to be able to be a good wife and mom at the same time- so I looked for a job that would be less than 20 hours a week. There weren't a lot of options in this category so I knew I couldn't be picky. I saw a couple of housekeeping jobs and applied for them, and sure enough I got a call from a husband and wife looking for someone to work at their house a couple days a week.

I have been working Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 9-12 for about a month now and so far I really enjoy my new job. It's definitely a huge change from my heavily secretarial background. I haven't worn an apron since my very first job working as a server at Grand Occasions Catering and Banquets. Now I feel like I have come full circle back to my beginnings except now I don't have to wear a white shirt and black tie.

Since my job is cleaning, it doesn't really feel like work. It feels like every day life. Like an extension of my daily activities. In fact, it's actually easier than cleaning my own house, because there are no children to clean up after which means I don't have to pick up a million items off the floor that come from all over the house, and I don't have to worry about Keira destroying everything I have just accomplished. I think that these 6 hours a week will do exactly what I hoped- help make ends meet without taking up the better part of my time and energy.

A Random Kind of Girl

After watching a movie, Keira comes up with the most random quotes to say. I think Keira has seen Tangled a few too many times, because she walks around saying things like, "This is the story of how I died," and, "I have a PERSON in my CLOSET!" It's a little disconcerting. Then after she watched Beauty and the Beast today and has been saying things like "Don't talk about my father that way!" "Take me instead!" and "Show me the beast!"

Keira has started pretending to play the guitar on random objects like her big shovel and the broom. She pronounces guitar "cantar" which is funny because it means "sing" in Spanish. So she has been singing, "Cantar cantar all day long!" I really don't know where she came up with that line.

Lastly, who is Peter? In my house there are 3. Peter Joey (Keira's name for a peanut butter jelly sandwich), regular Peter (heater), and good ol' Com Peter (the computer). Who knew the name Peter could cover 3 random objects?

On a whim, we had a picnic at Millerton Lake last week. I knew it was close and wanted to check it out for quite some time. I'm glad we did. It only took about 25 minutes to get there and we had the whole place to ourselves since it was a weekday. The picnic area was grassy, shady, and beautiful. We saw a bunch of lizards, a bunny, fought off some squirrels, saved 2 tiny frogs from the bathroom, took a picture of a wild turkey in front of the lake, got our feet wet, then came home. Here are some pictures of our picnic adventure.

Cake

March 28th marked my 25th birthday and this year we decided to spend it at Art's grandparents' house in the bay area. Visiting his grandparents is truly a vacation- they spoil us, cook for us, and absolutely adore their great-grandbaby (even though she wears them out). We took a drive to the Concord mall and bought some much needed summer apparel for Keira and had my birthday lunch at Johnny Rockets since we no longer have one in Fresno. Grandma Kathy and Grandpa George have made me feel like family since the first time I met them. We visit them as often as we can and on our drives home all I think about is how grateful I am that they make us feel so welcome and so loved. Keira has no idea how lucky she is to have such awesome great-grandparents, but it is obvious that she loves them.

Since I knew I was going to be out of town for my actual birthday, I had a small celebration at my house a couple days before with my family and Robyn, who is pretty much family. We had pizza and watched "The Other Guys." My mom has exemplary cake making skills and she made me her new specialty- an angel food strawberry ice cream cake with whipped frosting and strawberry topping. It's like heaven baked into a delicious confection. I wish I had even a fraction of my mom's cooking skills. My last cake making attempt resulted in one of my most embarrassing moments which I will divulge now...

It was about 3 years ago and our ward was asking people to sign up to bring cakes to some event. When I saw the sign up sheet, hardly anyone had signed up so I added my name to the list out of sympathy. I remembered having a lemon cake mix in the pantry that needed cooking so I whipped it up in my heart-shaped silicon pan, but when I attempted to remove it from the pan, about half the cake stuck to the pan and it came out (for lack of a better description) FUGLY. So I smothered it with frosting and called a neighboring member to ask if she had any sprinkles (for, at that moment in time, I thought that sprinkles might detract from the hideousness of the cake). She met me at the church with the sprinkles and I put them on the cake, but it just made it look even more like a five year old made it.

I almost took it back home because it was so unsightly, but I thought, "Oh it's no big deal. It will just get stuck on some big table with lots of other food and cakes and no one will even know I made it." So I went into the cultural hall to put it on the table only to discover that these cakes were intended to be on display with pedestals and name tags prepared for each one. To make it worse, the other cakes were glorious like something my mother could make. Some people even cheated and bought fancy store bought ones. Then there sat my ugly sprinkled lump of a lemon cake with my name all over it. I wanted to dig myself a grave and crawl in it. I do believe I am so emotionally scarred by that experience that I will never attempt cake making again.