Blessing Tallulah

In the LDS church, when babies are born, they are given an official name to be placed on the records of the Church and a blessing for their life by a male priesthood holder, usually their father but sometimes grandfathers, uncles, close friends of the family. It is a beautiful tradition, and I found this article online when I was researching baby blessings [also, some funny stories where the dad named the daughter's future husband or told her she would marry a millionaire, etc]. Cait and I love how Margaret Blair Young describes it:

"As an infant, my parents' firstborn, I was taken in my father's arms and given a name and a blessing. There, I was at the center of a priesthood circle. Other men (probably my uncles, though of course I don't remember), joined Dad as he blessed me. They each put one hand under my little body and one hand on the shoulder of the person standing next to them. They literally and symbolically supported me, and joined their faith with my dad's. This circle—a prayer circle, if you will—is a common one in our community...

I suspect my father was tearful at the miracle of my tiny body, and at the responsibility I introduced."

On Sunday, July 15th, Tallulah had her baby blessing at Cait's parents' church. We were going to do in Sacrament Meeting, but Les (Cait's dad) had drill (military stuff) and needed to be there in the morning, so he came on his lunch break and we did it in the bishop's office post-church meetings. It was a little rushed and crowded and Atticus talked the whole time, but it was still a special occasion, and the Spirit was most definitely in attendance. It was a beautiful blessing, and we took some lovely pictures afterwards.

I get chills looking at the happiness on Lu's face, she knew it was her special day

Uncles Ethan and Devin, Bishop Bronson Titus and Poppy also stood in the circle 

Some people might think this is a little weird, but I really want to put the blessing up here for those who weren't able to attend (grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends), or even for the simply curious of what is said at a Mormon baby blessing:

Heavenly Father. By the authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood, and in the name of Jesus Christ, we give this baby a name. The name by which she will be known will be Tallulah Fern Carroll-Browning.

Tallulah, we wish to give you a blessing by this same power, the power of the Melchizedek Priesthood. We bless you that your spirit might be strong, that you might have an understanding of the wonderful power that it is to be a child of our Heavenly Father and Mother. We bless you with an understanding that along with mental, physical and emotional health, that tending to your spiritual health is an important and necessary step in becoming a whole and healthy child of our Heavenly Parents.

We bless you with the understanding that as a daughter of both Heavenly and Earthly parents, you always have someone to turn to that will love you and care for you. Tallulah, we bless you with strength to understand that, through the Spirit, you may make wise and informed choices that will lead you to a full and meaningful life and that you can trust that voice, the Spirit, to lead you on a path that will lead you to your heavenly home.

Tallulah, we bless you with a love for those around you, that through that love you might be a beacon of hope and understanding to those around you that might be experiencing difficulties and trials. Tallulah, we bless you with the love that you will need to reach out to your family and to your friends that they might benefit from the knowledge and the wisdom that you will gain throughout your life.

Tallulah, we bless you with an understanding of the love of your mother. Know that you can trust in her for an example of what is to be a true daughter of our Heavenly Mother and Father.

Tallulah, we leave these blessings with in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Four months

The day we returned from the beach, we celebrated Tallulah's four month birthday. I can't believe she is only four months old. I feel like a year has gone by since she was born. She has an old, wise soul.

She's started sitting up and you can tell she is getting ready for being a real baby. Allison swears she rolled over once, but I'm not convinced. She hates tummy time and isn't too great at lifting her head up that way, but has great control when she is sitting up. She seems very interested in food, but we are holding off a few more months. She is growing like a weed, and though we have no idea what she weighs, she is outgrowing clothes and has gained a few pounds in the past month or so. She loves sitting in her swing and staring at the animals as they turn around on the mobile. We've started putting her in the BOB for running trips with Daddy, and she seems to enjoy it. She loves the beach and playing in the waves. She is starting to grasp things and is slowly figuring out how to get something from her hands to her mouth. Watching her brain working is one of the most amazing feats of humanity. She has incredible concentration and sleeps like a log.

She hates taking a bottle and thinks pacifiers are horrible. She has found her thumb and sucks it occasionally, but not consistently (I keep encouraging it, but Tim tells me not to for fear of future expensive orthodontic care). She has these long, gorgeous fingers and toes, the most luscious lips ever seen on a baby, and one adorable dimple that melts my heart. She smiles easily and cries rarely. She is a little cuddler and will nestle up to anything with a heartbeat.

She loves this the most

Big bow

She loves her car seat

Soulful eyes

Beach vacation

Yesterday we returned from an epic week at the beach with all my family (minus Christopher and Hillary, who had school/work). It was the first time in a long time all the siblings have been together, plus the six cousins and my mom and dad. It was a full house, to say the least. We stayed at a lovely home about 1/2 mile from Litchfield Beach on Pawleys Island. We rented a golf cart and bikes with baby seats, and we spent hours relaxing in the surf every day. Atticus was crazy about it. He loved building sand castles and jumping in the waves and riding in Aunt Allison's big inner tube (meant for river tubing, but worked in the ocean too... except when it flipped on us a few times). He loved it so much that one afternoon, Tim had gone with the big kids and Atticus didn't want to go just then so he stayed home. Well, my mom and Lauren came back from shopping (they did a lot of that) and about twenty minutes later, I realized Atticus was nowhere to be seen. Allison had seen him walk out on the porch but didn't really process that he would walk OFF the porch. I ran downstairs and hopped on a bike and everyone else home followed and did the same.  About 1/4 mile later through the wooded path (the wooded path with alligators in the stream, mostly dead ones, sadly, but alligators nonetheless), I found him in the middle of the street talking with a couple in a car who had stopped to help him find his mommy and daddy again. I could not believe I got so distracted that he got that far by himself. He had put his beach hat on and was going to find dad, he told me when I biked him home (in a basket because in my haste I didn't think to grab the bike with the kid seat). Suffice it to say, we had a long talk about leaving to the beach without an adult...

Tallulah was as pleasant as usual, and she loved feeling the sand between her toes as the waves rushed in and out. I loved having a fellow nursing mother there who I could send Tallulah home with when her boys napped because she could feed her and I could stay for a few more hours at the beach. We even took the kids to Medieval Times one night (I had free tickets) and left her at home with Lauren, and I didn't have to pump a bottle (not like baby sister will take a bottle, so yeah, we are working on that)! It was great. Our little family managed to avoid sunburn almost entirely (Atticus got a little red in the face for a day, and I got burned on one tiny patch on my upper thigh that I missed, Tim got a little toasted one day but his doesn't hurt and fades quickly). I hate it when vacations end so soon, it really was a perfect week and I had forgotten how much I love, love, love the beaches of South Carolina. 

Nothing beats beach all morning, sandwiches for lunch, naps all afternoon, and card games at night. I even managed to squeeze in an hour by myself to read my Kindle while the waves brushed against my legs. It was absolutely glorious. I already miss the sticky, sandy, salty sensations.

"What?"

She did a lot of this

Postpartum Progression Mom would be proud: I dressed very, very modestly (also, my skin is scared of the sun...) 

Yogi wearing Lulu's hat

The cousins are loud... very, very loud 

Bennis the Serious

Nothing like cuddling up with some good books

He actually laid in bed by himself and read for a whole TEN MINUTES. Now if only we could get him to read himself to sleep, we'd be getting somewhere.

Mormons and modesty

Feminist Mormon Housewives is currently having an open debate/forum on discussing modesty with children (oh, FMH, how I love thee!). Mormons have this thing about modesty: they are kind of obsessed. We are taught from a young age that we cover our shoulders, wear shorts to the knee, and GOD FORBID you put on that bikini on your honeymoon.

A fairly popular Mormon Mommy blogger posted a Primary lesson on modesty that she taught in her ward. Besides being culturally-insensitive (those immodest Indians!!), it also presented ideals of modesty that go above and beyond what Church leaders encourage (like swimsuits needing to cover what garments cover rather than simply one-pieces and tankinis). I'm not trying to criticize her approach... no wait, I am. Not because she is teaching her children that. Whatever, you can parent how you wish and dress your daughters like nuns and make them ashamed of their feminine figures. But I'm scared as to what Tallulah will be lectured on when I send her to an LDS Primary when she comes of age and she happens to have someone like this teaching the Sharing Time lesson. Yikes. Tim and I have discussed before where we will draw the line on what we want our children to be taught at Church. In our home, we discuss Heavenly Mother right alongside Heavenly Father (I even change the words to Primary songs when I sing at bedtime), and I am dreading the day they are reprimanded for mentioning Her in a prayer in a public setting. Or what if Tallulah is wearing a sleeveless dress to church when she is 9 during a modesty lesson like this? I'm hoping Mormons who believe things like this are few and far between, but these days, I just don't know.

Instead of enforcing strict rules on shorts-length and swimsuit detail, why don't we encourage self-esteem, the beauty of the human body, the power of our bodies, how strong and healthy they are, dressing practically for the situation (like you wouldn't wear a swimsuit to Church). It seems to me that settling on arbitrary cultural ideals on how we should dress is not that important to Jesus, nor is it that important to teach our children, especially when many of the children probably do not pick out their own clothing.





I mean come on, woman-- Peter Pan's tights?! Really?!??

And I also love these photos someone linked to in the comments on FMH (Abinadi: immodest, King Noah: modest, Stripling Warriors: immodest).

Mormon-Unitarians

After listening to a Daughters of Mormonism podcast a few weeks ago on Unitarian Universalism and their beliefs, Tim and I decided to attend a local congregation of UUs to enhance our Sabbath Day worship. Though I had never attended a Unitarian church before, I vaguely knew about Unitarians as one of my best friends in high school grew up in that church, and her parents were these awesome hippie-granolie parents that you just don't find in the south. After doing a little research in addition to podcasts and blogs about enhancing your Mormonism with Unitarianism, we thought the two would be compatible together. Mormonism has strict doctrines and rituals and hierarchy, whereas Unitarianism is essentially devoid of strict doctrines but preaches values of acceptance, compassion, and tolerance, which is taught in the Mormon church but is oftentimes overlooked in the culture. They essentially think "God is love" and that's all there is to it. Each person in their religion is on a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning."

We headed over post-Sacrament meeting and after Atticus had an hour of nursery (he was ready to leave anyways), and we arrived about ten minutes after their service started. After we got Atticus settled into the nursery (they had a Buzz Lightyear toy, so he had no problem), we settled down with Tallulah in the small chapel during a musical number of "Beautiful"and the sermon soon began (we unfortunately missed the reading of "Ain't I a Woman?") It was given by a guest speaker, a woman from a nearby town that was actively involved in politics, and had a passion for reproductive freedom. At first it was a little unsettling to be talking about contraception, teen sex, and abortion in a church setting, but her words really resonated with me, and she brought up a few issues and perspectives that I had never considered, and her peaceful and rational tone enhanced the message. After the meeting, there was coffee and cookies and fellowship. We spoke with a few people, but didn't stay long because we were hungry and Atticus started making a mess.

Overall, we really liked the service and would probably attend in the future. The UU church in Madison looks amazing, there is a congregation of 2000 (largest in the US) and they meet in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's close to where we live, and we will most likely continue to combine our Mormonism with a side of Unitarianism. I'll let Tim offer his perspective at a future time, he has more thoughts about our venture into uncorrelated Mormonism.

Summertime...

and the living is easy...

but not really when you have two little ones.

Though it's not easy, it's certainly been these things: loud, hot, tiring, super fun. I thought it was loud before Lauren and her kids arrived, and compared to now, the house was a downright ashram. Heaven help us, but they are some of the loudest kids I have ever seen [heard]. Atticus* has become a total chatterbox recently too and his vocab is expanding so rapidly we can hardly keep up (by that, I mean 90% of his talking we don't understand). Tallulah has even found her voice lately, and is cooing up a storm.

Tiring: though both my kids sleep 10 hours at night (can I get a: HALLELUJAH!) these days are exhausting! Add in miserably hot weather, lots of walking/swimming/chasing/wrestling, and by the end of the day I can barely stand. I think it is also a function of the icky food I'm eating (burgers, fries, chips, ice cream, potato salad, etc). I need to get better at keeping my body healthy so I can keep up.

Tallulah often can't keep herself up either

Like I mentioned previously, part of the reason we are tired is because it is SO. HOT. And by hot, I mean REALLY hot. Let's take a look at the weekend forecast:

To beat the heat, we plan on swimming in various pools around Columbia. So far, we have hit up Ft. Jackson, Trenholm Park public pool, our cousins' neighborhood pool, the Carroll pool in Gaston, and our bishop's backyard pool (our neighbors also have a pool that looks SO tempting all day long, but we are pretty sure they don't want us hanging around). Atticus did swimming lessons the last two weeks, and he is getting awesome at kicking his legs and will now even go under without freaking out (much).

All swammed out

^{Prior to this heat front, we had a few cool days (you know, low-90s!), and took the opportunity to hit up Riverbanks Zoo for the third time since we've been here.} 

Feeding the lorikeets, Atticus prefers to watch

This bird was way creepy and mean, hence my face

My mom with all her cute grandkids (isn't she gorgeous?)

 Not much else going on around these parts, so this is mostly a boring update for the Utah grandparents and any other friends who happen to care how cute Tallulah is. Coming soon: our conversion to Unitarian Universalists, thoughts on healthcare reform, and my new-found love of pottery.

Dimple!

Hipster oneside

^{* names have been changed for privacy purposes (aka, I'm too lazy to maintain a baby blog anymore... so yeah...)}

Haircuts all around

We went on a haircutting spree this past week. Tim cut both his and the guy's hair, and then I went to a salon and had my hair cut (for free!) from my sister's friends. Mine is a little shorter than I would have liked (I was thinking about going even shorter, but then opted for shoulder-length and it's instead at kind of an awkward in-between stage) and we discovered the guy has crazy cowlicks now that his hair is short. I'm hoping it grows back as fine and blonde as it was, but it looks like we might have lost the soft baby hair for good. Lu did not get her haircut, and she felt a little left out, but we quickly reminded her she has no hair to cut.

Our dog, Bear, also got a haircut last week, funny enough

This one shows off Tim's beard better

I am not meant to raise a toddler

I just do not have the patience for Theo these days. Not sure what happened to my sweet little boy, but somewhere between getting a new sister to mom going out of town, packing up our house, staying with three different friends in Provo, driving across the country and moving in with my parents has thrown this little guy for a loop. Maybe the adjustment for me has been even harder than for him (how much I miss having my own home and life is a whole other post). I really need to take a few deep breaths and work on my patience because the kid is exhausting it (and me). I know it's not him, that he is two and a half and his behavior is normal, expected even. I know he is going through some major upheaval in his world. I get it on a intellectual level like all the parenting books say, but actually dealing with it every day is easier read than done. And I get that he will grow out of it and mature into a quite lovely preschooler, inshallah. But GEEZ, it is frustrating and I am not a very patient person.

I miss this kid... and his great hair :(

Our friends the Lees

We made lots of really good friends during my time in Provo. But two friendships, for me (definitely not speaking for Cait) really stand out: The Lees and The Bryners. I want to do a couple of memorial posts to these great friendships. We already did a good tribute post to the Lees here, but our friendship, having lasted so long and gone so deep demands at least one more. Since we're having trouble accessing old photos from our external hard drive, we only have some recent pictures and some videos of A.G. pulling Theo and Theo and A.G. feeding Lu a bottle are up on the other blog because of too many name references.

Those videos and the following photos are from the last few days we were with the Lees. They genererous enough to let us stay with them for the last two days of our homeless stage (the rest of that stage was with Jon Bryner's mother).

The Lees were just all around great friends for us. So many of our housing decisions (pretty much every housing decision post-marriage) was made by a decision on gaining or maintaining proximity to the Lees. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of times we ate dinner together was over 100. And the number of fine conversations we had was probably at least triple that. It was great to see our kids grow together as they were all pretty close to a year apart.

So here's to you Lees. Here's to friendship.

Graduation

So, I graduated from BYU. As I'm sure it is for most college grads, the whole experience was rather anti-climatic. It's hard to feel like you've really accomplished something when your sitting in a large room full of people who have done the exact same thing as you.

I am proud of what I accomplished at BYU, however. I didn't earn any major awards or anything, but I did fairly well in a difficult major while spending a fair amount of time working or staying at home with kids while Cait worked. But most of all, I am proud of how much I've felt I've learned while at BYU. While it took me a while to learn how to get good grades, I came into BYU well prepared to learn in a non-GPA oriented fashion. If I had to choose between knowledge gathering skills and GPA gathering skills (which is not a necessary choice for a lot of people and probably wouldn't have been for me if I'd put more effort in high school), I'm glad I had the former.

I recognize, of course, that there is still an immeasurable amount of knowledge to obtain in my life, but I feel that my undergrad experience has taught me how to learn how to learn, and not just learn, but to apply that learning to life and share it in meaningful ways.

So there you have it, there is my endorsement of my experience as an undergrad at BYU. I loved the high level of spirituality at the university and that my "secular" education could mix well with my "spiritual" education. I was also constantly surprised at the high level of discourse and the openness to new and different ideas of most teachers and students (although, especially among the students there were some really closed-minded individuals). Of course, being a private, religious university, there was a lot of bias toward accepted LDS ideas, but at least that bias was almost always openly admitted to and discussed, where I feel that in other circumstances, teachers and students try to conceal a bias that everyone has, whether they admit it or not. This openess about the perspective that we all brought to "truth" really allowed for a lot of personal exploration into what my own perspective on truth was.

I came out of BYU a much more liberal and less doctrinally-oriented Mormon, but I still came out a Mormon. I don't know what would have happened if I'd gone to a university that was more generally liberal. Would I have become even more liberal, or would I have reacted against it (as I reacted the against conservatism at BYU, although I'm not sure to what extent that is true) and become more conservative. I guess we'll find out in Madison.