Sunday: Our first full day with Grammy in the house. We all went to the LDS Church in the morning and had a lovely time (I went to FUS with Atticus the night before while Cait and her mom shopped, for anyone tracking our church attendance). We had the lesson about "Teaching our Children the Gospel" from the Heber J. Grant manual, I made some pretty restrained comments and a lively discussion ensued. After church I went to the "New UU" class that we have been attending the last few weeks in preparation for becoming members and everyone else stayed home. We had a lovely chicken dinner in preparation for the Turkey dinner on Thursday, and then we all wallowed in a state of exhaustion until we all dropped off one by one to bed, and all slept soundly, except for Lula, who woke every 15 minutes. Atticus hit a record of 13 hours of uninterrupted sleep, so at least we can trust in a better future for Lula.
Monday: A day full of inside play and shopping for Grammy and Cait as the weather started to turn a little chilly. We lost one of Atticus's shoes so we had to buy him a new pair, and we found some sweet faux vintage high-tops at Stride Rite (which incidentally, is about the same price as the Target kid's shoes, and the saleswoman gave Atticus a train toy for his tracks AND sent him a card through the mail a few days later thanking him for his business. Buy local people! It's worth it!)**
Tuesday: Grammy took Lula in the morning while Atticus went to preschool so that I could get the house cleaned and our stuff ready to go to head up to the vacation home in the Dells which Grammy rented where we would be spending Thanksgiving. Cait cut out of class early so we could head up to the house a little early and we spent the rest of the afternoon settling in, having dinner at the clubhouse and deciding whether to go swimming that night or not. We decided to wait. Devin and Hillary (Cait's brother and sister-in-law) came late and we stayed up talking to them until we dropped off to sleep.
Wednesday: A day full of swimming, shopping and playing outside in beautiful weather. Atticus made friends with some other nearby kids and he and I played football with them for as long as they would let us. Atticus loves playing with bigger kids and was so sad when we had to leave. We had a sweet cookout over the fire in the backyard for dinner.
Thursday: In the morning, we took our kids swimming and Atticus tried unsuccessfully to make friends with a kid there by following him around for an hour. Thanksgiving dinner was incredible, with all of the Carroll classics. I'll let Cait gush about it later if she so pleases (edit by Cait: it was my first Thanksgiving with my mom cooking and WOW, did I miss it! We just polished off the leftovers and I already am making plans for Christmas dinner). We almost just ate at a buffet but then decided against it because Grammy is such an excellent cook. Turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, broccoli casserole, homemade cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, brussel sprouts, rolls, pecan and pumpkin pies. Gluttony at its best.
(edit by Cait) Friday: We avoided the Black Friday crowds but did go to REI later that day. We bought Lula a snowsuit and myself and my mom both bought black down parkas (everything REI brand was 50% off, it was great!) Hillary and Devin bought some jackets as well, and Atticus picked out a pair of "spiders" Bogs (not Spiderman, but Atticus can't tell the difference).
Soccer, Bieber-style
It was SO windy, and the fire took a while to get started
Terrible picture, but I failed to get a decent one, and my mom deserves some photographic credit for the delicious dinner she prepared
Atticus and his "Lincoln Log" house
** We bought them from Morgan's shoes in the Hilldale Mall -- highly recommend them! If anyone in Madison wants a $10 off the Stride Rite store, we have referrals for you :)
In Book of Mormon Girl, Joanna Brooks concludes her memoirs with a beautiful image that has stuck with me in the months since I read it: a large gathering of diverse people, chatting and sitting at a giant table. This is her dream for Mormonism. No one left out, no one made to feel like they can't contribute in their unique way.
My lovely and ever insightful sister Lauren had a wonderful conversation with me the other day, about how she wants us in the Church because she needs me to be and the Church at large needs us to be there to affect it for good in the direction of progress, not because I will surely wither away without it. And with her words, I could imagine a Mormon world where I could be a full and participating member. Though I struggle with issues in church history, I can chalk it up to the fallibility of man and the complexity of God's plan. Our short-sightedness leaves us vulnerable to misinterpretation, leading to doctrines that seem out of line with perhaps the truer principles of eternity. But right now, I can't be a full participant where my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters are excluded and even disparaged, where women are a lesser other, where doctrinal creativity and intellectual inquiry are actively discouraged. Tim tried to make an honest and open attempt to reconcile some of his upset with the gender-exclusive language of the Book of Mormon and was essentially told he was becoming an enemy of the Church and his grandchildren will be damned. Really people?! He was changing pronouns. It's amazing how ingrained the patriarchal system of the Church truly is.
If the LDS church could be a little more open to others and a little more open to questions and innovation, I think I could be more satisfied with my experience in it. I find so many of the core doctrines to be stunningly beautiful, to be breathtaking in their depth and magnitude. I want, want so desperately to partake in this beauty. I look at my wondrous children and can't help but think my love for them is more than biology, it's more than hormones and evolution's way of propagating the species. Tallulah... I knew that girl. I knew her. Emerging from my womb she had such an essence, and I stared into those eyes and I knew her for a thousand years.
we meet at last, my darling
I struggle to convince myself it is a trick of the neurons firing in my grey matter that sparked these emotions. I want to have faith in eternal families, in temples, and in the atonement as our path back to our home in the heavens, wherever that may be. And I am trying. I am praying. I am searching. I am pondering.
But the negativity and the backlash has left me discouraged. Hopeless even, that I might not ever be able to find a place at the table with my fellow Saints. On the other hand, our fellow UUs are actively encouraging us to pursue a dual-religious-affiliation household. They are urging us to retain the doctrines of the LDS church if we so choose, to fuse them with our newfound principles and the community we have found with them. Why are Mormons so afraid of other churches? Are we threatened that they might have more truth than us, in some aspect, shape, or form? Why, if I question the Mormon church's exclusive claim to truth, am I all of a sudden a terrible person?
And so, every night, I utter the same thoughts, and end with: "please, God, wherever you both may be. Find me a place at the table, amen."
Tim and I don't have a great track record with using birth control. Hormones make me weepy and crazy, I'm semi-allergie to condoms (and the lambskin ones are ridiculously expensive), and now my uterus has expelled not one, but TWO, IUDS. Before we were married, I tried to procure a diaphragm and called every pharmacy in 100 miles and though I had a prescription no one would even special order one. We even used these weird dissolving sheets that looked like Listerine strips for a while. Why won't they just approve that effing male birth control pill?!
We've even considered permanent sterilization for one of us, but life circumstances can change in an instant and I'm nervous about deciding something when we are so young. We think we are done having babies... maybe... but our baby is only 8 months old, so who knows how we will feel in two or three years. I didn't even think anyone would even sterilize a 25-yr-old, but my gynecologist said she would have no qualms about it because she "had three babies in three years during her residency" and she would "think verrrrry hard about having a third child." But she did tell me she would make me wait six months to think about it, to which I replied, "I'll be pregnant in six months if we don't figure something out." And while I'm pretty sure with the amount of breastfeeding we are doing I won't even start ovulating until Lu is a year or so, I am still so nervous about getting pregnant that I won't even risk it.
And I'm not trying here to complain about being fertile or garner any kind of sympathy. Most people would consider this a blessing. I have scores of friends who are not able to have children, and while sometimes I am slightly jealous, I can't even pretend to understand how emotionally draining it must be. It is more a gripe I have with the structures of our institutions...
I'm frustrated with the fact that I'm a liberated, educated woman in the 21st century who can't for the life of her figure out a solution. I can do statistics and learn Arabic with the best of them, but I can't actually control my fertility. And that leaves me nervous every time I have sex to where I can't really enjoy it so we aren't actually really ever doing it. Come on third-wave feminist movement, give me something to work with here! I need something easy, reliable, and with no serious side effects. Yes, please, thank you.
(and don't suggest NFP, the idea of it is so great in my head and maybe it could even work, but I would probably think I was constantly pregnant and waste a lot of money on pregnancy tests)
As it was the first Halloween where Atticus really got into, we decided to go all out and borrow costumes from our friends and trick-or-treat in our Eagle Heights neighborhood. Atticus actually really wanted to be Super Why, but I did not have the capacity to make a costume nor the money to buy one. He made a very cute penguin, and once we picked up the costume from his friend Kylie, he was more than happy to wear it (though we thought it was his size, and turned out to be a 12-18 months....)
His school had a little parade, so this is all the photographic evidence we can provide of the occasion. Tallulah was a very cute kangaroo, and maybe there is a picture of her somewhere, on some camera.
My favorite part of the evening was our Chinese neighbors exclaiming "Happy Halloween Day!" Language can be so funny.
This could also be seen as kind of a Halloween-y picture, so I included it here
Disclaimer: While I feel like I have a fairly good grasp of this topic, it's not terribly well-researched and the numbers are approximate based on several sources.
A long time ago, in a land called America, there lived a president named Ronald Reagan who reigned supreme. Everyone loved him, and he perpetuated myths of welfare dependency....
Conservatives have this long-standing belief that there are millions upon millions of Americans mooching off public coffers and stealing the money of the hard-earned tax-paying middle class.
Anyways, I think I read about 10% of Americans live below the poverty line ($21,000 abouts), most of them single mothers and children. 4.4 million Americans (approx.) are on "welfare," (that's like 1 in 75?) meaning monetary payments in the form of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). There are limits on how long you can be in the program, and the allowance is a pittance (I read on USA Today that the average allotment is something like $68 a month in Texas). Moreover, there are work requirements and you must be engaged in some kind of work activity if you can't find a job at least 30 hours a week like community service or education. If you have a child under 6, the requirements are less stringent. Now, I've never been on TANF, and I don't know how this is enforced but I know that you would have a caseworker who would make sure you were trying to find employment. Food stamps and Medicaid are more flexible, and you can be on those for longer periods of time. But they both have a work requirement as well, that varies state by state. I know when we were getting food stamps we didn't get any money for Tim because he was a full-time student, and we didn't get any money for me when I stopped working temporarily and was between jobs, even though I had a child under the age of 2. The average allotment for the SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) is $150 a month. We get about that much for our family of four with an income of $2000 a month. It helps, but it's not like we are out buying caviar (yes, we did get more when we were making less money a month, but still it wasn't THAT much).
Anyways, back to the working requirements. Apparently, only 30% of those 4 million Americans receiving TANF are not working, and my guess is most of these are single mothers of very young children. And let me tell you, I don't believe the myth that mothers are having children just to stay on welfare because FREAK, KIDS ARE HARD. If I didn't want them, I certainly would not keep intentionally getting pregnant and birthing them for $100 a month, I can tell you that. I would freaking go work because being a mother of a baby is way harder than most jobs out there, I wager. Also, I found a study somewhere that said the number of children born to poor family was not statistically higher than the number born to non-poor families. A lot of it was skewed with education level, conservative states with less access to birth control, etc.
It comes to this: are poor people just lazy? Or are structural institutions to blame for poverty? I don't think people choose to be in poverty just like I didn't choose to be born to a family with an involved mother and father who made sure I succeeded and helped me out along the way to get me where I am today. That's not to say I didn't work hard either, but in reality, I didn't really. I had wonderful teachers, a free college education courtesy of my brain and my parents and Pell grants, I had every opportunity to succeed. But most people don't. They have absent parents and overcrowded schools and cheap daycares. They are subject to sexual and physical abuse. There is so, so much structural violence in the US that keeps poor people (especially minorities) poor. What we need to do is stop judging and blaming individuals and take a step back and examine our institutions, [mis]perceptions, and how we can fix things.
If you are really concerned about welfare payments, you should be looking at corporations. The US government spends twice as much in corporate welfare payments than individual welfare payments. AND if you're worried about welfare fraud, it's a pittance compared to the money lost due to white-collar crimes and corporate fraud that takes place every year, so you should really be attacking CEOs.
PS: It actually wasn't your conservative heroes who played a part in these stricter work requirements for welfare payments Good old Bill Clinton was actually the president that "reformed" welfare in the past few decades by introducing more stringent TANF to replace the previous AFDC system. It increased work requirements and cut the number of people on the program to half between 1996 until the recession in 2007 (however, some progressives blame Clinton for ending welfare and thus hurting many families since he did not foresee the recession of the past years, and many families that could use TANF funds now do not have access to them). But yeah, if you are into that kind of thing, thank Clinton for it.
Alright everyone, Cait and I don't get out on too many dates, and we have photographic evidence of even fewer. So let's post about one of the few we do. Cait and I got some of her friends from school to come watch our kids so we could go see hunger games for free at the University a little while after it came out. We had a debate about whether or not we should leave Tallulah, and after some pressuring from me, we decided to leave her.
Only a little while after we got on the bus the sitters called to say that she wouldn't stop screaming. So after some more pressure from me to wait until we got to school, we called back and she was still crying. So one of the sitters stayed with Atticus (who was great the whole time) and the other drove Tallulah to us, and Tallulah promptly fell asleep as soon as they started driving. Cait went out to get her and I stayed in line for the movie.
We stayed at the movie until the violence started, and decided it wasn't for us. So we had a nice time waiting for the bus and talking about the place of violence in our lives (we both agreed that we would like to minimize it), we took the bus home and some nice foreign girls took our picture for us. And do you know how lucky you are? You get one with flash and one without.
Hot couple with a cute baby. You can't beat it. Also, this picture is great for showing how different my beard is in color to my hair. I know you all love when I talk about my beard in photo captions.
Alright, I'm going to dissent from the common stance of hating on Twilight for one blogpost even though I'm not sure if even I agree with what I say. But I enjoy exploring opposite points of view and this one is particularly interesting to me. This post applies only to the books, because I haven't seen any of the movies and am not as interested in talking about movies and talking about books. Also, this is repost from a comment I made on the feminist mormon housewives page, so there is a slim chance you have seen it before, but if you are so obsessed with us that you read every comment we make on Facebook, you probably wont mind reading anything we write twice.
I think one of the possible interpretations of Twilight might be that even narcissistic, excessively pessimistic people are real people too, with real emotions and feelings, who can do great things if they start believing in themselves. And that sometimes what they need to believe in themselves is another narcissistic, pessimistic person to come along, who, even though they still hate themselves, they believe in the other person.
Don't we all believe that about everyone? That everyone, deep down is a self-obsessed worrier and that one of the keys to joy in this life is to surround yourself with people who love you and see that this self-obsessed worrier isn't the real you, but who sees the potential for greatness within you.
Listen, I hate the characters in Twilight (and yes, I've read all the books). If I met them in real life, I would hate them. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real people like that out there, and that their feelings and experience are just as valid as my own. I also hate all the characters in Wuthering Heights, and yet it is still a great book (a reference that Meyers makes several times throughout the series).
Is it not possible that by showing the most extreme cases of emo self absorption, Meyers is making the argument that even the worst narcissism can be overcome when you stop thinking about yourself and start thinking instead about those you love and seeing yourself through their eyes?
We have this idea that everyone, and especially now, every woman should be fine completely on their own. That they don't need anyone else to be a happy and complete person. But maybe that is false, at least for some people. Yes, you can't be in a whole relationship unless you are a whole person, but Bella's relationship is totally screwed up until she begins to accept that she too is a person of worth, both within and outside of the relationship (which she does by understanding and then rejecting on some level Jacob's love for her.
I think maybe Bella's transformation to a strong, independent {SPOILER} vampire {END SPOILER} marks the true intention of these books. Yes, girls become obsessed with boys and boys, even when they are hundreds of years old become obsessed with girls, for no apparent reason. They become overly obsessed sometimes. We don't fault Romeo and Juliet for this obsession of youth, why should we do it with Twilight. Yes, of course Romeo and Juliet is better writing, but on this point, they seem completely similar. And rather than commit suicide, both of the people in the relationship attempt to meet the other where they are, and find some sort of compromise through a {SPOILER} terribly named baby. {END SPOILER}
Well, anyway, I think that is one interpretation. and once again, I"m not sure if even I believe it. But I challenge you to tell me why Twilight is fundamentally worse than Wuthering Heights (besides the writing, all you English majors, because maybe one definition of "good" writing is what moves people, and I would argue that Twilight has done that more than Wuthering Heights, even if her sentences aren't as beautifully constructed) If you have read this far, pat yourself on the back for considering the alternative viewpoint. I know I am patting myself on the back for writing it.
Or we should all just hate Twilight as much as Robert Pattinson apparently does:
