Iowa City

I cannot believe that there are now less than three months until Christmas! It is coming so fast! What a wonderful time of year!

Anyway, as I sit here alone watching College Football without Jon, I am not looking forward to the rest of the weekend. Jon left at noon today to head for an Emergency Medicine Regional Conference in Iowa City, IA. He is presenting some of the research which was done in the Emergency Department of UTCOM this summer. I will let him tell about the conference, since he is there. I just know he was not looking forward to going this early, because the conference is not until Monday, but there are now there Saturday night. He does not know what he will do while the rest of those he went with are off drinking and partying all weekend.

I am kind of looking forward to being able to go to my own ward on Sunday. I am not too thrilled about going by myself, but I haven't been able to attend my ward for a month. I have been going to church. I have just been attending Branch Conferences in the Stake and Stake Conference. With next week being General Conference (YEAH!!), I am glad to be able to attend my ward for one week in five.

Well, I am going to get back to watching College Football. I just wanted to let everyone know what Jon was up to for the weekend.

Bad Wife or Just a Busy One?

I do not normally like Orson Scott Card. My sister does, but I have never really been a fan. However, I read this article today and I really like it. I think too many women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints get too caught up in this kind of a thing.

(I added the pictures)

Bad Wife or Just a Busy One?

by Orson Scott Card

Published: Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

I wondered if my wife had a kind of Joan Crawford thing going on when she told me, about six years into our marriage, that she could not live with the idea of my taking my shirts to a professional laundry.

"What is it?" I asked. "The plastic bags? We can tie them in knots so the kids can never play with them."

"It's not the plastic bags!" Kristine looked so miserable. I decided to cheer her up with humor.

"The wire hangers?" I asked, pointedly.Since this was only a few years after "Mommy Dearest," she got the joke. It didn't cheer her up at all. "You think I'm some kind of monster."

"No," I said. "I don't. I think you're a very busy woman, doing things that the whole family needs you to do."

The list of what she was doing really was quite remarkable. Our then-youngest child was born with cerebral palsy, and Kristine was taking care of him along with our other two children -- and handling the family finances, and dealing with scheduling and transportation, and anything that required making a list and remembering 10 minutes later that there was such a list and where it had been put.

The traditional division of labor was not for us. I had vowed to myself before I even proposed to her that there would never be a job so loathsome, tedious or difficult that my wife could do it and I couldn't. I could clean a toilet, wash and dry dishes, cook a meal, and vacuum a floor (not in that order, of course).

When she handled the check writing, the checks went where they were supposed to go and did what they were supposed to do. When I wrote checks, they often found their way to the Great Banking Trampoline. Our lives became so much better when I no longer carried the checkbook. Ever.

And while our firstborn loved the lullabies his mommy sang to him, when it came to seriously trying to go to sleep, that was daddy's job. From infancy on, he needed a deep baritone voice to fall asleep to. (In my years of teaching, I've found that many children and adults share this trait. I'm always happy to oblige.)

In my son's case, getting him to sleep was a long, long labor. I spent years lying on the floor of his room every night, with a little slant of light from the hall letting me see and grade student papers or stories that I was going to review, and all the while, hour after hour, I'm singing the only song that he'd accept, "Away in a Manger," over and over, in every season of the year. All versions, all verses.

It was my job because he would accept no substitutes. He has no memory of this, though it persisted till he was 5. But I still dream it.

We divided the labor according to my mom's and dad's old slogan: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (None of us knew that it was an old Communist precept.)

When it came to my shirts, though, I ran into a wall of irrationality.

Because, you see, my wife had internalized the idea that a good Mormon wife irons her husband's shirts.

"So let me see if I understand this," I said. "You can't let me take my shirts to the cleaners, even though we can easily afford it, because if I do, it will mean you're a bad wife."

"Yes," she said unhappily.

"So the shirts pile up in the laundry room until there are 30 shirts there and I have to buy a new one. Or iron them myself. My mother taught me how. I have the skill. Only I don't want to iron them, I want to take them to the cleaners. Why won't you let me?"

"But if you take your shirts to the cleaners, it will mean that I've failed as a wife!"

"To whom will it mean this?" I asked. "Not to me. Not to the kids. Who else will know?"

"It'll mean that to me!" she wailed. "I know I'm being irrational, but that's how it feels."

"It also feels like a colossal waste of your time to iron them, and that's why you don't do it," I said, "because at any given moment on any day of any week of any year, you have something better to do than iron any shirts of mine."

"But if the other women in the ward found out that I ... "

And in that moment, she knew and I knew that I had won. I gloated immediately. "I thought we prided ourselves on making our own division of labor based on what worked in our marriage."

Glumly she nodded.

"Right now I own 30 shirts, all of which are in the laundry room, most of them clean and waiting to be ironed. Other men don't have to own 30 shirts in order to have a hope of a clean, ironed shirt to wear."

"Go," she said. "Take the shirts. Have them washed and pressed by the pros."

You'd have thought it was 1870 and she was giving me permission to take a plural wife.

Skip a few years. Now we shall talk about bread.

I grew up on homemade bread. There was no better food in all the world -- no, not even a spice cake with penuche icing for my birthday, not even pistachio ice cream in Brazil or France or Italy -- than my mother's bread, white or wheat, when it was still so fresh out of the oven you could barely slice it, eaten in thick slabs full of melting butter.

If they don't serve that in the celestial kingdom, I'm not going. Not that I expect my mother to bake bread every day in heaven. Once a week will do.

My wife knew this. But she is not a bread baker.

Don't misunderstand. Kristine is a great cook. She makes perfect pie crust every time. Her gravy always tastes perfect and never has lumps. And she never serves me Jell-O or anything involving Cool Whip. But for one reason or another, she never learned to make bread.

So when, in the late 1980s, I turned up with a breadmaker, she didn't view it as a cool piece of cutting edge technology. She saw it as an insult to her Mormon wifehood.

Because, just as Mormon wives had to iron their husband's shirts, they apparently also had to bake bread for their families.

"But you don't bake bread," I pointed out helpfully.

"Because I'm a terrible wife!"

"You're a wonderful wife who doesn't bake bread. Every now and then I'd like a loaf of hot fresh bread. Making bread is a lot of work and neither of us has time to do it or even time to learn. But this machine already knows how. Let's let the machine bake bread for us."

I think the machine has made two loaves of bread since 1989. Why? Because we both know that when the breadmaker comes out of the corner of the kitchen counter, my wife feels like a failure.

So we buy all our bread at Great Harvest Bread Co. It's almost as good as my mother's. If you toast it or nuke it, you can get butter to melt on it.

Somehow buying good healthy bread from a bakery is something a good Mormon wife can tolerate. But at least one good Mormon wife can't let a machine bake bread for her.

O my fellow Saints, ye males and ye females! Hearken to my voice!

There are so many ways to be a good Mormon wife. They involve taking all the talents and all the time and all the means that God has given you and using them to serve others, especially your family.

The key phrase is that you use the talents God has given you. And you use the time that you actually have.

1. Not everybody is good at everything. I can't manage money. Kristine can't write novels. So I write the books and she pays the bills.
2. Not every possible use of your time is as important as every other use. Kristine didn't have time to take care of our kids' needs (including the handicapped one), do her church callings, run our business, and learn to make bread and iron my stupid shirts.

Here's what a good Mormon wife does: Whatever must be done for the good of her family.

Here's what a good Mormon wife does not do: Beat herself up because she can't do every good thing that she's seen other Mormon wives do. There is no article of faith or temple recommend interview question dealing with shirt-ironing or bread-baking or even money-managing.

We all have our own marriages, our own talents, our own lives. Keep the commandments, be kind to each other and provident and wise with your children.

After that, whatever you do is what Good Mormon Wives and Husbands do; and whatever you don't do is obviously something that you don't have to do to be a Good Mormon Spouse.

New Dishwasher

YEAH! We got our new dishwasher! Thanks Al for putting it in and making sure it works. Doesn't it look nice?

Emergency Medicine Residency Workshop

Jon and I went to an Emergency Medicine Residency Workshop at St. V's Mercy Hospital in Downtown Toledo tonight. There was good food and very helpful information. The food was from the China One Buffet, which we of course had to find out ahead of time that it is safe Chinese. It was really good, and nice to find out there is a Chinese restaurant Jon and I go to and it is ginger-free.

For the workshop, there were two attendings that talked about things to look for when choosing an Emergency Medicine Residency and what to prepare for when you are out interviewing. All the students who attended (there were only about 20, mostly third years) were able to ask questions, too. It was very helpful information.

Test Results

I had my 6 month appointment today. I found out that I do not have gestational diabetes! I am so glad! Everything was good! I have now gained 20 pounds in my pregnancy. Also when the doctor was trying to find the heart beat, he kept moving away from her.

Jon and I are trying to figure out what we are going to do to celebrate passing my blood glucose test. We also found out that our insurance will cover the supplement (Fish Oil/DHA) I have to take with the free prenatal vitamins (free from Meijer). Very cool!

Baby Update

Here is a picture of me at 6 months (26 weeks). Also at the end of this post I will include a slide show so you can see the difference.

I had my glucose test today. I think it went okay. Hopefully, I will find out the results at my doctor's appointment tomorrow. I could feel my blood sugar dropping during the hour I waited. It felt like I am still hypoglycemic, so hopefully that is a good sign that I do not have gestational diabetes. Jenni, thanks so much for driving me in case it made me sick! I did feel a little sick, but not as bad as the last time I had to do that test.

Jon did feel our "little bean" move the other day. He was really happy, but it was not what he expected to feel. "A little ripple" is what he called it.

St. Mary's

Sunday morning, Jon and I headed to St. Mary's, OH for another Branch Conference. We had to leave at 7:30 so I could be there by 9:30 for a pre-conference meeting. It was a really nice morning. There was fog rising off the ground everywhere. It looked really cool and was a great sign that fall is here. We also got to see the sun rise. It was reddish pink until it got about the fog. So beautiful!

The conference went really well. I taught a combined YM/YW class with Dusty Watson, a member of the Stake YM Presidency and my ward. The youth seemed more into the lesson than the week before (I was in Wauseon).

The branch building was fairly new and really nice. I love the green steeple on top! That is actually how we found it. I have discovered that getting lost on the way to a Unit Conference is just part of the experience. Everyone I have been to (except my own ward), we have gotten lost trying to get to the building. Well, this time was no different, but it was not our fault. The directions from Map Quest were wrong. They had the wrong name for a few of the streets. Luckily when we were back tracking I saw the Chapel and we were able to find the correct roads.

The branch had made lunch for the stake leaders who were there. Too bad for Brother Davis. Brother Davis, the Stake YM President, had invited Dusty, Courtnee, Jon and me over to his house for lunch. I actually eat at both places and both were really good! When the meetings were done we headed to New Bremen for lunch at the Davis's.

SIDE NOTE: Yes they are related to the Davis's in Idaho Falls. I went to high school with Brother Davis's (the one here in Ohio) nephew. His parents and brother's family live in my parents' stake. Small world!

Anyway, we had a wonderful meal with Brother and Sister Davis. They have a very nice home. It is older, and they are fixing it up, but it was fun. It even has the old radiators that really work.

Then, we headed for home. We got home at 5:30 and just lounged around the rest of the day. Jon said he felt like he missed out since he was not at our ward's meetings. I feel inactive. I have not been to our ward in three weeks. We had Stake Conference, then I was at Branch Conference in Wauseon, and the I was at Branch Conference in St. Mary's. I will probably be there this week, but by myself, since Jon will be in Iowa for a Conference related to the research he did this summer. And then the next week is General Conference. Crazy!!

Dinner at the Beck's

Jon and I had a meeting to talk about how youth conference went this last year. Along with the meeting, President Beck, the 1st Counselor in our Stake Presidency, made dinner for all involved.

We talked about all the things that were good about youth conference, all the things we wish we knew before hand, and all to things that should be changed. It was good to talk about it. Now we will type these things up and pass them on to whoever does the next Wilderness Youth Conference in four years.

For dinner, we had turkey (cooked on the grill), acorn squash (made like mashed potatoes), homemade coleslaw, tomatoes with cheese and balsamic vinegar, rolls, cranberry sauce.... It was so good! The turkey was really moist. For dessert, we had Handel's Ice Cream with fresh peaches. It was a fun night to get together with other members of our stake and talk over dinner.

Jon even got to feed the neighbor's horse. President Beck has a beautiful house and yard. There is a forest with a stream in his back yard. It was a nice neighborhood too.

On our way home, Jon and I saw an interesting car. It was either a Lamborghini or Ferrari. We weren't really sure, but it was weird to see a car like that driving around in Toledo. Too bad I didn't get a picture.

Baby Stuff

After my meetings on Thursday, Jon and I picked up some free baby stuff. The Wahlquists were nice enough to give us a lot of their baby things. They just sold their house here in Toledo and were ready to give it away. Now besides just having a crib, which I got from my sister (Thanks, Kelli!) and a dresser, with Jon's name written all over it, we also have a stroller, swing, tub, and bouncer.

Here are some pictures of what we picked up Thursday night.

THANKS KENNA AND MARC!!!!!

Meetings

Thursday night, I had my third Thursday Stake Meetings. We put together a schedule an budget for 2009. It has to be in to the Stake Presidency by the end of the month to be approved. I am pretty excited for some of them. The activities should be lots of fun! Right before Standards Night, we had a planning meeting with the youth. They came up with lots of really good ideas for activities. Sadly, we could not use all of them. Since we have been asked by Salt Lake to cut back, we could not even use all of the top 8, but we did our best to work in as many of their ideas as possible, and the activities will be longer.

It was a long meeting to get everything figured out, but it was a good experience to be able to be involved in the process. I hope all involved have a good time.

Problems with Appliances

A few times this summer, Jon and I have had to call our apartment office to have our air conditioner fixed. We have had a few nights where it got to 90 degrees in our apartment because we had to wait for the air conditioning guy to come. Well, now we are at the point we can just have the windows open. It is wonderful! There is talk of a new air conditioner for next summer, even though this was a new one.

Now we are having problems with our dishwasher. The inside of it is turning yellow/brown. Not very reassuring that the dishes are getting clean when the inside of the dishwasher looks so gross, which you cannot really see in this picture. Also something I have always thought a little weird is the duck tape. What's up with that? Al (our fix-it guy) said we are going to get a new dishwasher, because it is old and he doesn't know what else the problem could be. Yeah! The sad part is I will have to wash dishes by hand until the new dishwasher comes on Monday or Tuesday. Thus is life, I guess.

Wauseon

Sunday morning, I went with the Stake YW President to the branch conference in Wauseon, Ohio. Thankfully Sister Chase was feeling better, or I would have had to go by myself and fill in for her. I know I would have gotten really lost trying to get there, since we did get lost and Sister Chase had been there many times.

I really like Wauseon. It is a nice farming community, and the branch has great people in it. There were a ton of corn fields, which we drove by on our way. It is only about half an hour from Toledo (of course, I went from Haskins on back roads, so it might take less time from Toledo).

The youth always amaze me. They are great! I have really enjoyed going to different wards and branches around Northwest Ohio, and getting to know the youth better.

Youth Standards Night

Saturday night was Youth Standards Night for our stake. I am surprised that it came together and worked out great. There were a lot of stressful days leading up to this event. We had many people, who were supposed to participate, discover they could not be there, and we had to scramble many times for someone to fill in for them.

The day before, the Stake YW President came down with the flu. Since I had been working closely with her to get everything ready, I got the be in charge at that point. I am so grateful to those who filled in at the very last minute, to those who help set up, and to those in charge of food and drinks. They made the night run more smoothly. I am also really gald I am not normally in charge of things.

I never had a Standards Night like this one when I was in Young Women's. We always had a speaker that would talk for an hour and then we would have refreshments. Our parents were invited. It was more like a stake fireside.

Here they do classes for the youth to pick from. Each class is about a different standard from the "For the Strength of Youth" pamphlet. This year they did a class for the parents to let the parents know what exactly the youth do in Young Men's and Young Women's, and what resources there are out there from the church to help them with their youth. The five classes, which the youth were able to pick three, were: Choice and Accountability, Dating, Honesty, Physical Health, and Sexual Purity. There also was an over all theme that was tied into all of the classes. We used the church wide theme for the youth, Mosiah 5:15, "Be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in good works...."

I made sure everything ran smoothly. I checked on each teacher to make sure they had what they needed. The youth and parents seemed to enjoy themselves. I heard only good things. The clean up went faster then I expected, but the YM President, Brother Davis, took charge of getting the building looking better then we found it.

It was a good night, but I am really glad it is over. My feet were really sore and swollen. It was nice to come home (and find out how College Football had gone).

Watering the Lawn?

Jon and I went for a walk after dinner, which was something Elder Kikuchi had said in Stake Conference that married couple should do. As we were walking through a neighborhood in Maumee, we saw something that was a little weird. First I should say that not many Ohioans water their lawns. Most of the time there is enough rain that it is not needed. Recently, we have not gotten much rain and lawns around town look really sad. It's almost like home.

Anyway, we were walking down the street and there was a guy putting out a sprinkler to water his lawn. He placed it right in the middle of the sidewalk. That way it watered the grass between the sidewalk and the road and the grass in front of his house. He's a multitasker. It was just a little weird to see him put a sprinkler on the sidewalk and leave it. Does the side walk need water?