pretty baby

I'm in North Carolina and it is freezing cold. Apparently, it is the coldest week of the year here. That goes right along with the luck I had going to Colorado last April. But that fact is far outweighed by the opportunity to help with this 5th grandchild. Isn't Annabelle pretty?We had a wonderful opportunity to get acquainted last night on and off between 12:30 am and 5:00 am.

New Year's Eve hope

On December 31, at 12:19 pm, this girl:Gave birth to this girl:And in two days, I get to hug both of them. I'm very excited. I've been embroidering up a storm. Her name will be on everything! If you want more details go here.

Christmas joy

The Christmas season has come and gone. It was filled with shopping, candy making, decorating, trips to the airport, practices and performances, parties, cooking and eating great food, game playing, movie watching, and just general fun. In short, time with family and friends. A glimpse of heaven. The most delightful Christmas card we received was from an elderly woman in our ward. That she would send us a card was unexpected given that we've only lived here for a year and a half. That she would be so hilarious was even more unexpected. She writes:

Dear Wanda and husband (forgot his first name *frowny face picture*) Wanda - you did it again!! The choir sang beautifully!! Sorry about forgetting HIS 1st name!! Does old age (84) give me an excuse? It's the only, only excuse I can think of (and I'm really trying hard to think of it!!!) Anyway - have a Happy New Year! What's-his-name is a really great teacher - I always enjoy his "lead in" remarks. Sincerely, Gwenn

I just cracked up! (Mark is the gospel doctrine teacher in Sunday School and I am the choir director.) But it made both of us feel really good and it made us stop and think about expressing gratitude more often to people for the things they do. I think that this year I'd like to be more thoughtful of people. This year, for the first time, we had only the youngest three children here for Christmas morning. We still had 20 family and friends for Christmas Eve dinner, which was great fun and the prime rib turned out superb in spite of me! But the next morning we started later than usual and it was a little more quiet and relaxed, which was nice. Here are the three coming down the stairs Christmas morning: David got a new phone and the stupid war game he wanted.This house's front yard is smaller than our old house and has fewer bushes and trees, so we don't have quite the dazzling display as before, but it's not too bad. We don't have quite the location for drive-byes either, and the upper roof line is inaccessible even with our gigantic ladder because the lower roof line is in the way. But we do our best:

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.....

On the way to Seminary on Monday morning in the dark, the announcer on the radio said something about snow down to the 1,000 foot level. It didn't really register with me until we heard a thud outside my classroom door (to the outside) and a student walked in laughing and brushing himself off. His friend had collected enough snow from his car to make a snowball and launch it at him. (Some of the kids live in the hills and had snow on their cars.) When I got home from Seminary, I took some pictures from my driveway of our nearby hills:Snow this low happens only once every 15 years or so in California, so it is really exciting to us. Later in the day I took this picture to show the blue sky and snow:Saturday night at our Ward Christmas Party, the Madrigal Choir from Mountain View High School had performed some beautiful Christmas music. Sunday evening we had gone up to Temple Hill in Oakland and heard a concert by the Blackhawk Choir that my sister-in-law, Nancy, is in. There were about 130 people in their choir and they sounded really great. My favorite number was a clever Jingle Bells arrangement to the music of the Nutcracker. All of this wonderful music combined with the dusting of snow has made it feel more like Christmas around here. I know that it is a stressful time of year for musicians, as my niece Lisa was bemoaning, but those of us who are listening and enjoying really appreciate all of the hard work that goes into the Christmas concerts. It gets the rest of us in the holiday mood.

Happy Birthday, Laura!

Sometimes you can tell a lot about a child's personality before they are born. The birthing process can be an indication of things to come. Some come into the world like gangbusters (what ARE gangbusters?) as if they can't wait to get started in life (Becca) or some so quickly and unobtrusively, you feel like you almost missed it (Allison).If you know Laura, it will be no surprise to learn that she came into this world at her own pace. She wouldn't be hurried. It didn't matter that with my previous two children (first births don't count!), I delivered them within 2 1/2 hours of getting to the hospital. This held true for the two births after Laura as well. So when we arrived at the hospital on November 7th around 8:00 am, Mark was in his suit, prepared to go on into the office in San Francisco after witnessing this 4th child's birth. However, Laura had a different agenda. She took her sweet time. The contractions spread out, so it wasn't a harder labor, just an inefficient labor. She waltzed into the world at 1:15 pm. I know that it irritates some of my other children, but Laura was a perfect baby. Her APGAR score was a 10. The nurse said she'd only seen one other 10, and that was a pediatrician's child. But more than that, she was an easy baby, an easy teenager, just an all around easy-going young woman. Her outlook on life is upbeat. She looks for the good in people and experiences. One year, when she was playing Little League Baseball, she went to tryouts by herself (it was at the school across the street from our house.) Tryouts consisted of them pitching three balls to you, hitting three high flies to you, and hitting three grounders to you. When she came home, this is the conversation we had: Me: How did tryouts go? Laura: Good. Me: Did you hit any of the pitches? Laura: No. Me: Did you catch any of the high flies? Laura: No. Me: Did you get any of the grounders? Laura: No.But she thought tryouts went well.... This makes Laura sound more unathletic than she really is. She's always up for trying something new. She played baseball, she was on the swim team, she played soccer, she took piano lessons, she took flute lessons, she took voice lessons (David thought she said she was taking BOY lessons), she did well in school. When Mark gave her a name and a blessing as an infant, he blessed her with a sense of humor. I was sort of surprised, I had never heard anyone do that before, and I remember thinking that she would need it in this family. I mean things were pretty chaotic with an 8, 5, and 3 year old besides her. But what I've come to realize is that yes, Laura has a good sense of humor (like the rest of my children), but with Laura it's more like BEING in good humor. When she was about 18 months old, I wrote in my journal: "Lots of people will tell me how good-natured and happy she seems to be - and she really is. Everything is a joke to her. I wonder what she'll be like when she's older."Interestingly enough, Laura was born a year and a day after my miscarriage. I felt like I had been pregnant an awfully long time and I had gone through morning sickness twice to get her. Was it worth the wait? I think so.

good (or bad) hair

*warning: some images in the post may be disturbing. Proceed with caution! I've always felt like Oprah and I share one thing in common: our hair. Obviously, her hair is a different color than mine, but I've had about as many different hairstyles, and I thought my hair had about the same texture and required the same amount of work. But seeing the movie Good Hair a couple of weeks ago changed my mind. I was amazed at what black women (and men) go through to have good hair. The chemicals they use to straighten their hair are so strong that they can burn your scalp. (I'm sure any straightener CAN burn your scalp, but these chemicals are much stronger.) The process of getting a "weave" is not only time consuming, but costly. Like $1,000. And these were not wealthy people. These were school teachers and day care providers. Anyway, it started me thinking about my "troublesome" hair and I decided I wasn't so bad off after all. I started out life with hair that was thick, manageable, and with just enough body to hold a curl. My mother did such a great job with my hair, that there were many pictures of me from the back.But somewhere about the time I finished 7th grade, my hair turned on me. I entered puberty and my hair changed to being coarse, wiry, and frizzy. I tried to pull off the popular "flip" hairstyle. Check out those bangs and cat-eye glasses! This is a reminder of how awkward junior high was.By the end of high school I had tried various things to make my hair straight. I tried ironing it. I tried a relaxer called "Curl Free" that was supposed to make my hair straight. It didn't. I toyed with trying the relaxer with the black girl on the box... I was sure my hair had more in common with hers. I settled for setting my hair on 3" diameter rollers while my hair was wet so that I could wind it tightly making it would as smooth as possible. This, however, required me to have my soft-bonnet hair dryer on for 3 hours so that it would dry. Twelve hours in rollers was not enough--it would still be wet in the morning, so I usually ended up going to bed with the hair dryer on and waking up in the night and turning it off. I'm sure that wasn't a fire hazard or anything. (Note: blow-dryers hadn't come on the scene yet, neither had straighteners.)Even though I lived in Ventura, close to the ocean, I disliked going to the beach because of what it would do to my hair. Hours of work could be undone just by going to school on a foggy day! Oh how I longed for swingy hair that would dry straight. When I got married, I decided I had to wear it short. The blow dryer had been invented, so that was a help..... but big hair can sometimes overpower the face! I've spent a greater part of my life fighting with my hair. Sometimes I've embraced the waviness and put gel on it, but I've never really liked it that way for a couple of reasons: 1. once you gel it you can't touch it 2. you have to gel it while it's still wet and since my hair takes forever to dry, it's usually wet all day. I hate having wet hair. 3. once you sleep on it, you have to wet it again to get it to look good, see #2Various appliances have been invented over the years to assist people with hair like mine, but it still takes time. A lot of time. A full 15 minutes to dry the hair until it looks like this: And then another 20-30 minutes to use the large barrel curling iron so that you look normal. When my children were young, I didn't have that much time to spend on my hair, so I usually wore it short. Or somewhat short.I occasionally tried wearing it long, sometimes with disastrous results! What was I thinking??I don't think you people with naturally straight hair know how good you have it. My mother-in-law used to tell me that I was so lucky to have curly hair. Uh, no, you mean frizzy hair? Lucky? So, you people with straight hair? Doesn't this make you happy for the hair you have? If it doesn't, go see the movie.

Alyce

My sister-in-law, Alyce, would have been 66 years old today. Hers is an easy birthday to remember, the day before Halloween. It's hard to believe that she lost her battle with lymphoma 20 years ago last August. We moved into a house just 4 doors down from her and her family in 1979 when Mark graduated from law school and we had just 2 children. It was our first experience living away from the cocoon of BYU where hundreds of other young, married couples struggled to make ends meet until they hit the big time. Since Alyce was 10 years older than me, she was the veteran who showed me the ropes. She had all the experience in areas that I lacked: motherhood, church callings, cooking, enrolling your child in school and soccer, savoring life. She was my first friend in the neighborhood/church/city and my best friend for those 10 years until her death. If my phone rang at 9:00 am, I knew it was Alyce, doing her dishes and needing someone to talk to while she did it. After my 'hello', her cheerful voice on the other end would exclaim, "Hi, there!" We would talk for about 20 minutes about this and that while we both cleaned up our kitchens (no cordless phones then!) Very often in the afternoon, I would take the kids and walk down to chat with her amid the hubbub which was the Rawlings family after school. She found humor in situations where I might have gotten upset. She understood that kids were, well, kids. Two years after we moved to the area, Mark and I began having a yearly Halloween party. The couples always came in very imaginative costumes. We had been having these parties for about 2 years, and on the third year I let everyone know, except Alyce, that we were going to have a surprise 40th birthday party for her. They should still wear their Halloween costume, but just make it into an aged person. So we had a gray-haired Raggedy Ann and Andy, cheerleaders with gray hair, aging hippies, etc. The theme for the party? We were having a funeral, with the words "Forty Can Be Fatal" on a banner. I was asked by some of the more sensitive party goers if Alyce would be offended. Hah! She'd love it. (And she did.) Alyce just thought it was my usual Halloween party. She and Richard came as a nun and priest. Perfect. We printed up programs that said 'In Memory Of Alyce' and Mark was the minister and gave the eulogy which was more like standup comedy. Phil Urie sang a song with words changed which we giggled through. Sharon Laguna and I had gone to a cemetery and were given old dried up flower arrangements from off of the graves. We had a coffin cake made with red-haired Alyce smiling inside: She thought it was hilarious. Notice her dead bouquet.We had a wonderful time, but looking back, how could we know that in 4 years she would be diagnosed with lymphoma and all too soon (2 years after that), we would be attending Alyce's real funeral? I have vivid memories of Alyce. Sitting on her front lawn in the cool of the evening after a hot summer day, serving up root beer floats to kids as they took a break from playing "Jail." Opening my front door and seeing her tear-streaked face with clumps of hair in her hands as the effects of chemo-therapy took its toll. Visiting her while she was bed-bound and her telling me how she wished she was well enough to just go to the grocery store, that would be a welcome change. Or how much she missed going to her children's soccer games. She taught me to relish the mundane and appreciate being out of doors relaxing instead of thinking I had to be accomplishing something every minute. Thanks, Alyce.