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.

Crafty Baskets

I just finished making these little baskets and wanted to post the pictures, mainly so Bonnie can see what they look like. The plastic inserts are the bottom of a 1 gallon bottled water container, which I thought was so clever. (The pattern called for it, I'm not THAT clever.)Halloween

Fall

Christmas

You gotta be kidding

I walked into a department store in our mall today. They have Christmas decorations up. It's October, people. Can't Christmas wait at least until after my birthday? It's anybody's guess how long they've been up. I haven't been to the mall since August.

Big Jolt

Just a little while ago we were jolted by an earthquake. Actually, there was a little jolt and then a bigger one, which actually knocked a picture frame (with Donovan's picture in it!) off my shelf in my sewing room. We quickly turned on the radio expecting to hear the SF talk radio show taking calls from people about the quake and what it felt like at different points around the Bay Area. It was a timely quake, since we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake, aka The Pretty Big One (not to be confused with The Big One, 1906). Anyway, the only thing the radio talk show host said was that they had received a few calls from Pleasanton about an earthquake. Later, they mentioned that it was a 3.8 centered between Pleasanton and Sunol. I went on the USGS website and with the help of Google Earth saw where the epicenter was, probably less than 1.5 miles from our house! This on top of a freak rainstorm today that dumped almost 2 inches of rain and up to 50 mph winds! Nature gone crazy!