Life as we know it

I have no plan for this post. That doesn't seem so unusual to most, but all of my blogs are planned out and this one isn't. I haven't even decided if I am going to actually post it or just keep it safe in a draft. I miss livejournal's ability to make some posts private, some for only friends, and some for public. Blogger should really REALLY get on the ball with that, especially since livejournal was doing it when I was in Jr. High.

This is my life right now. I have been married for over two years now, and I am further away from getting pregnant than I was when we got married. And I really want children. I have ALWAYS known that would be my highest calling in life, from when my playing pretend as a little girl was always playing house. My parents were very against forcing children to gender identify, so they bought me dolls and trucks and tools and pretend makeup kits. I chose the dolls, and I used the Tonka trucks as strollers.

*note, this is not actually me in this picture, but you get my drift.

When we considered breeding our dog Cleo I asked my mom if she would be a good mom and her question to me was "Does she 'Mother' her toys?" I'm not saying by any means that if you played with cars as a small child that you will be a bad parent - far from it. Dogs are not people, and have nowhere near the resources and intelligence and common sense that we do. But the point remains that I have been in the practice of 'Mothering' for a very long time. I have invested so much in that goal. And you know what? I WILL be a mother some day. I will hear little children scream "Mommy!" and that will be my name. It hasn't happened yet.

This "not happening" is not without trying. I have never been on the pill, and we still have the full box of condoms we got when we were married. I have spend about 8 months on fertility meds, and we know I am broken. "Perfectly healthy people, as a general rule, have no problem getting pregnant" Right? So I am in need of fixing. I can accept that this body in it's current state has almost no chance of conceiving, and even if I could it would probably be a hard pregnancy. So now I have a choice of what to do moving forward, and there MUST be a choice. I will not accept this without a plan, and no one around me would either.

1. Do nothing. Convince myself that there are other things that I should be focusing on. Throw my efforts into loving my wonderful husband, school, loosing weight, and getting a better job. If I am patient I will have less stress, my relationships will improve, and I will not be the crazy wannabe mom, who cannot exist without relating everything in her life to children and infertility and birth and pregnancy.

2. Throw myself further into fertility treatments. Spend thousands of dollars on forcing myself to get pregnant, only to be a basket-case when I see time after time that negative test. This one has the highest possibility of conceiving. There are methods I have not tried and tests I have not done and one of those could do it. It is my highest chance of getting pregnant.

3. Start the process of adoption. Get a lawyer, save up for court fees, get registered with an adoption agency, create a bubbly profile for LDS family services that justifies ourselves as the perfect place for someone's baby, because no one is going to give a baby to someone that they have any doubt will be able to take care of them. And we could wait. Wait for potentially years, being turned down because our jobs aren't stable, we don't have college degrees, we've only been married for a short time, we don't have any other children, we're too fat, our eyes aren't the right color- the list goes on. And what if there is someone who likes us enough to consider us, and we go to pickup the baby and they say "No, I'm sorry, but we've changed our minds" even though we have been supporting them through the whole pregnancy and we were so sure that it would work out. And what if that happens one, two, three times and we never ever get to bring that sweet child home?

None of those three sound anywhere close to perfect. We have decided on a mix of one and three. We will focus on other things besides getting pregnat. We will work on improving our life and our jobs. While we do that Alan and I are working on our certification to be Foster Parents. There is no need for fancy adoption blogs, and the children are so much more needful of loving people with open arms. We realize that 90% of children that we may get will be unadoptable as their birth parents work with the court to get their children back, and the ideal is for a child to be raised by loving birth parents. The whole 100% are in need of a loving home, and that is what we can give.

If you want to be a parent you have to be where there is the possibility of children, and foster care is the perfect place for us. I know that God will know if we are supposed to adopt a child. I know that we have a lot more to offer than a fancy blog will ever show. I know that we will be blessed because of the role that we play in their lives, be it for a day or a lifetime. With Alan and I both working, many people would consider us crazy for even trying, even going forward with it with no plan as to how we are going to provide for them, but we know this is what we need to do. We are going to go through the classes and become licensed. We can't be powerless to give a child safety anymore.

It's a start. It is progression. I am moving toward 'Mommy'.

Not your momma's mommy blog

First, everyone should go here and read the article "Why I Can't Stop Reading Mormon Housewife Blogs".

I totally know how she feels. Granted, there are a few things on the checklist that I have. I have various crafting abilities, I am Mormon, married, young, and I do drink a fair amount of chocolate. Of course, some things don't quite fit (I have never seen Alan willingly wear plaid, and he has perfect vision, so the glasses are out) but most of the things are similar. Then we reach the disqualifications. I have no children, I am also constantly arguing with Alan over who gets to/has to be the breadwinner, and I don't have enough energy to make more than a microwave burrito most nights, let alone construct a new kitchen table out of used popsicle sticks.

My blog layout is not coordinated, I don't have a catchy crafty blog name, and I still have not posted about the myriad of things that have happened to me over the past few months because my house is never clean during the daytime, or if it is the Camera battery needs charging.

*note to self, must blog about Moving, Christmas, Fall Pictures, Cricut, and all of the other things that have happened*

But you know what? I am doing ok. Life is not what I planned, nor is it what the "Mormon Mommy Blogs" lead me to believe my life should be, but I am ok with that. My life is at a point where it has to progress in some way before I go insane. There is change that is needed, and I don't think it's going to go in the order I planned. The kids plan isn't working and I really need to move on. Alan is considering reenlisting, which scares me to death, but I have this feeling that we really need to look into it.

So here's to hoping that the future will turn out great, and that things will work out better for me than for this guy.

22 Read, 18 Started.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ani

I have recently discovered that I am a god,

a bird,

and a prefix for a Tibetan nun.

Go figure.

Springville living

We are finally moved! Usually, moving is a way stressful experience for most people, but with every box I moved I felt better!

Oriental cravings

I should not blog while hungry. Seriously, it's bad, there are so many good recipes I've found and so little time and energy to make them with!. Today's kick is oriental food.

I am aching to try this lovely looking Wonton Tutorial by Gourmet Fury. Seriously! Don't they look so good! And so easy too! I have some boneless ribs at home that would be wonderful for it. The wonton wrappers you can get at just about any grocery store in the special produce section (walmart has them for sure).

I'm loving homemade sushi as of late! It's a lot easier to roll than I was expecting, and I love being able to put only what I want on it. There are some great video tutorials on Youtube that are great for learning how to roll it on your own. It's actually a pretty affordable meal at home depending on what you use. Alan and I love a California roll (rice on the outside) with crab, (we use imitation, I know, shame on us, but it's way cheaper and a lot easier to work with) cream cheese, avocado, and cucumber! It's especially good with a little eel sauce and a touch of spicy mayo. *EDIT: If you are looking for an alternative to the seaweed wrap for your sushi, you can use this really simple egg wrap.

My only problem with it is that I'm having real difficulty finding a good sushi rice recipe. I use a rice cooker, so the good recipes that don't require a bunch of ingredients are currently eluding me. If anyone knows of a good one please let me know!

I love the adorable little Bento boxes from Lunch in a Box. She totally makes me want to get up an hour early to make Alan and I one for work. She lists prep time for each of her boxes (most are half an hour or less, though they would probably take me significantly longer, hence the hour early for work), and there's almost 100 pages of bento goodness on her site!

I think the kitty's legs are mozzarella cheese or possibly tofu, but I could be mistaken.

(And yes, that adorable thing in the corner of the bagel box is an OctoDog, with the tutorial on that link)

Most of the dividers are silicone, so they bend and mold around the other food. My favorite are the silicone cupcake liners, because they are multi-purpose, and according to the great Alton Brown, the only single-purpose item that should be in the kitchen is the fire extinguisher.

If you're looking for a great date night with a fun twist, I love Sam Hawks Korean Restaurant in Provo, Utah. It doesn't look like much at all, but the food is SO GOOD! I love the beef Bulgogi

It's a korean BBQ beef that is to die for! You wrap it in lettuce with rice, kimchi, and other awesome goodies. If you're going in a group (5 or more) it's a good idea to call ahead and let them know you're coming, also if you know what you want order it then. They're a really small restaurant, but they are so worth the wait!

Yum!!

Creative laced tank/vest tutorial

I am planning to make one of these

With this tutorial by Ucreate

I'll probably also do it in black, with a stretchy jersey knit for the bottom rather than the lace like the example pic, Though I'm still deciding which colors to do it in. I seriously just need to spend a day of sewing at my parent's place, because my mom has the most fabulous collection of fabric, sewing machines, and crafting paraphernalia I've ever seen. One of these days Alan will have his tricked out garage and I will have my craft room sanctuary, but for now, I am happy to drive the half an hour over to their house, rather than dig my sewing machine out and re-thread it with the black, white, or brown thread that I have available.