A Posting of Pictures

Joseph loves snuggling his stuffed animals. Those are 2 of his favorites. He woke up and crawled into his room to play. I heard cute little noises coming from there, so I looked in and saw him snuggling his little friends. He makes cute, squeaky noises when he's snuggling them.

My new haircut! It's a weird angle that Mitchell took it from and my face looks greasy, too. But my haircut is amazing! I love it. It's the first haircut I've had in almost 2 years. It was so nice to get all the dead ends cut off. I went to a salon that's really close to our house. When I walked in, about 20 black ladies were staring at me as if to say, "What do you think you're doing in here?" I stayed and ended up getting the best haircut I've ever had. She even curled it for me!

Modeling the yoga pants Mitchell got me for our Anniversary. I love them! I would wear them everywhere if I could.

Mitchell with his Anniversary present from me. It's a towel. He laughed so hard when he opened it. It's the perfect gift for him. We use very unconventional terms of endearment for each other, including Butt Face. Mitchell's family hates it, and the funny thing is I don't remember why we started doing it, but we have fun with each other and it works for us. We're starting to stop, though, because we don't want Joseph to think it's okay to use those names with other people. I know it's weird. We ARE weird.

My Biggest Regret and Greatest Desire

I am not feeling very happy this morning. My dreams last night have put me in a sort of depressed mood. On a regular basis, I have bad dreams about my self-perceived failure to get an education. In the dreams, I am usually at a school with an extremely heavy load, but I only go so some of my classes and I never do any homework. I'm also usually repeating my 12th grade year in high school.

My dreams are a skewed version of reality. I was homeschooled my senior year because I was having multiple major surgeries that made it impossible for me to leave the house. I didn't even do very much homeschool work because the combination of the healing process, the pain, and the drugs made me very tired and my brain very slow. I got my GED when I was finished with the surgeries. I didn't have any trouble with that at all. But school has always been very important to me, so I didn't ever feel like I really graduated. When I was finally done with all the surgeries (it nearly 3 years), I decided I could try to do some college work. Popi gave me money to enroll in some online BYU courses. Stupidly, I chose 4 very heavy classes. 16 credits after 3 years of no school is not a smart idea. When I started the classes, I was staying at my aunt's house in Reno. Those 2 months are the most serene and peaceful of my whole life. I was doing great on my classes and I felt so good about them. Then my life got crazier than it had ever been in my whole life. Within the next year I: had my wisdom teeth out in 4 separate and painful appointment, got dry socket and an infection, got engaged, moved across country, got married, got pregnant and ridiculously sick with the morning sickness, moved across country again, became really depressed, and had a baby. Because of all the turmoil and upheaval, I didn't finish my classes. It has become one of the things I most regret in my life. I'm constantly dreaming about that failure.

Now I have a 1 year old and I'm pregnant again. I feel like it will be a decade or so before I'll finally have the chance to go to college. The hardest part is that going to college was one of the biggest dreams I had growing up. I miss learning so much! I feel kind of stuck right now. I thought about doing one of the free BYU courses, but I can't afford to buy the required reading. I sometimes get jealous of Mitchell because he's going to school and having a great time learning all these things that he's always wanted to. He gets jealous of me because he's so busy and I'm not at all. I don't know what to do with myself. My brain feels like it's starving.

Book Reviews

I'm going to review my first 10 books, so that if anyone is interested they can read them, too.

1. The Fellowship of the Ring - Recommended: Yes. I really liked reading this. I never attempted it when I was younger and finally decided to. I liked a lot of the stuff that wasn't included in the movies. I'm struggling to finish Two Towers, though (I've been working on it since January). I always have a hard time with the movie, too. I think that the part with Sam and Frodo travelling is so boring.

2. Pyramids - Recommended: Yes! I LOVE Terry Pratchett. Mitchell introduced me to his books when we got married. He's one of the only authors that Mitchell will read because it has to be really captivating to get his attention. Terry Pratchett is sarcastic and cynical in a hilarious way. His books are parodies of our world and they are so great. I recommend starting with The Color of Magic first because it is the first book. And just like Harry Potter, the first 2 or 3 chapters can be hard to get through, but once you do, it's worth it.

3. Enchantment - Recommended: No. It was an interesting retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story and I liked that part. The reason that I don't recommend it is 1) the language and 2) lots of inappropriate parts, to put it delicately. I think it ruined the book even more for me because I know that Orson Scott Card is a member of the Church. My sister-in-law actually works for him and is best friends with his daughter. She's gone to Sacrament Meeting with him! He should know better.

4. A Telling of the Tales - Recommended: Sure, if you like fairy tales. It was a lot of short stories about different fairy tales and tall tales. I like the style of the author. I thought the Sleeping Beauty re-telling was funny. And I really liked reading the stories about Paul Bunyan and John Henry.

5. Spindle's End - Recommended: Yes. It was great! I just really liked the way it was written. I liked the way that magic was portrayed. I liked the ending.

6. Bobbi Brown Beauty - Recommended: Yes. It's the first of her books, and if you were only going to read one, I'd recommend the most recent one, but it's still really good. It has a lot of tips and tricks that the other ones don't have.

7. Never After - Recommended: Yes. It was hilarious. It pulled together many different fairy tales and put funny spins on them. The only part I didn't like was the names of the characters. Many of them seemed like tongue twisters. Even if I'm not reading it out loud, I'm still reading it in my head and I don't want to constantly stumble over names.

8. Kissing the Witch - Recommended: No. I didn't like it at all. I don't even know why I finished it. It was interesting because the author tied together many different fairy tales, but other than that I hated it.

9. Untold Tales - Recommended: Yeah. Another collection of short stories. All of the fairy tales were given a funny twist and then tied together in the end.

10. Bobbi Brown Beauty Evolution - Recommended: Yes. Her second book. I like that she includes a chapter for all the different decades of ages, all the way up to 70 years! And she has a good chapter on pregnancy.

Joseph is a Rock Star

Joseph LOVES to dance. He also loves rock music. Since before he was born, that has been his music of choice. He used to dance in my belly when Mitchell would play his music. Yesterday, Mitchell was listening to something and Joseph started dancing all crazy. It was really cute.


Some of his favorite music includes (Don't feel obligated to watch all of these. I know that this is not the musical taste of many of you. Joseph has his daddy's taste in music):

Yngwie Malmsteen

Steve Vai

Michael Jackson (his favorite is Rock With You, but I can't get a video)

Queen

Deep Purple

and Europe

Triple Threat

Yesterday was Easter, General Conference, and our 2nd Anniversary! Mitchell said it was a triple threat. I'm going to separate each part to make it easier.

Easter:

Mitchell had a basket set outside the bedroom door and eggs and things hidden around the room for Joseph when he woke up. He had a great time finding the eggs. He was shaking them and then figured out how to open and started throwing the candy around. Later in the afternoon, I fell asleep without picking up all the candy and he figured out how to eat it, so all evening he was on a major sugar high and crawling around the house like a maniac. I had to give him a bath because he was so sticky. We had lunch with Mitchell's mom and sister between sessions and it was really nice. It was a really good Easter. One of the things we got Joseph is a board book of the first Easter. It's really beautiful and it will be wonderful to read every year.

Coming out to find his sheep and basket.

Finding his Easter book.

His first egg.

Trying to pose with the monkey that Grandma Pyle gave him.

2 more eggs.

General Conference:

We went to the church to watch the first session. It was so wonderful. I think my favorite talk was President Uchtdorf's. I also noticed that many talks over the weekend included a lot about the importance of families, teaching your children, and being a good parent. I liked that. My family is the most important thing to me. We had to leave towards the beginning of President Monson's talk because I suddenly started having a really bad allergy attack and my throat was swelling up. I still don't really know what caused it. The 2 Benadryl I had to take kicked in when the second session started, so I unintentionally slept through the whole thing. We'll watch the talks we missed as FHE lessons.

Anniversary:

We like to follow the gift list for anniversaries just because it makes it fun. The 2nd anniversary is cotton. So Mitchell got me 2 pairs of Victoria's Secret yoga pants that I've been wanting. They are black with a color on the waistband; one pair is hot pink and the other is purple leopard print. I love them, I'm even wearing a pair right now. They are so comfortable, too. For some reason, the gift I got him wasn't shipped until 3 days after I bought it, so it's not here yet. I'm annoyed because I payed extra so it would get here in time. I'm probably going to call and get my money back. I'll post of picture of it after he gets it, in case he saw my blog beforehand. We broke the Sabbath and went out to eat dinner together. We went to Yukon Steakhouse, which is a place his dad used to take them on some Sundays when he had them for the weekend. We had a good time and I was glad I didn't have to cook because I was still out of it from the Benadryl. We watched a movie together when we got home. It was a really good anniversary. We always have so much fun buying each other gifts. I know we'll have fun next year, too. And maybe our anniversary won't be on a Sunday.

Hide And Seek

This is Joseph's favorite way to play hide and seek, with Daddy's hats. Once, he put it on and then started crawling around. He ran right into the closed bathroom door. He was surprised, but started laughing because I was laughing so hard.


He will also go sit behind something and then lean out and smile at me and then hide again. It always makes me laugh. I think he has the cutest smile ever, it's very infectious. If I'm in a bad mood and he smiles at me, it always makes me feel better.

Middle Names

I am 80% sure that I am having a girl. It's just a feeling. I knew Joseph was going to be Joseph from the very first of the pregnancy. I knew he was going to be born on the 16th nearly a month before he was born. And at the beginning of my labor, which was around 13 hours, I knew that he would be born around 4 AM (4:46 AM). So, I'm trusting my feelings for now and thinking that this baby will be a girl.

I already know that I want her name to be Anne. I've known that I would have an Anne since Mitchell and I were engaged. But Mitchell doesn't like the middle name that I wanted. I wanted Cordelia, but Mitchell and his brother, Ross, say it sounds like cornucopia too much. So I have no middle names. Mitchell wanted Annabelle, but we determined that Annabelle Ellis sounds awful.

Anyone have ideas?