Two HUGE Accomplishments in Recent Days

Last week I accomplished two of my lifetime goals within a few days of each other. The first was to read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I finally finished the monster! Back story: My junior year in high school we were assigned to choose works to read from classic American literature, eventually ending up having read a thousand or so pages or something for the semester or year. Do you like how clear my memory is? Anyway, I chose Moby Dick largely because it had a lot of pages. Six hundred and fifty-five, to be exact, in the edition I had. I started off, and was immediately bored. I didn't make it beyond a hundred pages. Sadly, for perhaps the only time in my entire school career (that I can remember anyhow), at the end of the semester I added all the pages to my list anyway, telling myself it would be fine because I would just finish reading it after school was out when I had more time.

Fast forward several years. My good intention to finish reading that book still had not happened. I picked it up again several times, but each time I never got anywhere. My guilt loomed up, but the promised boredom that would result in my actually taking the time to read the thing loomed larger. Finally, two years into my marriage and a month after having my baby I bit the bullet and took Moby Dick off the shelf for the long haul. Maybe after having a baby I was more convinced of my ability to do hard things. Maybe I just finally had a bit more time on my hands whenever I sat down to nurse Peter. Whatever it was, I plowed doggedly through Moby Dick, and do you know what? It wasn't half bad. Ha ha! Turns out Melville is an engaging writer, although perhaps one with too much time on his hands. The actual story of Captain Ahab and the white whale is told in about one hundred pages. The rest of the five hundred and fifty five are dedicated to describing every aspect of whales and whaling in the 1830's you could possibly desire to know, all of which are found to be proper metaphors for varying aspects of life, and are linked by Melville as such. But by Jingo, I got through every word of the thing, and I'm a better person for it.

The other major goal I accomplished was to make sourdough bread. Maybe it doesn't sound so momentous a thing to you, but for me it is as though I have arrived when it comes to bread-baking. I was pretty nervous to try it, because making and feeding my own starter (called a levain) sounded daunting, and the whole process required about a full week before I could even attempt making the bread. But one evening I made a pre-ferment which only needed a 24 hour rest before being used for focaccia bread. The next day I ended up sleeping instead of making the bread, but we still made the meal and ate it without it, so suddenly I had this unused ferment lying around that I ought not to waste. I had read enough about making a sourdough starter to know that the pre-ferment was the beginning of one, so I thought, "What the heck?" and started feeding it regularly for a few days. On the sixth I made sourdough bread, and it turned out beautifully!


The loaves pictured above are half whole wheat flour, half white flour, and have lovely crispy crusts and tender insides. A hit! A veritable hit! Next I want to make sourdough rye bread, and then I will truly have arrived. Ha ha!

You may think I'm done posting, now that I've documented my two achievements advertised in the title. Not so. In my life these days I've got to strike while the iron is hot! So I will tell about a few more current events.

My baby will be three months old next week! I can't believe it! Here are a few pictures of our perfect little guy:






Me, loving my boy:



Peter in some of his cute outfits:



I also wanted to do a post on some of the techniques Luke and I have learned that work well with Peter. I was hoping to have pictures of everything, but for now I only have two. First we see Peter on my back in the Kozy Carrier:


There were days in the beginning, when Luke and I were still figuring out how to be parents, when Peter would cry inconsolably at night. I now realize he was probably over-tired and hungry, but at the time I was a naive new mother and didn't know what to do. During those times, one of the only ways to calm him down was to strap him onto Luke or I and take him for a vigorous walk. He loved it! We actually usually would strap him on in the front to begin with, but recently I have figured out how to get him on my back, and it's really nice for doing chores, such as the dishes.


It's hard to see in this picture, but here Peter is nicely swaddled in a blanket my mom made for us to accommodate his growing size. He sleeps best when he is swaddled, and sometimes when I know he is tired but he doesn't want to nurse to sleep, I can swaddle him up and bounce with him, and his little eyes will roll and droop, and finally close in surrender to sleep. What an angel!

Next, as mentioned above, is bouncing. Peter LOVES bouncing. Preferably on one of those big blow-up exercise balls, but the edge of the bed works too. This is another very good trick for calming him when all else fails. Sometimes he needs a triple-threat: swaddling, nursing, and bouncing all at once. Ha ha!

Peter also loves white noise. Really LOUD white noise. I'll have to post a picture of his face while our vacuum is going or when I hold him right next to the monitor. It's amazing! Several times I have been driving home from my mom's house and Peter has started to protest. Being unable to do anything else, I have turned the radio to static and blasted it in the car, and miraculously Peter has stopped and even fallen asleep. Amazing! Luke and I are now connoisseurs of good static, and have found the stations on either side of 89.1 to work quite nicely.

There remains only one more event to tell now. The other night Luke and I were doorbell-ditched with a plate of Halloween goodies and a poem accompanied by a picture of a ghost informing us that we had been "Boo-ed" and now needed to pass it on, posting the ghost on our door so other phantoms would know to keep away. We'd had things like this go on in my family neighborhood growing up, and I loved it! I had forgotten about it though, so I'm quite pleased that someone else started it in our neighborhood now. So much fun! If anyone desires to initiate such shenanigans themselves there's a website called BeenBooed.com where a ghost and poem print-out are all ready to go.

Here is a picture of the treats our phantom left:


We made oatmeal cookies with candy-corn jack-o-lantern faces to give. I was going to take a picture but I forgot in my haste to remove them from the house so we didn't eat them all instead.

September

We blessed our precious baby last Sunday. My mother-in-law still had the blessing outfit Luke wore, and Peter was barely able to squeeze into it, so he got to wear it! Just like Daddy. So cute!

Parenting has been amazing! So much has changed in our lives, and all for the better. It is without a doubt very challenging, but 90% of the time it is fun to meet the challenge. Even waking up several times a night isn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. The only time I find myself waning in enthusiasm is when Peter wakes up at three in the morning and decides to stay up for an hour or two. Luckily it doesn't happen often, and even when he does I am usually able to take a nap later on, so it's fine. Here are a few changes that are great in our lives:

We get up in the morning. Sometime between five and eight a.m. Peter wakes up, and therefore so do we. And it's wonderful! I have always struggled getting up in the morning, but once up I love it! And now that I have a baby to require it (sadly, school and work were never enough motivation for me to wake up on time), I wake up and get on with the day relatively early. Thank you Peter!

I am fearless. Just today I killed two spiders and a fly, and only let out one screech. Anything that threatens my baby will immediately be exterminated; questions will be asked later, if at all. Luke appreciates not having to wake up or come running every time there is a menacing insect now, although sometimes I still call him just to polish his knight-in-shining-armor skills. Thank you Peter!

We are far more relaxed about "gross" stuff. Poop, pee, burps, and farts no longer phase us. I am frequently soaked in spit-up or my own milk, and I just wipe it off with the nearest burp cloth like it's nothing. Thank you Peter!

We shop at the farmer's market. This is less as a result of having a baby than because we moved to Salt Lake to be closer to Luke's school, but it's a wonderful thing nonetheless. Salt Lake has the biggest farmer's market in Utah so far, and it's awesome! We are very much about supporting local farmers, and hope to learn a lot about gardening ourselves so we can have our own garden/orchard someday.

Here is Peter looking with great interest at Luke's friend Cory Smith:

Peter is a very smiley boy, but it's hard to catch him on camera. Here are my attempts:

And here I'm trying to catch him sticking out his tongue:

He has started to suck on his fist and notice his feet, which is adorable!

He also has a brand-new cousin! Blaze Williamson:

Who is much smaller than he ever was!

Peter and his Daddy are completely enamored of one another, as is apparent from the photos below:

P.S. I apologize that several of the pictures need to be rotated. By the time I figured out how, it wasn't worth redoing it.

Quizzes

What is the purpose of a quiz?

I say quizzes are an attempt to assess whether a student has learned the material. After a quiz, a grade is given which reflects how well a student did on the quiz, and how well the student learned.

Yeah yeah, we all know grading can be subjective etc. But I've just about had it with professors preaching that grades don't matter, because we all know that they do matter for several reasons.

I took a quiz this week (a take home quiz) and I was astounded when I got it back and saw that I had gotten only 7/10 right. Upon further examination, I saw that the questions that were marked wrong were something like this:

1. Instead of "fewer," I wrote "less."
2. Instead of "upper halves of the letters," I wrote "the tops of the letters."
3. Instead of "increase the leading so there is more space between lines," I wrote "adjust the leading so there is mores pace between the lines."

At first I thought "I wonder what dork in here graded my paper . . . how could you possibly not understand that I answered the questions correctly?"

I took it to the teacher and the teacher said "Um, yeah . . . I actually graded yours. You know, since it was a take home quiz, I kind of wanted it to be exactly what was in the book, so . . . yeah."

So apparently I was to fill in the blanks, not read and retain information so that I could explain it to someone if they asked me.

And so I ask, what, my friends, was the purpose of this quiz? It doesn't seem like it was to learn . . . because I did in fact learn, but anyone who saw my grade would think that i had learned poorly, and that's not the truth at all.

Poor teachers. You have difficult jobs and I think we all get frustrated with the grading system and having to kind of conform to it in the way that we teach, but I exhort you, please ask yourself from time to time "what is the purpose of this quiz, assignment, or project?" If the purpose is one other than to learn, to gain experience, etc . . . you know, a valuable use of time . . . then reconsider what you are doing.

I don't have hard feeling against said professor, said professor is great and I enjoy said professor's class. I'm sure it is difficult to always have that passion for teaching and learning burning all of the time. But maybe with a little effort we can really improve the quality of the time that is spent in the classroom.

Thank you.

More Pictures of Peter!

Peter has arrived!

Overdue

Luke has been so good about keeping this updated while I've been busy being pregnant, finishing school, etc. And this pregnancy is stretching out so long, that I decided he deserved a "pregnancy" picture, to show how well he has taken the whole thing. Here's Luke at a little over 9 months:


Doesn't he look great? Hardly any wear-and-tear at all. Ha ha ha! And here's me:


We are both so excited for Peter to get here, and are anxiously awaiting his arrival, but we're not the only ones! My fam can't hardly wait to meet him, and on Sunday night after we had a birthday dinner and vigorous game of volleyball, my sisters and mom got to work on some of my pressure points to encourage him to come:


Our darling baby is a little over a week overdue, but that just means that every day he's a little closer! Meanwhile, both mom and dad are feeling great, and are finding ways to keep busy while waiting for him to come, such as deep-cleaning the house, watching the entire Star Wars saga along with several other choice films, taking walks each night, practicing our relaxation scripts, playing with friends and family, and enjoying our time together.

We love you Peter! Please come soon!

JULY

Hi. It's Luke again!

First of all, here is Andrea at pretty much 9 months of pregnancy. She's huge in a very tiny way! We are so excited to have Peter in our arms. The official due date is tomorrow, but we both have a feeling that it'll be another week.

The other thing we are excited about is our move! We applied to the student housing at the U several months ago but as I corresponded with a girl that works there in the office, we were thinking that our chances of getting in right when we wanted to were slim, so we prepared a plan B and asked Mom and Dad Wright if we could live with them until we were offered an apartment at the U. They said they'd love to have us, and we were even getting kind of excited to live with them, but then the U called and offered us an apartment that we could move into on August 20 which works PERFECTLY!!! We were both so happy! We went and looked at the apartment immediately and although it is very small, we both feel like it is absolutely the perfect thing for our little family and we accepted the offer. So now we won't have to move in with parents after all and we will have much more time together as a family since I won't have to travel down to American Fork after my night classes. It was such an immense blessing and we're so overjoyed that it's going to work out!

New subject. The fourth of July was fun. We went and spent it with Mom and Dad Perkins and also Caleb and Lauren, and a hint of Andrew and his girlfriend. We just had a very nice relaxing day. We slept in, ate breakfast and talked until noon . . . Andrea napped, I washed our car for the first time in a year . . . we had a calm little barbecue and later that evening Lauren's parents invited us all to watch fireworks with them at Davis high. It was the first time we had seen a firework show to music and it was great! Here's a picture of the little Ho-Ho firecrackers that my Mom always makes, Andrea made them this year though.

The weekend after that we had a lot of birthdays to attend and a shower for Andrea with her family. It was a lot of fun too. These are pictures of Jackson and Alanna's combined party:

This is Jackson's Death Star cake that Caleb Made for him.

This is Jackson's other Skateboard cake with doughnut wheels (lucky boy!).

This is Alanna's Monkey cake.

When we were growing up my mom would make fun creative cakes for our birthdays like cookie monster cakes, baseball cakes, dragon cakes, etc. Sarah has definitely made the creative cake making a tradition for each of her kids birthdays. they're always really fun to see.

The first present that Alanna opened was . . . FINGERNAIL POLISH! I was amazed because she's just two years old, but she knew exactly what it was, exactly how to use it, and it was as if it was the only thing she ever wanted out of life! She tore into the package and I don't think anyone expected her to get very far but she picked some blue polish, unscrewed the lid and started trying to paint! People tried to persuade her to hold off until she had opened her other presents but she didn't care about them at all! she squealed and screamed and said her favorite word (No!) whenever anyone tried to take the polish from her so eventually we just gave in and patiently watched as she painted her nails. It was the cutest funniest thing ever!

And then here's one of the finished hand:

And while we're talking about Alanna, I have to mention that since she turned two she has immediately started liking me and acknowledging my presence etc. She'll hug me now, smile and laugh in my presence, let me hold her, wash her hands, and play with her. It's nice ya know? it's nice to try to give your niece a hug and not get stiff-armed in return :)

Sunday we had Ashton's birthday. I have to include this picture of Wilson and him:

We spent the afternoon helping with the quilt that Grandma Wright is making for Peter. The whole family got in on the quilting action. Here's Mom and Heidi:

It's going to be a really cool quilt with nine completely original and authentic patchwork illustrations by a really great guy called me :) I can't believe that Mom Wright is undertaking this huge task! It's going to be hard but she insisted on doing it so we all gave a big push to help her.

That evening we all told Ashton what we love about him and then we played a killer game of volleyball. I never had realized that there were enough people for a five on five game, and it was the most fun ever! Andrea and I can't stop talking about what a perfect, fun, friendly game it was.

And then we had this week which was fun as well but I'm done now so thanks for reading and goodnight.