Belly Time

Thanks for all the nice words and wishes!

Since a pregnant woman's belly is public domain, I've gotten a few requests to show off mine. Well, unfortunately I don't have any pictures yet of my belly, but for those of you belly enthusiasts who are so anxious for a really good belly picture, let me satiate your desire with the following. It will have to hold you off until I get some pictures of myself:

(p.s. To this guy who accidentally walked through a picture we were taking a few years ago, if you are somehow reading this right now...uh....sorry.)

Year-End Cheer

We had a lot of reasons to be happy at the end of 2009. First, we had a warm and cozy Christmas with our family, eating chocolate, playing games, watching football...napping while everyone else is watching football. We spent Christmas morning in our jammies opening presents with my mom and dad in the same room where I had opened Christmas morning presents on the twenty previous Christmases. And it was wonderful!

Roo got me this:

It is a drawing pad that you use to draw and paint digitally--that means on the computer. I've never used one, but Roo knows I aspire to be an artist so it was a very clever gift on his part.

I got Roo a surround sound system to make the orc snarls on Lord of the Rings even louder and more grotesque. He got to hooking it up right away. But what he really wanted (but unfortunately didn't get) was this Plush Taunton Sleeping Bag because, as we all know, Roo aspires to be a Jedi. And if you get to sleep in a plush Taunton when you're a Jedi, who can blame him? The zipper pull is a light saber and the inside lining of the bag looks like Taunton intestines--and you thought they smelled bad on the outside!

Lando and Chase got to run back and forth through the house as fast as they could, since Christmas had overloaded their senses and running back and forth and barking seemed to be all that they were capable of doing.

Leia got to sleep on the jigsaw puzzle:

We watched Harry Potter (love it!) and Sherlock Holmes (liked it, especially how authentic it was. It had me craving London for a week) and Avatar (which had Roo scoffing for a week), we (mostly just Roo) played volleyball, we went shopping, we slept in the family room (that was actually a mistake and we deeply regreted it the next morning), we visited all the grandparents, and we finally got someone to play Settlers of Catan with us (we got that game for Christmas last year and hadn't convinced anyone to play with us since).

But none of that was the best part. For me, the best part came at the doctor's office when he put a cool wand to my tummy, and Roo, my mom, and I got to hear the miraculous pulsing of a tiny, racing heart coming from inside my body. The hearbeat belongs to our baby, which by now is about the size of a lemon and almost four months old. About four months ago, I had just had a miscarriage and consequently decided to put off trying to have a baby until next year or so...or forever. And it seems that's all it took (well, that's not all...) to get me pregnant again almost immediately. I was initially flustered/annoyed/afraid of what could potentially happen again, but with each day my hope grew a little bolder until that day in the doctor's office when I heard proof that the little embryo was becoming a little person and my hope bloomed. This is my third pregnancy and the first time I've ever heard a heartbeat coming from my body that wasn't my own. I don't regret the other two pregnancies, the ones that didn't work out. It was those experiences that taught me about the power and peace of the Atonement. And I am as grateful for that as I am today for my ever burgeoning belly.

So here's to a new year and hoping that the third time is a charm!

Season's Greetings!

Apparently Roo isn't real keen on mailing out Christmas cards to all our friends and family.

However, I felt like we should do something to pass along our well wishes and jolly good cheer to you all, so I bypassed his Scroogism by crafting my own, first-ever, virtual Christmas card. I think it turned out pretty classy. Roo would definitely approve.

Enjoy!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

From the PHILLIPS!

(Don't worry, Chase isn't dead. He's just sleeping...)

Attack of the "I Don't Care" Sweater

I've made a most egregious Monday error.

Today I made the mistake of wearing an "I Don't Care" sweater. We women all have at least one of these lugubrious getups, as "I Don't Care Sweaters" are the ideal trappings of the sleep-deprived, the heart broken, and the menstruating, to name a few. The problem is, I don't really have any outstanding reason to be wearing an "I Don't Care" sweater--I just kinda put it on by accident this morning since it lured me in with the promise of warmth and coziness, and now it is using me to spread its ambivalent laziness all throughout the workplace.

As the name suggests, an "I Don't Care" sweater is what you wear when you just don't care about the world. How can you tell if your sweater is an "I Don't Care" sweater? It is of necessity very baggy, at least big enough for your dad to wear. And while wearing the sweater you:

1. Are more likely to eat food off the floor.

2. Use the adjective "stupid" to describe most things.

3. Find that doing your hair in anything besides a lumpy, loose ponytail is not worth the effort...and stupid.

4. Feel like work has become a major inconvenience.

5. Feel like any incoming call is a major inconvenience.

6. Feel like the UPS guy making you sign for that package is a major inconvenience.

7. Punch the buttons of the telephone with belligerence then slouch while taking phone calls.

8. Unbutton the top button of your too-tight jeans after lunch. A) Because you can, and B) because you don't care.

In fact, this becomes the reasoning behind most of what you do today:

Why are you coloring rainbows on that customer's order form with your multitude of hi-lighter markers? Because I can and because I don't care.

Why are you spending significant blocks of time staring at nothing and thinking about LOST? Because I can and because I don't care.

Why are you eating another fruit roll-up? Because I can and becuase I don't care.

Why are you spelling "because" with a "ua" rather than an "au"? Becuase I can and becuase I don't care.

Let this be a warning to you: keep your "I Don't Care" sweater in the drawer with your tattered yoga pants where it belongs. Once in the workplace it will wreak havoc--and you won't even care.

Adventures in the East Part 3

I have more pictures to post of our vacation. I know it's kind of old news by now, seeing as how it's been over a month since we were there, but you know what else is old news? The Civil War. The Constitutional Convention. Melting cheese on steak sandwiches--all old news. But that doesn't make them any less worthy of consideration and/or discussion. So just look at my old pictures and appreciate them, dang it!

We rented a car to drive to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Gettysburg. First, we had the most cliche lunch that South Philadelphia has to offer: a cheeseteak from Pat's. And it was good!
The thing about cheeseteaks in South Philadelphia is that they are best when served with a little bit of profanity. As Roo was at the window about to order his sandwich, he had to wait for the guy behind the counter to finish hollering, "shut the hell up and make the damn sandwich" at his female co-worker. And that was probably the best Philly Cheesesteak Roo ever ate.

J and Sam loved their cheesesteaks, too. And so did the pigeons--they flocked around and pecked at each other for the scraps from our sandwiches. I think if the guy behind the counter had seen this, he would've hollered, "hey pigeons, shut the hell up and eat the damn scraps." I think its just a South Philadelphia thing to yell at pigeons--pigeons and women. But those Phillies sure can cook a cheesesteak!

We took a nice tour of Independence Hall:

Here is the hall of the Constitutional Convention. It was really neat to imagine what it would have been like to be there with all our founding fathers. And then I wondered if maybe they had their own salty South Philadelphian there to holler, "Shut the hell up and write the damn Constitution." Probably, since their approach to constitutions is much like their approach to cheesesteaks, and we ended up with such a good Constitution, after all.

That's just how they do things in Philly.

The Liberty Bell

We spend that night with Jim and Kathie and their baby, Seth--I mean, Gavin--at their apartment in Baltimore. We had a wonderful dinner and played a killer game of Yahtzee where I rolled my first ever Yahtzee and Kathie made smoothies with their Magic Bullet. So it was like living in an infomercial for the evening. Thanks Jim and Kathie!

The next day was pouring rain and I was coming down with a bad cold, but we drove to Gettysburg anyway. I just loved it there! The colors were perfect. It wasn't too crowded. I had even read Killer Angels last summer to prepare myself. Roo's enthusiasm for the likes of Little Round Top and Devil's Den was dampened (pun intended) a bit by the rain, though...

Probably one of the best parts of Gettysburg was this amazing restaurant we found. We were cold and wet and we came upon this underground tavern in the basement of a historical home which was actually part of the Underground Railroad. The whole place was candle lit, the servers wore authentic clothing, and the menu had a lot of extra "e"s on the end of words like "corne". The dark, warm, rough timbered tavern was perfectly cozy with our hearty food and a warm mug of apple cider, complete with a cinnamon stick and apple slice.

Two things that matter to me in life are beauty and history (and profanity...just kidding), and we saw a lot of that in Pennsylvania and Maryland. I can't wait to go back and see more someday (when it is not as damp)!

Ode to Roo

Encouraged by the nice response to my poem, I've penned another. This poem is inspired by Roo's absence from my life lately. He spent last week in Tucson measuring rocks or something and will spend this week in Houston at some kind of info session with Exxon--he applied for a job with them. Anyway, the important point is that he is there and not here with me. I've tried to convey my sense of woe with the following ode:

Ode to Roo

Dear Roo, I love you,

When you're not here,

I feel like poo.

Where I'm From

I used to hate poetry. I hated how ambiguous it could be--how there was no right answer as to what it was supposed to mean. After living some more, however, I've found that some my more complex life experiences are best expressed by the abstract, the ambiguous, not in plain prose.

Anyway, a long time ago I read an excellent poem written here by Tiffany, and, inspired by it, I decided to call a truce with poetry and write a poem of my own. I kept it sitting in my drafts for a few months, but the lull in my blogging of late has, out of necessity, forced me to pull it out.

So here it is--Annie's First Poem:

Where I'm From

I am from stories, from piles of words and pictures in my little girl hands,
that color the ceiling while I wait for sleep.

I am from calloused hands, rough and accustomed to tribulation.
Bent by work, stiff from toil,
Passed from father to son, who grew into father--
My father.

I am from long nights.
The resonant scream of saw blade against wood that cries through the family room floor,
and accompanies our sleep.

I am from homemade.
From home sewn,
home cooked,
home grown,
home bound.
The taste of chicken noodle borne up in steam
that curls in our tired eyes.

I am from bare feet and irreverent laughter in couch cushion forts.
From learning to keep up and watch out and be quiet.
From brothers.

I am from Windows of Heaven
and Father in Heaven
and Stairway to Heaven.
On the yellowing keys of an upright piano
I play--just yellowing keys and me.

I am from someday but not today. Where we are content to wait, to adapt, to settle.
To finish the work.
To do without.
Here the world is apart, so far from our small corner.
It is for someone else.

I am from falling in love with the boy downstairs
who exists in a world where impossible
doesn't.
In my big girl heart I hold his words and pictures
that color the ceiling while I wait no more.

(the end.)

I'm going to ask my mom to hang it on the fridge.

You should try writing your own.