Today was little man’s second set of immunizations, and the first time his parents had to watch (at least, I don’t remember the immunizations at the hospital when he was born).

During the appointment, the nurse commented that little man’s dad and I looked extremely calm for first-time parents.

Calm?  Us?  That was pretty much our spoken reaction – with an added laugh.

In her experience, she said, chill parents have pretty chill babies, and both of us looked pretty chill.

The irony is that the night before, I’d been praying for help to figure out why little man had been crying so much when I was trying to feed him for the past few days, worrying he was getting sick.  My hubby had suggested that perhaps every time little man was fussing during the day, he wasn’t really all that hungry.  I finally realized that was probably the case (and the pediatrician confirmed it today).

But little man pretty much slept through the immunizations.  As I watched him sleeping and being content for the first few hours after his appointment, I was in awe.  Where did this calm child come from?

Then he started crying. He woke up, and started kicking his legs, but must have been pretty sore.  Poor kid.  Thank goodness for children’s acetaminophen!

I have a new favorite blog.

It has been feeding the geek in me.

With posts like how one mom worked with her children to make decorations for their Christmas tree this year with Legos, talking with the creator/writer of the xkcd comic (warning: ultra geeky!), and one mom’s obsession with finding the perfect name for her children (including charting each name being considered to see how unique it was!), I’m REALLY digging this blog.

Check it out! GeekMom.

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 (I know, I know)
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 (and the sequel)
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 (started the original Spanish version)
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

Looks like I read 33 of the books listed, and started a few that I haven’t finished.

The last time I saw the BBC list, the books were different…and not overlapping (i.e., Chronicles of Narnia, which I take to be the entire series, vs Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe; Hamlet vs all of Shakespeare).  There also weren’t as many more recent books such as Da Vinci Code.

We love our ob/gyn. A few examples why we think she’s cool.

• Rich and I tend to consult each other the day/night before our next appointment to review any questions we’d thought of that we need to ask her. (I should note here that Rich has come with me to every appointment; it’s so nice to have a second brain there to remember the stuff I don’t!) A few weeks ago, Rich woke up in the middle of the night before our appointment and told me I needed to ask our doctor what we should do in case our baby was born in the middle of a zombie invasion. On our way to the appointment, I asked if he remembered telling me that. He did. We decided to ask.

  At the appointment, I got through the real questions and then Rich said we had one more very important question to ask. So, as straight-faced as I could, I asked, “What do we do in the event our baby is born during a zombie invasion?” Rich chimed in, “Because, you know, hospitals are where the zombies go first, and a screaming baby would just attract them even more.” Honest-to-goodness, our doctor stepped back, sat down, and got a very serious look on her face. Then she said, “You know…I’ve never thought about that one.” She thought a bit more and said, “Well, I live close by and have an extra room – I could deliver the baby there if you needed. Or, really, plenty of people have had home deliveries; you just need to remember string to cut the cord…”

  She had to step out for something, and when she came back in, she told us they just got a new med student/intern, and she said she was totally going to make that the new girl’s first assignment. “I’m totally telling her she needs to research what we should do in case of a zombie invasion and have her write up a flyer for us!”

• Rich told her today about the centrifugal force baby birthing machine, telling her that was our request for the delivery. As he described it to her, she got a huge kick out of it! She told us she’d love to pull a prank on the hospital staff when we came in to deliver the baby and have the print-out of the image of the machine and tell them that we needed her paged immediately so that she could bring it for us!

It’s great to have a doctor who is very competent and caring, and who cheers you along the road of pregnancy. It’s just extra awesome to have one who gets your (and your husband’s) sense of humor!

Saturday, we had some friends from out of town come visit and play games with us. I remembered earlier in the day that I was slated for bringing the monthy birthday treats for Young Women’s, and decided to buy a box of cookies from the grocery store while out picking up dinner since we were short on time. Rich had made some cookies for our company, and, instead of baking them all, saved about half of the cookie dough in the refrigerator.

As I was out picking up the pizzas for dinner, I ran to the grocery store, picked up the cookies, as well as some crackers for the Cougar Gold cheese we had for snacking during the evening, and some candy because I’m pregnant and it looked/sounded good. I walked out with one grocery bag that I thought had everything I’d purchased in it.

Our friends left at about midnight, and as Rich and I were getting things ready for church, I started hunting for the box of cookies I’d bought. They were nowhere to be found. NOWHERE. Rich checked the car twice, and I started really freaking out.

I started a new blog recently called “From Z’s Perspective.” If you’ve read it, you’ll probably seen it’s quite different from this blog. I thought I’d take a quick minute to explain.

This blog, Z’s World, is mainly a personal blog. It will continue to be the place for baby updates and the like.

From Z’s Perspective is more professionally-focused. I subscribe to a couple of newsbriefs via www.smartbrief.com. The articles summarized in these daily briefs deal with online advertising and leadership – two areas of interest for me. A few recent articles really got me thinking, and I thought I’d start a blog where I could exercise my MBA muscles a bit, almost doing mini-case studies when I find articles that intrigue me for whatever reason. Because these expositions are far different in tone than my general blog post here has been, I wanted to make it a different blog. And, truth be told, I’m hoping to add it to my resume in the future as I work towards my career goal of becoming a business consultant. So, the new blog is my outlet for expressing my opinions on business topics, a way to help me stay plugged in to the world of business and exercise the skills I’ve developed there, while also giving me the opportunity to keep learning and growing professionally.

Both blogs are on Networked Blogs, and feed into my Facebook profile. I realized if anyone actually follows those feeds, it might get a little confusing why there are two looks from two blogs popping up.

So, to recap – Z’s World is the personal stuff; From Z’s Perspective is the professional stuff.

Happy reading!

The Seattle, Washington, temple.

Tonight was the youth baptism temple night, and I was able once again participate. For those unfamiliar with LDS baptisms in the temple, we believe in being baptized as proxy for our deceased ancestors. We do this because we believe there are certain ordinances, or actions, that need to be taken to qualify us to live with our Heavenly Father again. One of these ordinances that we believe to be necessary is baptism. However, many have died without the opportunity to be baptized; we believe that, as God is a merciful God and would not deny someone heaven’s blessings because they did not have the chance to be baptized while on earth, we can baptized on their behalf, under specific authority granted by God. The LDS church’s website has a little more about the topic.

Tonight, as one of the adult youth leaders, I helped with the baptisms. I love being with the youth at the temple! However, tonight was a little more exciting than previous youth temple trips have been. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. Being confused as one of the youth. I had taken a family name with me that needed baptism and confirmation, so I was dressed in the clothing for that purpose. Even being 7 months pregnant, the clothing was large enough on me that I just looked a little ill-proportioned, not pregnant. This became obvious when one of the temple workers started talking to me as though I was one of the youth, rather than one of the adults helping with the temple trip! Being days away from turning 30, I was definitely thrilled to be mistaken as being a teenager!

2. Being baptized for someone on my mom’s side of the family. First, having a name that needed baptism on my mom’s side of the family was amazing! She’s from El Salvador, and finding family history records there is difficult, to say the very least. Most of the baptism and confirmation work had already been done for the rest of the family members; this was a new one. However, that wasn’t the only exciting part…I also slipped on the stairs into the baptismal font, giving everyone, including little Magnum, a bit of a scare! Little did I know that the temple worker who had been giving the youth their instructions for how to participate in the baptisms and confirmations had watched and said to the youth, “Right…be careful, the stairs can sometimes be slippery.” There’s nothing quite like leading by example!

3. Just being in the temple. I love the calm feeling of the temple. It’s truly a place where you can leave the world behind and focus on the matters of eternity. I always love going and doing work there!

4. Getting pizza afterwards. When I had first arrived at the church to pick up youth to take to the temple tonight, one of the girls mentioned to her mom (and the rest of the youth and leaders present) that I was definitely waddling. I had to laugh and say, “Hey, just because I’m waddling doesn’t mean you have to point it out!” After the temple trip, we had pizza and cookies for everyone. I was hungry, and after the young men’s leader called out to the hungry teenage boys, “LADIES FIRST!” I mentioned to the young women’s president, “Well, he said ladies first, and this lady is getting some food!” Little did I realize she’d take the opportunity to call out another announcement, “Ladies first, and there is a pregnant lady who definitely needs to eat!” What was super sweet was one of the girls immediately responded, “Sister Z, I’ll get your pizza for you!” Ah, the love. And ah, the pregnancy!

I should also point out that another highlight to the evening was just getting to hang out with the girls and the other young women leaders. I really love working with them all! We have such a fun time together, teasing, talking, swapping stories. I loved getting to drive some of the girls to the temple and chatting with them both on the way there and on the way back.

I’m looking forward to the next temple trip. Hopefully, I’ll still be able to go!

Until today, my pies have mainly either been apple or some combination of berries.  Today was a day for experiments, though.

I’ve had a Best of Country Pies recipe book for a few years.  It’s a treasure trove of recipes, most of which I haven’t gotten around to.  I’ve looked warily at the cheddar pear pie recipe before, uncertain about a pear pie, but we had a few pears just tipping that border between ripe and over-ripe, and this recipe called for the exact number we had on hand.  Pears and cheese sounded like a great combination anyway, so I had to try it.

A note on presentation:  yes, the crust really should be up over the lip of the pie plate, but the filling wasn’t quite enough to reach that level, so I rolled the edge to meet it.  Next time, I might add one more pear to fill the pie plate.

Also, a note on the recipe – I didn’t use the full amount of salt the recipe called for.  For the pears, I used a pinch of salt; for the topping, I used a little more than a pinch of salt.

The flavor was wonderful!  The cheese in the topping wasn’t overwhelming to the pears, instead complementing them well.  Because of how ripe the pears were, it was very juicy – I may have needed more cornstarch for the filling.  Regardless, it was a great kick-off to fall and pie-baking season!