We’ve had a robot blanket that has been 95% complete for the past few weeks.  Today, it was time to finish the binding.  This simply required cutting a 12″ x 3″ piece of fabric, sewing it to each side of the binding already on the blanket, sewing the binding TO the blanket, and finishing the binding.

I decided to read one of my favorite books to Little Man last night: The Cat in the Hat.

As I read the story, I realized…I’m the fish.  Even as a kid, I remember reading the book and thinking that the fish had a good point.  Yup.  I was that boring kid.

And I’m that boring adult.

My husband, on the other hand, is the cat.  He makes life fun!  I could totally imagine him saying, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now!” as he bounced on a ball while balancing all sorts of weird things.

Then I read another favorite:  Green Eggs and Ham.

Again…my husband is Sam.  I’m the other dude who finally says, “Fine.  I’ll try it to prove I don’t like it, just quit bugging me!” and then says, “Hey!  I guess I like it after all!”

Sadly, my take-away from the two book was…I’m boring/risk-averse/boring.

I’m so glad I married the cat.

Today marked the first day of bottle-training for the little man.

It ended with trying solid food, instead.  It’s only a couple of weeks earlier than our doctor recommended starting him on solids, but with upcoming schedules, we needed to find something he’d eat than didn’t require my presence!

I love General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  During conference, the leaders of the church address us, giving us messages we need to hear.  The topics usually include gospel basics, such as prayer, faith, and repentance.  This conference, though, I took away two big things: have more charity by doing more service for others; and nobody is immune to struggles in life.

One talk in particular really touched me and dealt more with being a better spouse.  Elder Richard G. Scott, one of the members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered the talk.  I had tears in my eyes for most of it.  He spoke about his wife (who passed away awhile ago) and his children, and the moments of joy he had from his marriage and from being a parent.  He said his wife had always been so kind and thoughtful, and left notes for him in his scriptures and other places she knew he’d find them.  He said she always put others first, and always prayed for opportunities to serve someone every day – a prayer he said was always answered.  That talk really inspired me.  I really felt a desire to be a kinder and more caring wife.  What was funny to me was hearing my husband refer to the talk as the “how to be a better husband” talk; I felt like it was a “how to be a better wife” talk!  I guess Elder Scott managed to reach both husbands and wives with his talk!

The other thing I found interesting from this conference was the fact that two speakers spoke on trials in life, and both quoted a previous church leader who basically said nobody is immune to struggling in life, but the joy after the trial outweighs the difficulty from the trial.  I really appreciated that, in part, because I’d just been reading talks from the October 2008 General Conference where speakers said the same thing!  Trials come, and trials go, but we always learn more, and we find greater joy afterwards, though it’s tough to remember that or feel that way in the middle of the trial.

My goals after conference: be kinder; be gentler; reach out in service to others more; and remember when there seems no end in sight for some difficulty, God is watching and helping, and, in the grand scheme of things, the present is pretty fleeting!

I love singing to little man.  Most of the time, he loves it, too.  However, recently, my choice of songs seem to have been hit and miss…

A couple weeks ago, I was singing an old LDS children’s song, “I Hope They Call Me On a Mission.”  I don’t know if it’s sung as much as when I was in primary (the LDS children’s Sunday School), but it’s an old favorite of mine.  For those not familiar, the lyrics to the first verse are:

I hope they call me on a mission
When I have grown a foot or two.
By then, I hope I will be ready
To teach and preach and work like missionaries do.

As I was nursing little man, I was looking through the LDS children’s song book, found this song, and started singing.  Suddenly, little man stopped nursing, looked at me, and starting pouting!  I chuckled, stopped singing, and he went back to nursing.  I started singing again, and, again, he stopped, looked at me, and got tears in his eyes!  I couldn’t believe it – he’d NEVER reacted like that to a song!  I called for Rich to come watch, because that’s what any parent would do…laugh at their child crying when a particular song is sung…  Little man had gone back to nursing while I wasn’t singing.  I explained to Rich what was going on, and tried singing the song one more time.  Sure enough — little man stopped nursing, looked at me, pouted, and started crying!

The curious part of me tried it again a few days later, just to see if he’d still react the same way — he didn’t.  I figure he warmed up to the idea of a mission later in life…

Another time, I was playing Frank Sinatra tunes on the piano and singing along…and he got fussy!  He’s become fussy before when I was playing — if I’m sight-reading and stumbling through a song a bit, he occasionally gets a little fussy until I get to a different song that goes a bit smoother.  But the Sinatra reaction was a bit surprising.  I switched to a little Nat King Cole, and he was happy!  He’s listened to Sinatra with daddy before, but I guess he just wasn’t in the mood for it that particular day!

Then last night, as I was rocking little man to sleep, I was humming various songs – LDS children’s songs and some LDS hymns.  I decided to actually sing some of the words to the songs, and little man stopped nursing, pouted, and got teary again!  I went back to humming, and he was content.  Of course, I was curious again what the trigger for the tears was…turns out it was the words – to any song!  As long as I hummed a tune, he was fine, but the moment I started singing the words to whatever I’d been humming, he started getting teary-eyed!  So he got hummed to instead of sung to…after I laughed at his pickiness, of course!

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.