02/29/12

1.  Happy Leap Day!  That means it is Kyle Bilowitz's birthday.  :-)  In elementary school, a boy named Kyle Bilowitz in my 2nd grade class turned eight years old on leap day back in 1984.  I remember getting a kick out of the fact that he was really only turning 2.  It's so funny, the things that stick in one's brain.  On the next Leap Day, I will be 39.  Yikes!  Brigham and Joseph will be 14, and Mosey will be 12.  Triple Yikes!!  Four years from now isn't really ever going to come, is it?  I'm going to stay in this blissful phase of my children's childhood forever, right?  I wish I could be one of those parents who looks forward to their children's growing up.  It's a good thing for the children-- to grow up I mean (I think?), so I should be happy about it, as their mother, right?  But I'm not.  I'm very upset about it.  I think 10 and 8 are the perfect ages for my boys and they should stay that age forever more.  And I should stay 35 forever more.

2.  Mosey had a fabulous day today.  I'm not sure what has happened over the past couple of days, but I like it!  He told me today after Tae Kwon Do (which he said was "awesome!"), "Being sleep deprived doesn't really make you grumpy, it just makes it harder to keep the grumpiness from coming out."  That made me think a little bit.  Why is it that our natural instinct, when we are tired or stressed, is to be grumpy and unpleasant?  Isn't that entirely counterproductive?  Aren't we more likely to get our way when we are pleasant and happy?  Aren't our blood pressure and stress hormones lower when we are cheerful?  So doesn't it stand to reason that, evolutionarily speaking, humans who respond to stress and fatigue by becoming *more* friendly and happy, would have a reproductive advantage over those who don't?  So why, after 100,000 years (or so) of homo sapien existence, have we not all acquired this happy-go-lucky trait?  Ha!  Maybe our very fallen natures are themselves indication of a divine source.  :-)

3.  I think 95% of my caloric consumption over the past 2 days has been in the form of rice crispy treats.  I just finished packaging all the leftovers from Brigham's castle cake and putting them in the freezer where hopefully they will be less of a temptation to my sweet tooth.  I thought I had better self control.

This is the sunset from this evening.  My sunset photography skills are lacking-- somehow my pictures never fully capture the intensity of what my eyes perceive.  I was making dinner in the kitchen and saw a flash of bright orange reflected in the windows of the house behind ours, so I grabbed my camera and went out the front door.  It was just fading-- in fact, in the frame after this one, taken only a few seconds later, the color saturation had decreased by about half.

This is the leaning tower of laundry that my boys dragged into the living room for me to fold last weekend.  And yes, as I predicted, the other four loads that didn't get done that day are still sitting, untouched, in the laundry room, waiting to be joined by another few loads by the weekend.