Blessings of Zoom Church

 A tale of two stakes... In my mom's stake up north, they had great success with Zoom during the Pandemic. They noticed people returning to church (at least virtually) who hadn't been in a long time, and they've felt prompted that to this day they should offer a Zoom option.

In my stake, they feel that Zoom is actually a stumbling block that was keeping people from returning in person, and they ended it forever last July.

I believe that our church leaders are inspired and the two stakes have different needs. That makes sense to me. But as a mother of a young toddler who keeps getting sick, boy am I glad that I can hop on my mom's Zoom church when we can't go in person! We didn't catch covid until last fall and we had to miss a few weeks of church then. Zoom was such a blessing. Zoom would be great when I first have my baby--the first 6 weeks I don't go anywhere.

Today we were gearing up to go to stake conference when Matthew threw up pretty spectacularly. I was feeling very bummed that we were going to miss it when I remembered my mom's stake has stake conference today too, complete with a Zoom link!

I don't know what the long term answer is but it would be nice if there was some sort of Zoom meeting always available for people that are home sick. But I guess the pandemic also taught me what to do when you can't go to a church meeting--you can still hold a very lovely meeting right at home.

Tired of Politics

When we first started trying to get pregnant again last year, I was hopeful we could do a Halloween pregnancy announcement. I looked at ideas and came up with what I thought was really cute--a Dr. Seuss themed reveal! Based on "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish". I would wear a red fish hat, Trevor would wear a blue one, Matthew would be in a fish costume with a number 1 on his chest, and then I'd put a tiny fish in a fishbowl on my stomach with a number 2 on the top. At the time I thought this was completely adorable.

Then at whatever point last year, Dr. Seuss was accused of racism and for a little while people were pulling him from their shelves. I realized my cute little pregnancy announcement could be taken as a sort of political statement, as some people were publicly taking sides on the Dr. Seuss issue as a political statement. But I just wanted to share a cute little idea based off a children's book! I wasn't pregnant by Halloween so it was a moot point anyway.

Trevor and I set a goal to take Matthew to Disneyland before he turned 3 and we'd have to pay for his ticket. We finally booked our trip a couple weeks ago, and then all the drama around Disney has erupted about the law in Florida. I am not happy about the direction Disney is going. There is content they are slipping into their toddler content that I do not agree with--I don't let Matthew watch it unsupervised because things pop up that I don't expect. I'm disappointed that they've made alcohol available in every park and that now they cater more to the single adults that like to visit Disney more so than to families, just because singles have greater disposable income.

But I haven't cancelled our Disneyland trip just yet. I got so excited I looked up best places to take pictures in Disneyland and saved a few to my phone. We paid for a year of Disney+ back in December and I intend to use it for the full year.

I want to still be a happy little Disney lover just because I love their movies and I've been a long time fan without people assuming it is a political statement.

Why can't we keep the politics out of kids' shows?

Word of the Year: Reclaim

 First, let me say that 22 has been my lucky number since I was a little kid. Why? I have no idea but because of that I have reason to believe 2022 will be an awesome year. :) Back in my BYU days I used to tell people turning 22 that that was a particularly good year of life and I got a lot of strange looks.

Trevor just pointed out to me that his birthday is on the 22nd, so there you go. Proof it is a good number.

I thought long and hard about what my word of the year should be. I really struggled with it this time around. Finally, though, I decided it should be reclaim.

The last two years have been tough for me as I'm sure they have been for everyone. I became a mother two months before we settled into the pandemic. Adapting to motherhood was wonderful and scary and challenging, and doing it during the pandemic was so isolating. At first I was still working 20 hours a week, but often times needing to sacrifice my sleep or meals to fit it all in since child care options were extremely limited. 

I knew that working as a marriage/parenting researcher wouldn't mean I would have all the answers to parenting... but I didn't realize how much it would frighten me to know that I wasn't living up to the perfect textbook answers of how parenting "should" go. For whatever reason people tend to be quite judgmental of parents, and I often found myself taking that judgement particularly hard.

Then of course lately society has become so divided, along political lines and along pandemic lines. I found myself in a strange place where I am politically conservative but also a believer in masks and vaccines, and deeply dedicated to protecting my at-risk family members from contracting covid. People would sometimes judge me and my politics incorrectly based on my mask. Suddenly I found myself taking a lot of heat from people that I usually agreed with on things because to me covid was a real illness. Sometimes people would argue to me that the odds of dying of covid are small, but having family members who have been struck with rare conditions or deaths before this wasn't much comfort to me. One of my uncles passed away from covid on Matthew's first birthday last year. Other have said that covid is just a flu and not a big deal, but Matthew and I caught it in September (likely from church, unfortunately) and it wasn't just a flu for us.

In the end, to me, covid is a health condition, not a political issue. It hit the world at the same time but like any health issue it impacted everyone differently, and everyone needed to make their own choices about what precautions to take and how to move ahead. It makes sense to me that different people came to different conclusions, but there was no room for that in the public discourse. It seemed that no matter what I did in the pandemic, I was judged for it--called out for not being cautious enough or called out as a stupid sheep for trying to take precautions.

So basically the last two years have been a lot of adapting, a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of feeling judged even when I'm doing my best. In all of this, I feel like I've gotten a bit lost. I've forgotten to take care of my own needs instead of focusing on my family's needs. I've forgotten that my opinions and feelings matter too, even if they are different than someone else's. I've even forgotten some of my strengths and talents and things that make me a worthwhile person. 

I don't like that. This year, I want to refocus on reclaiming myself, being stronger against opposition and judgement, and taking better care of my own needs and wishes. This is going to be a year of Shelece.

Writing

Today I stepped a bit out of my comfort zone. I submitted a short article to a parenting blog for potential publication. I'll hear back in 2 weeks. 

I don't know if they will accept it. I'm proud of myself for trying, though. Writing has always been a passion of mine but it's one I've mostly shelved as an adult. First to survive grad school, later because I had other priorities like frantically trying to find my husband, enjoying newlywed life, and learning to be a new mom. My raging perfectionism hasn't helped either. 

But my goal was always to write a novel, and maybe I don't need to aim so high to start. It seems much more doable to write a few short articles for websites... so we will give it a try and see how it goes. If nothing else it will get me writing again, and if no one wants to publish my stuff, I can always publish it here on my blog. 

Summer Bucket List 2021

 I used to love making these! I have so many goals for this summer that I decided to write them all down. Of course these days they are all very toddler based :).

SUMMER BUCKET LIST:

Meet my new nephew!! (Top priority!) June 13, 2021

Visit family in Utah

Feed the ducks with Matthew.  July 10, 2021 (Okay, so we fed geese. But there were no ducks at the duck pond that day!)

Take Matthew to the zoo. (Bonus: feed the giraffes!) June 15, 2021

Take Matthew to the aquarium.

Take Matthew swimming.

Teach Matthew to ride a trike (or at least push him around on one :) July 19, 2021

Run through the sprinklers with Matthew.

Set up a wading pool for Matthew. June 4, 2021 

Set up an outdoor playset for Matthew. June 7, 2021

Visit the playground with Matthew. June 28, 2021

Go stargazing with Trevor.

Ride the ferris wheel at Scheels.

When You Are the Frog in the Pot

 We've all heard that old Sunday School story, right? That if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will hurt him and he'll jump right out. But if you put him in a pot of cold water and sloooowly turn up the temperature, he will stay in until he boils to death.

I recently had a scary experience that was a modern update on this for me.

Here's the spoiler: the cruise control cable in my car had come off and was caught in such a way that my car was accelerating without me pressing the gas pedal. For about a month, possibly even two. 😱

I noticed that something was wrong at first. My car sounded like an airplane and it kept gunning it even when I was stopped with my foot on the brake. My dad suggested the choke might be stuck and suggested a solution. I tried it, it seemed to work, I moved on.

A little later I had problems again. I didn't realize it was the same thing. My car was jerking violently a few times when I braked. (Turns out, that was the transmission struggling to downshift while the engine was running full tilt--or something, excuse my lack of car vocabulary :). This happened while I had Matthew in the car and I was horrified. I asked my dad to come check it out to help me figure out what was going on. But, I told him I thought it was a problem with my brakes. He drove around the block, hit the brakes a lot of times, and didn't notice a problem. I started to think I was crazy.

I should have taken it in then, but I drove around for weeks until the same thing happened again. Meanwhile, I slowly got used to my car not working quite right. I am one of those (annoying, sorry) sticklers who always does the speed limit, but I noticed that often I was going faster than I meant to. I assumed I was just distracted and pressing the gas too hard... it never occurred to me that the car was accelerating on its own. Gradually I was learning to ride my brakes and be very light on the gas pedal, but I didn't realize that it was happening.

After I finally got it fixed last weekend it was like a totally new car. One terrifying moment happened when I turned on the car, shifted into drive, and.... just sat there, not pressing the gas pedal, surprised that it wasn't moving. OF COURSE I know that you have to press the gas pedal to go... but sometime along the line I'd just gotten used to the car leaping forward when I put it in Drive without realizing what was happening, since I did go through the motion of pushing the gas pedal. The drive home was slow too and I realized I was not used to pressing the gas pedal very often. YIKES!

Among the many lessons I learned from this... I thought about other times in life where something seemed off to me, but I doubted myself because others didn't see it, only to get used to being treated in ways I should not have been treated. An important moral of the story is trust yourself, and also get your car checked out if you think there's a problem!

Secrets of the Subconscious Brain

So I had another dream last night (dang, is that all I blog about these days???).

The details aren't important, so skip this paragraph if you want to. I dreamed that Trevor and I were attending a formal dance together at BYU. Except instead of being in the Wilkinson Center, we were in the Chapel Hills Mall. And a lot of my high school peers were inexplicably there too. (Also, my red dress was to die for. Wish I actually owned something like that!)

Anyway, I ran into one of my old high school friends that I haven't seen since graduation. She said, "wow, Shelece, you seem so much more confident than you did at our homecoming dance when we were 16!"

I said, "well, I hope so! I'm twice as old now as I was back then." And basically that's the moment I realized I'm twice as old as I was in high school. I've never consciously stopped to think about that before. 

That makes me feel old, but also... awesome. Hey, I've got two high school kids worth of life experience now! I am more confident and smarter and braver than I was back then. I'm not perfect, but stopping to think about how far I've come feels good. 

Hopefully I feel as awesome about it when I'm 3 times as old as I was in high school!