In the Navy

Today my little brother is joining the Navy. He is on his way to boot camp in Michigan this very second. I’m having a hard time believing this is real.

Toby wants to be a Navy seal, so he had to commit to eight years, whether he actually becomes a seal or not. He has no idea whether he’ll even enjoy being in the Navy, but he committed to staying in it until he’s 30 years old. I can’t even commit to next weekend’s plans. I have no idea what I’ll be doing in eight years, and I have no desire to commit to anything that far in the future. I would be scared out of my mind just from the commitment.

Then there is the whole Navy seal business. Once I watched a documentary on Navy seal training. I think I blocked out the specifics (or I have a really bad memory), but it was seriously disturbing. I just remember that there were ridiculous activities that would have killed me in about two minutes, and I remember thinking that no one in his/her right mind would voluntarily sign up for something like that. Really well-built men were dropping out left and right. It was totally ludicrous.

So Toby has been working out for the last year and a half, trying to get ready. He does 500 sit-ups and 500 push-ups every day, and then straps on his army boots and runs for miles—sometimes on the beach. He also goes to the gym and swims a lot, and he's still going to get his trash kicked. What is he thinking?

I can’t believe that two people who were raised in the same house with the same rules and same parents and siblings can think so differently. Why did I grow up thinking that my only option was to graduate from college, get married, and have children, while my little brother was discovering all kinds of crazy things to do with his life? It totally blows my mind.

The Baby Center

Do you want to know something cool about being pregnant and clueless? There’s a website called babycenter.com that fills me in on everything I need to know. I get this weekly e-mail message that tells me how big my fetus is in relation to different foods. Last week it was a lemon; the week before it was a jumbo shrimp; before that it was a fig, etc. I can’t imagine what these e-mails are like for people who have morning sickness. I’m sickness-free and I still get totally grossed out thinking about a jumbo shrimp growing inside of me.

My weekly e-mail messages also tell me about how much weight I’ve probably gained, what symptoms I’m likely to be feeling, and what I should or should not do while I’m pregnant. I’ve learned all kinds of amazing tidbits that I never would have known on my own. Did you know that it’s not good to eat soft cheese when you’re pregnant? It’s also not good to take a bath in water that’s hotter than 101 degrees.

Luckily, the weekly e-mails haven’t said anything specifically about snowboarding, so I’m pretty sure that means I can still go. I’ve been really careful about not falling down, just so you know. And I feel okay about it because my mom said she skied when she was pregnant. She said I shouldn’t even ask the doctor if it’s okay because he might say I shouldn’t go, just so he won’t be held liable.

The best part of my weekly learn-how-to-be-pregnant e-mail is when it tells me the symptoms I might be experiencing. It seems like every week I discover something weird that is happening to my body, and of course it never crosses my mind that this new weird thing might have to do with being pregnant. Then, a day or two later, I always get my new e-mail telling me that I’m normal. Last week I told Ben that the second I stop eating I’m hungry again. It just started, all of a sudden. I couldn’t stop eating. Then, the next day I got my friendly reminder that when you’re 15 weeks pregnant, you might be ravenously hungry all the time. Those babycenter.com people are amazing! How did they know?

Cheap Furniture

Ikea is pretty much the best store on the planet, in my opinion, and I’m having a really hard time living all of these millions of miles away from it. Last summer Ben and I made a special trip to California to buy some furniture…oh yeah, and also to see my family while we were there. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen my family for a year; Ikea was the first priority. We bought a coffee table, an end table, and light fixtures for our entire house for $200. We also looked at some dressers, but we couldn’t decide whether two dressers were worth another $250.

Now that I’ve done my research and I realize that two dressers are definitely worth $250, I can’t get to Ikea. So I decided to try to order them online. I had already heard that their shipping prices were ridiculous, but I guess I didn’t totally believe it.

Surprise! It costs almost $200 to ship $250 worth of stuff. It’s TOTALLY ridiculous. And they don’t just tell you when you place the order that shipping costs $200. They send you an e-mail message after you’ve already told them your credit card number that says, “Oh, by the way, the shipping costs $200. And here are a lot of other words to hide the fact that we’re charging you an extra 80% of your total cost for shipping. Hopefully you won’t even see the shipping amount and you’ll just click reply so we can totally rip you off without you even knowing it.”

I’m so mad about it that I almost think I should boycott Ikea. But instead I’ll just tell myself that the shipping people don’t have anything to do with Ikea, and Ikea hates them just as much as I do, and Ikea and I are on the same team. Then I’ll just have to figure out a way to convince my parents to come visit me after making a pit stop at Ikea.

Spiz

I’ve been reading a lot of infertility blogs lately, which have gotten me thinking about how real the possibility is that I might be infertile. There’s no way to know these things when you’ve been on the pill since you were a virgin, right? And if there are that many girls blogging about it, infertility must be more common than I thought.

Plus, my mom had endometriosis and didn’t get pregnant for three years after she started trying. I don’t know how these kinds of genetics get passed along, but I thought chances were pretty good that it would take me a while to get pregnant after I stopped taking the pill.

I WAS WRONG!

Up Chuck

Generally speaking, I’m not much of a vomiter. I don’t get the flu very often and when I do, I usually just get a stomachache that lasts for a day. When I was younger, I used to throw up occasionally, but I can’t remember a time that I threw up more than once during a single flu episode.

Until last week…

Thursday night I started feeling sick, but I figured I could sleep it off and feel better in the morning—you know, the way it always works. I soon found out that this time was different. Starting at 5:00 a.m. Friday, I threw up once every hour for five hours. Then I made the mistake of going to work, because my job is so important that I can’t miss a day, even if I’m sicker than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Or because I couldn’t afford to take a day of sick leave because I already used all of my time off for the next 10 years when I went to Hawaii for Christmas. Or maybe because my weekly e-newsletter goes out on Fridays and I haven’t told anyone else how to cover for me yet. Whatever the reason, it was a mistake to go to work because that meant driving...in the car...where there is no toilet. I didn’t even think to bring a bucket.

So after I stayed at work for about 45 minutes, five of which were spent in the bathroom doing you-know-what AGAIN, I hopped in the car and went home. I didn’t make it all the way home, though, before the urge came again. And this time there was nothing to puke in. I didn’t even have time to pull over or open the window or dump out the contents of my purse or take off my shoe. I threw up my own lap, while I was driving. Who does that? Even though no one was around, it was the most embarrassing, humiliating moment ever. So instead of keeping it to myself, I went home and called everyone I knew and then posted it on the Internet.

The Devil Box

I grew up in a house where we didn't watch TV. We had a television, but we didn’t have cable or whatever it is that you need in order to watch actual TV shows, except on a few rare occasions when my dad pulled some kind of illegal stunt and turned on the TV for general conference. We could watch videos, but we couldn’t watch TV.

It wasn't like my parents thought the TV was equivalent to Satan and watching it would turn us into corrupted little devil-worshippers, because we were free to watch TV all we wanted at our friends' houses. It was just a big waste of time, and my mom didn't need additional distractions to take us away from practicing our musical instruments.

I had to practice my violin for 1 ½ hours every day, and it usually took me at least 4 hours to play those 90 minutes worth of music. My friends would call at 2:30 to see if I could play, and I would always ask my mom if I could, as if I didn’t already know the answer, and then reply to my friends that I needed to practice, but I could play at 4:00. Then my friends would call at 4:00 and I would embarrassingly say that I had only practiced for 20 minutes, so it would be 5:10 before I could play. And then at 5:10, I would beg my mother to let me play and promise to practice after I got home, but of course that never worked, so I would tell my friends that I still had another hour of practicing to do. I don’t even remember what could have possibly been entertaining enough to distract me from my violin for hours every day, but for sure it wasn’t the TV. Eventually I would finish my practicing and call my friends, but it was usually too late to play because it was time for dinner.

So anyway, I hated the fact that we couldn't watch television. I always swore that when I grew up, I would have loads of TVs and my kids would be allowed to watch them whenever they wanted. I also swore that my kids wouldn’t have to play musical instruments and if they didn't want to eat their broccoli, I wouldn’t make them.

It's weird how much things have changed since then. Now I’m sure I’ll force my kids to play musical instruments and eat broccoli. I still haven’t decided whether my kids will be able to watch TV (even though I now realize how brilliant my parents were), partially because I’m totally addicted to it now that I can actually watch it, and partially because it would take A LOT of persuasion for Ben to give up his precious TV.

Last night we sat down to watch Lost, because we love that show, and then we ended up watching Alias and that stupid wife-swapping show that comes on after Alias. We’re totally addicted! The TV totally sucked me in and made me believe that watching it was the most productive thing I could possibly be doing for 3 whole hours! And the worst part is that I’m sure the exact same thing will happen again tonight, only we’ll start out with the OC and hang out for whatever comes on in the 2 hours after the OC.

I'm starting to think that the TV is equivalent to Satan and I'm turning into a corrupted devil-worshipper.

10 Cool Things That Happened on My Christmas Vacation

1. John Peter Lewis (from American Idol) sang at my cousin’s wedding, because he’s my cousin’s cousin.
2. I swam with a giant sea turtle in Hawaii. I also swam with a nasty, mean-looking eel and tons of cool fish, but the sea turtle was the most exciting part.
3. My nephew (the cutest-little-momma’s-boy-in-the-world) started to like me a little bit, after ten days of persuasion and cookies.
4. My family spent Christmas Eve on our own private beach; singing Christmas carols, telling stories, and watching the waves roll in.
5. My brother gave me a pink ukulele for Christmas. What’s cooler than a pink ukulele?
6. On Christmas morning, Ben and I got to talk to his brother, Seth, who is on a mission in Florida. This was the view from our balcony while we were talking to him.
7. Be got an XBox for Christmas, which means we don’t have to buy him one for his wedding.
8. Ben found my $100 check from his mom, which I had lost and given up on two weeks earlier, in his wallet. You might be wondering how it got in his wallet. I am too.
9. The flight from Hawaii to LAX served strawberry-banana smoothie fruit juice. If you think it sounds gross, because room-temperature strawberry/banana-flavored water is nothing like a smoothie, you might be in for a real surprise. It was YUMMY!
10. The flight back to Utah was 4 ½ hours late because it was raining harder than Californians know how to handle. Since we got in at 4:00 a.m. yesterday, I went to work late and didn’t even feel one bit guilty about it.

Momma's Boy

In 13 minutes I’ll be heading to the airport, which means I’ll officially be on my way home. I’m so excited I could pee my pants. I haven’t seen my nephew in 1 ½ years, and he’s only 2 years old. Last time I saw him he was a baby, and now he’s a little boy who walks and talks and eats real food. I wonder if I’ll love him as much this time as I did 1 ½ years ago. I also wonder if he’ll hate me as much this time as he did 1 ½ years ago. Wish me luck on becoming friends with the cutest little momma’s boy in the world.

I Guess You Could Say We're Ford People

For about 8 months out of the year, I drive a teal Ford Escort. But, since I grew up in California and I still suck at driving in the snow, my husband and I switch cars during the winter because his car has 4-wheel drive. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been driving his Ford Explorer.

Last night when I walked out of Albertson’s, I walked straight to the teal Escort in the closest parking spot and stuck my key in the lock. I opened the door and got in, and then realized that it smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. I looked around for whoever was smoking, but I didn’t see anyone in the parking lot. As I was setting my bag of groceries on the floor of the passenger seat, I noticed a black and yellow hairbrush. I didn’t think we had a black and yellow hairbrush, so I started to get suspicious. Then I noticed a pack of Kool cigarettes on the dash, and I KNOW we don’t smoke Kool cigarettes. We’re Marlboro people. Or…I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life and I just had to do a Google search to make sure I spelled “Kool” and “Marlboro” correctly. So my first thought was that Ben was cheating on me, because I still haven’t totally gotten used to this whole marriage thing, which is totally different from the whole dating thing (where it was perfectly fine to cheat on your boyfriend because you’ll probably just break up in a few months anyway). Then, my second thought was that I WAS SITTING IN SOMEONE ELSE’S CAR, which was followed closely by my third thought: Why in the world does the key to my Explorer unlock the door to someone else’s Escort??? And then my fourth thought: Is the owner of this car watching me, and is he/she about to pull out his/her gun and shoot me for trying to steal his/her car? Then I remembered that I’m not in L.A. anymore. I’m in Utah, so if the owner was watching me, he/she was probably on his/her way over to make sure I had a key to the ignition, and then send me on my way with some canned food and toys and a warm holiday greeting.

Green Orbits

Usually I would never buy a 3-pack of gum, because what are the chances that I’ll still like that kind after not just one, or two, but three whole packs of it? Well I found a kind that I really, really like. It’s called Orbit, and it’s green, and I love it. I’ve bought it twice in a row now, so I thought it was time to splurge on the 3-pack. It costs less than twice as much to buy three instead of one, you know. So if you love the gum that much, it’s a good idea, right?

Well, here’s the catch. I didn’t actually read the label when I bought the gum. It was green, and it was the right shape, and Eclipse sounded right, so I didn’t even think about spending the energy to make sure Eclipse actually meant Orbit. I was WAY off! I bought this gross kind that just tastes like a rubber explosion of nutra-sweetened Binaca. And now I have 35 pieces left! What am I going to do with 35 pieces of nasty gum, with stupid little hard candy shells? What's with the shells, anyway? What are they hiding? What's so secretive about the inside of the gum that they have to cover it with a hard, white shell that disappears after two chews?

I can’t throw it away, because that would be wasteful. And I can’t just go buy a new 3-pack of the kind I love, because that would be like rewarding myself for my carelessness. I have to punish myself, so the next time I reach for a 3-pack, or even a single pack, I remember this day and do the research before just wasting money on nasty gum.

Does anyone want three packs (minus one piece) of green Eclipse gum?