Converting to an All-Dancing Posts Blog!

Just kidding. No, this is not going to be Memory's "all dancing all the time" blog. I have so many things I need to post about. Our 11th anniversary, Mother's Day, what my sweet kids are up to. That's for when I have time. Since I don't have time right now, I thought I'd share this *sweet* west coast swing I just found. Yeah, I'm thinking about dancing right now (thanks, Carolyn!) and I really need to get back to work. Of course, we realize this is all just for me so I can have a quick and easy place to find this video again. But I don't think there is any way you can NOT enjoy this video.

Dallin's 8th Birthday!

It is really, really hard to believe that Dallin would've turned 8 years old today. That's a big deal for us Mormons, as he would be getting baptised now. It made the day very bittersweet. It's interesting how his birthday creeps up on me. Last night I was at my Young Women's activity and I was just in a funk. I couldn't concentrate. Didn't really feel like chatting. Just wanted to go home and lay down for no apparent reason at all. Then I realized that this happens every year. I think that whether I'm conscious of it or not, I am playing back in my mind what I was going through at this time 8 years ago. When I realize that, and how it affects me, I put a lot less pressure on myself to act normal and like everything is fine around his birthday. It's just a hard time for me.

So, today, like all of his birthdays, we went to the cemetery. For some reason, every year, it is a big hassle. We don't plan very well or something. This year we got a very late start. Evan sat in some bark dust at the store we stopped at on the way. Michael was pulling slivers out of him for about 30 minutes while Evan just wailed and wailed. By the time we got stopped to pick up flowers and "lunch" (which turned out to be kind of yucky granola bars), it was already 1:30, half an hour past nap time, and Maren was asleep in the back. Then I'm thinking oh great, she's not going to sleep when we get home and I'm not going to get my work done. Anyway, it's always a stressful day and I'd like to just sit and think about Dallin and all of the experiences we had with him. The beautiful thing is that when we got to the cemetery, all of the stress melted away. We sat on a blanket and looked through Dallin's scrapbook. Michael read Evan copies of the letters that Michael and I wrote to Dallin to put in his casket. Michael cleaned up his grave marker and the boys took care of the flowers. Maren enjoyed the birds all around. It was a really nice time. We sure miss that boy and can't wait to see him and love him. Evan can't wait either. When we mentioned maybe going to the cemetery tomorrow instead of today, because of all of our fiascos, he completely lost it and said we had to go today. In his prayers lately, he's said things like, "Heavenly Father, we miss Dallin. We want him to come alive again." Although he realizes it will be a while and has said things like, "we just have to wait 60 years, Mom." Too right, son. :-)

This is a tangent, but you know how you mentally prepare for things before they happen and plan how you're going to react? Well, every time I think about us having a house fire and having to get us all out, I think grab the kids and the only possession I care about getting is Dallin's scrapbook. Because of that, I realized today that I should scan in those pages and maybe put them on the blog. I think I'll do that tomorrow. We'll see. I have a lot more stuff to blog about since I've been so unfaithful. Right now it's either blog, work or sleep. We'll see what wins out tomorrow.

My name is Memory...

And I'm a danceaholic. There. I'm out with it. During the day, I can't live without putting on some dancing music and sambaing or pirouetting or something around the house. When I sleep, I have ballet dreams mostly. When I should be working, I'm watching Dancing With the Stars online (side note: That is the ONLY show I watch. I don't really even have time to watch that with how much work I have, but I figure if I've only got 45 minutes of self-indulgence all week, that's not all bad. And who needs a TV anymore? Any show I ever care to watch is online. I love it!) When I should be sleeping, I'm checking out the latest west coast swing videos (this is the truth...I love watching west coast swing in between typing up my work because it is so fluid and smooth on the floor. When I get done watching, I feel like my fingers glide over the keys more effortlessly and more quickly. I think I get my work done faster that way! Sometimes I'm choreographing amazing ballets as I crank up some awesome Josh Groban. I don't know...like I've said before, dancing is just part of who I am. What would I do without it? I love it! So, more self-indulgence here (and so I can come back to this post any time and watch some of my favorite videos), I'm putting on some of my favorite dances. Some of you may be completely uninterested and that's okay. You have your quirks, too. Ha! Here we go...

First, a clogging video. It's funny about me and clogging. I came into it because it was a free way to dance and get some exercise. I do enjoy it but it just isn't filling my dancing need completely. First of all, I went from the ballet world where you dance in a big, beautiful theater with a live orchestra to the high school gym dancing to a CD. Ha! And some clogging is a big hickish. And I don't really enjoy "hickish". :-) Probably the biggest thing is that it's just not expressive. It's mostly just about fast feet. Fast feet are fun and I'm good at fast feet. But I want people to feel something when I dance, too. I want to portray love or anger, hurt or joy. And a lot of that emotion comes from the arms. There just isn't much of that in clogging. Well, none, really. In fact, the other day in clogging class we were going to take our hands off our hips and do a little ditty with them for a second. The girl next to me, who has always been a clogger said, 'I think I'd rather chop my arms off.' A ha! That's the difference between us. Anyway, don't get me wrong, I do love clogging. I suppose I would consider myself a clogger, even, now. But, I've got to find another way to meet my dancing needs. Here's a video I found of some pretty awesome clogging guys. Pretty fast!



And here's my old world...ballet! My first love. This Polina girl is amazing and I love this video. The second one is a promo video for the company I used to dance with in California, Inland Pacific Ballet. It is for The Little Mermaid, which I TOTALLY wish I could see because it looks amazing. The guy you see playing Prince Eric was my old dance partner, Chris Bonomo, who you can also see in Newsies. He's still dancing with them. Pretty cool.





Here's one of my favorite west coast swing dances. It's a little faster than most of them you see, but still very fun. I love all the spins in west coast swing...probably because I'm very good at them. Get me spinning and I don't want to stop! Anyway, I would love to be able to find classes for west coast swing. And, more importantly, I'd like to be able to afford them. Some day...please!!!



Okay, the following are some of my favorite dances from the ballroom world. Most of these come from Dancing with the Stars, where I've kept a mental list of ones I've loved over the years. Some of them you would have to skip past the first 3 minutes or so to get to the dance, but I couldn't find the shortened ones. I would love to be able to get back into ballroom, which I have done a bit of but not too much. I think I would be pretty great at it...if only I had the money to take lessons. Boy, that keeps coming up. Time to find Michael a job!! (His externship ended yesterday, by the way, so he's done with school and we're just waiting to hear responses from companies that we've sent his resume out to!!!)

Samba:

Mambo:

Tango:

Paso Doble:

Cha Cha:

Quick Step:

Rumba:

So, I'm exercising like a crazy woman lately. Monday through Friday I get up and meet a friend (thank you, Sarah!) at the church at 5:45 a.m.! We do Pilates or Buns of Steel and hope to expand our repertoire with some cheap new DVDs. Then my second workout for Monday is clogging class. That's pretty intense. And then on Saturdays I'm taking a Zumba class. Ever heard of that? I hadn't either until a couple of months ago when I was looking for a dance class to take through the rec. center and stumbled across it, wondered what it was all about, searched on the Internet and found this (it's a 9 minute video, FYI):



Is that teacher amazing, or what? So, anyway, it's an aerobics workout that combines Latin dancing (samba, merengue, salsa, cha cha, etc.) with some hip hop, belly dancing, African dancing. It's very, very fun. More like a party than a workout. :-) It's only about $300 to become a certified instructor so I've been seriously considering it. We'll see. Anyway, so that's 7 workouts a week. Not bad for an old "tub o' goo", as my good friend Tamra would say. Hopefully that goo will be getting a little firmer here any day soon. :-)

Now that I've got about an hour's worth of video on here to indulge in at a later date, I'm off to bed. Oh, after one more post.

First Talk!

Well, we had a momentous occasion here today. Evan gave his first talk in Primary and it was so, so fun. His topic was something about the prophets encouraging us to read The Book of Mormon. Well, all through the week I'd tell him we needed to work on his talk and he'd say, 'Mom, I already know my part.' Um, okay. So I'd ask what he was going to say and he'd reply, 'I don't remember right now.' Well, I never could get him to sit on my lap and help me put it together. He just kept telling me he already knew his part (now that I think of it, I would've really liked to not prepare anything, let him know what the topic was, and see what he would've said when he got up to the microphone today. Could've been pretty funny!). So, last night I decided I'd better put something together.

So, the time arrives and he and I go up to the microphone. Seriously, my motherly dreams coming true. I kid you not. I was all emotional! I whisper in his ear, not knowing what will happen...if he will speak or if I will have to say it all for him...and he says everything perfectly clear, articulate, and wonderful. What really cracked me up was that in two separate parts of the talk, I read him the few words in his ear and he said, "I don't want to say that." I said okay, moved on, read the next part, and he followed. He must've been constrained by the Spirit. Heehee. Several of the leaders in Primary asked me if it was his first talk in Primary and they were very surprised to hear that it was because he didn't seem nervous at all and he did so well. He did a really great job and we were so proud. Next time, though, he's going to have to write it and memorize it himself. :-)

Happy Day!

Michael had his last day of classes on Friday. He had three major tests.. one on math, one on drugs and one cumulative. He got 96% or better on all of them. Way to go, babe! Then he started his externship (internship = hospital, externship = clinic) yesterday. I had been really, really nervous about where he would get assigned to extern for a long time. See, Michael wants to end up being a radiology tech. He really enjoys doing x-rays and would like to be able to do MRIs, CT scans, etc. in the future also. So, we really needed him to get an externship where he could put his master x-ray skills to good use. And I was really hoping it would be somewhere close to home because he's been going quite a long way to school every day. My nightmare was that he would get assigned to a podiatrist office (nothing personal, all you blog-reading podiatrists out there!) an hour away. And you can't refuse the externship they assign you to. In fact, in the class that graduated just before Michael's, Michael was friends with the girl who was at the top of that class. And you know where she was assigned? The prison! That's a nice pat on the back for doing a great job, eh?

Well, the stars aligned, prayers were answered and the angels sang when Michael was assigned to Tuality Urgent Care...exactly 1.25 miles and 3 minutes from our house, between here and the Fred Meyer we do our grocery shopping at. Ha! You literally can't find an office closer! Plus, with it being urgent care, he's assisting with minor surgeries, doing x-rays, removing stitches, giving injections, drawing blood...all the fun stuff. So, we could not be more thrilled. I had to snatch a picture of him on his first day, but it was quite the rush job. There were patients waiting outside for it to open and here's this crazy wife taking a picture of her husband in front of the building. Heehee. I wanted to get a picture of him with the nice, new stethoscope we got him for finishing classes, but he bolted through the door. :-)

For Any Who May Care...

That would probably be the people who e-mailed me three weeks ago with emergencies, traumas and disasters in their life and haven't heard back from me yet...

I am absolutely swamped with work right now. There are unusually high volumes of insurance claim statements that I've been assigned to transcribe the last two weeks and right now I'm two days behind and, at this moment, have 13 HOURS of work to do to get caught up. No, no. Not a typo. That's 13 hours of work plus two kids to take care of plus a house to attempt (ha, ha, big fat joke!) to maintain, plus church callings, meetings, bills to pay, appointments to attend, blah, blah, blah. I just sent a note to work to beg for mercy. We'll see what happens.

Anyway, I wanted to say that I have some really great stuff to write about when again I have time. And to let any who think I currently don't care about them because they haven't seen an e-mail from me in a while know that I DO STILL LOVE YOU! (Yes, Schmelzlesticks, that means you!!)

Why Michael is the Cooler Parent!

I was doing my work and Michael apparently wanted to be Mr. Fun Dad today. This is how it started...

And here's how it ended.

The kids, as you can see, had so much fun. The kitchen floor was completely covered in paint, and so was Maren. She got a bath that turned out to be purple! This is something I would've NEVER done because I wouldn't want the clean up. After I took the video, I went right back to the computer and continued working. Ha! Lucky me. The kids are very blessed to have such a fun, wonderful, involved dad who adores them so much!

That's More Like It!

108 words

Speedtest

Who knows what kind of bizzarre cosmic shift happened last time, but the way I flew threw this one, I can tell you that there is NO WAY anyone could type 292 wpm or ANYWHERE CLOSE to it! :-) Happy to feel a little more human again.

Cuteness...

Michael talks a lot to Evan about what food does for our bodies, from our digestive tracks to our brains and everything in between. Well, we had tacos for dinner tonight and he said he wanted some sour cream on his. Then he asked me if sour cream helps your brain to think better. I didn't give him a very good answer and hmmed and haaaed (sp??) about it because it's FOOD and heaven knows he needs to eat more of it. But, it's not particularly terrible food and not particularly good for you either. Anyway, he clearly wasn't satisfied with my answer because he then turned to Michael and said the cutest thing: "Daddy, can I learn something from you for a minute?" Oh, the sweet, sweet way kids put things. I thought that was so tender. Then, of course, he asked if sour cream helps your brain think better. Of course, Dad's answer was needed no further clarifying. I just loved the way he put that.

I guess I'll do a Maren update while I'm here. Feisty Spice is doing wonderfully. Her hair is getting longer, her walk is getting faster and her words are getting more plentiful. She is such a big love, too. She absolutely loves to give kisses and they are so sweet, with the perfect pucker. She also loves to sing. You know, I feel like I'm having deja vu. I've said all of this before but it's still true. She still loves to sing The Farmer in the Dell but she has added I Love You, You Love Me to her repertoire. She loves to be outside. If she's clingy and driving me crazy, all I have to do is get her outside and then she doesn't want me touching her at all. I can't even hold her hand without a fuss. She tears down the driveway and right out into the street. That's her favorite place to be...walking down teh middle of the street. I don't know why. Doesn't prefer the sidewalk. Thank goodness for living in a very, very quite cul de sac, but still!

All right, why does Blogger have to do this to me? Half of my options are gone. Like my font, centering text, etc. etc. It's so strange how things just freak out on this system from time to time. Ugh. Anyway, this post may not match the others, but now you know why.

Typing Speed?

Okay, last time I checked I typed about 115 wpm. Then I saw this test on someone's blog so I decided to try it out. Um, yeah. I don't think this is accurate. It takes a few minutes to take the test so I'm not going to try it again for a while because my fingers need to rest. But someone else try it out and see what happens. I don't think it's even possible to type 292 wpm. On the upside, I was supposedly ranked #24 out of 1,136,113 people who took it. Ha! Seems like a sham to me. Try it out and let me know.

292 words

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Glad I Woke Up this Morning!

Looking back now, last night was pretty comical. I thought I'd appreciate reading about it later...when I'm healthy again. I felt pretty awesome about getting into bed at midnight. That would mean about 8 hours of sleep before the kids got up. Great! But after all the work I'd done yesterday, I needed some down time so I actually read in bed until 12:30. I'm still doing good. Well, until I laid down, that is. Whose idea was it for coughs to get out of control when you lay down? Let me cough all day, that's fine. But not when I'm trying to go to sleep! Well, I laid there and coughed nearly non-stop until 1:15. I asked Michael a couple of times if he wanted me to go sleep on the couch because I could hear that he wasn't asleep either. AND his ride was picking him up at 6 a.m. for school this morning. Eek! But he told me to stay in bed every time. I think he's going for the Husband of the Year award right now. We don't have any [adult] cough medicine so I went and raided the kids medicines. To make my long, self-prescribing story short, I ended up taking three different things, two in child doses, one in infant (had to drink about half of the bottle! Oh, yes! And all three of them were at least a year over the expiration date!) and laid down with high hopes of getting to sleep sometime soon. That didn't happen. At 2 a.m. I finally decided I'd tortured Michael enough and I wasn't even going to ask. I just took myself out to the couch so at least one of us could sleep. I don't know when I finally stopped coughing and fell asleep but I was thrilled when Evan woke me up at 9:20 this morning! A little prayer had been answered. And I've learned NOT to ask Heavenly Father that my kids will sleep late because I usually don't get it and have come to realize that getting 4 hours of sleep is just part of being a mom. So, I was very grateful this morning for extra sleepy kids and that my drug concoction didn't leave me in a comatose state. Tonight I'll take the cough medicine BEFORE bed! I'm hoping for a better night.

The Big Funny

I can't believe I completely forgot to put the funniest thing on here last night. At least I think so. So, about Michael's grade...there is also a spot on his grade sheet for comments from his teacher. They usually say amazing things and this time it says, "Don't be so helpful, wait until you are asked!" WHAT?!?! What the heck does that mean? So I asked Michael if she was serious or if she was just kidding around. He said he didn't know. It's been bugging me ever since. If she's joking around, that's fine. If she's being serious, that's pretty weird. Don't be so helpful??? Um, okay. Why is it that no one would ever say that to me? Michael gets all the breaks. Ha! :-)

One Big Conglomeration

Well, many of you may have been wondering (yeah, right! Like I'm really that important!) where I've been lately. Uninterestingly, I've been here...on the couch as much as possible. Actually, we've all been sick around here since two weeks ago. I've ventured out from time to time as I've had pockets of well feelings, but it's been a bummer of a couple weeks. Now I'm in the terrible, hacking cough stage. You remember the one...the seal bark that keeps me up for hours at night. Oh well. The worst part is that Michael had Spring Break last Wednesday through Friday and he was sick, too. There were all sorts of fun things I wanted to do but the most we did was a trek to Fred Meyer and pulling weeds in the front yard. So, enough of that. This post will be about random stuff with NO pictures. Bummer, I know, but I have none. What can I say?

Michael's 35th Birthday!

So, let's first start with Michael's 35th birthday. I was so distraught when I just pulled this up and realized that I hadn't posted about that. Anyway, that happened on the 23rd of last month. I told him to pick out his very favorite dinner, dessert and drinks and I would put it together for a dinner for our family members. He chose the Olive Garden salad, Puttanesca pizza (Mediterranean) from Pizzicato, mango Italian cream sodas, pineapple upside down cake and black raspberry chocolate chunk ice cream. Well, it was quite an undertaking for ME (probably much easier for most of you out there!) but I pulled it all off. Instead of making the Olive Garden dressing, which had about 15 ingredients and I just didn't have time for, I drove out to the restaurant and bought some instead. They give it to you in a cute little bottle. Definitely worth the trip. Everyone loved the Italian sodas and I think Michael was really happy about it. Of course, there is no earthly way I could've done it without my sister, Danica, who completely ran the pizza making (I think she ended up making seven pizzas that night!) AND made two pineapple upside down cakes. THANK YOU! The terrible thing is that I was so wrapped up in this dinner thing that I didn't have the time to even think about a gift to get him. So he got nothing. So sad. Sorry, honey! We still love you!

Michael's Term Grade

Lastly, Michael got his grade today for the last term he just completed, which was X-Ray. And you know what he got? Yes, he got an A, of course. But he also got 100%. That's 100% for the whole class! I'm so proud. Poor guy, though. I told him if he even tries to come home with a 98% next term, he's going to have to sleep outside with the dogs (what dogs?). You're amazing, dear!