Thora attempts leaving

I keep on checking everyone else's blogs to see if they're writing anything interesting, while all the while I neglect my own blog shamelessly. It's because nothing is actually happening, per se. I mean, I attempt to pack*

*An explanation is needed here. When I first started packing, it was very easy. I just looked at our loads of books, and filled box after box with them (usually too heavy, I feel bad for Avram when he fills the truck). Although Avram is still looking for books that I've packed, because I have now packed all of them, they are still a nice and easy way to pre-pack. Also, Lydia loves to "help" me pack; she puts things in and out of boxes such as Tape, her toys, other random things. The nice thing about books is although she can dump things in, she usually doesn't have the strength to pull the books out. Then I pack various and sundry household items, which Lydia still helped with. Now I'm on to the very miscellaneus items, which means it takes me forever to fill a box, and by the time I have, Lydia has deposited half of it back onto the floor. Lydia also likes to try and grab the sharpies I write with, and so the writing on the boxes ends up looking like I'm either drunk or five years old.
Needless to say, I'm very excited that Avram's mother is arriving today, and she can watch after Lydia while I pack. It turns out that because we're taking so little furniture, we have a lot of unused packing space, and so I'm not really worried anymore about everything fitting in, but rather how to keep it all from rattling around inside!


Another thing I attempt to do is say goodbye to friends and family. It's all very surreal, because I've been in Provo so long it doesn't seem like I'm really leaving it for good, so I say all the necessary things, like "I'll miss you" and "We'll keep in contact" and "Good luck....with your pregnancy, school, job, move, etc" but really in my head I'm sure I'll see their baby, degree, basement apartment, etc."
Maybe it will feel more real once I drive out of Utah. I know that's what it took to make it feel like I was really moving to Wayland, my boarding school. My parents and I left at four thirty in the morning, and I cried and cried as we drove out of the city. Of course, this could have just been hysteria induced by a lack of sleep.

We also attempt to get ready for Graduation, which so far has just meant planning on not going to Commencement, because I can't get tickets because I'm not actually graduating, I'm just walking. Instead we're going to eat pizza with family. But we're still walking in our college, at eight am on Friday morning. Afterwards we're going to eat mexican food, while we still can. Apparantly Britain has amazing India food, but nothing mexican-like. Makes sense; Mexico was never part of the British empire.

As I attempt these things; packing, saying goodbye, graduating I know that soon it will all become reality, because we're leaving in a week, whether or not they've happened.

Ruminations

To finish one story arc, I miscarried on Tuesday. To finish another, I also finished working on Tuesday (and because of the miscarriage, it was one odd day, let me tell you). Just so everyone officially knows too much information about our life, Avram and I aren't planning to wait a while to get pregnant again, because I want Lydia and the hopeful next sibling to not be very far apart in age, and now they will at least be 24-25 months apart, if not a lot more. That's what bothers me about the miscarriage the most; all of that wasted time and effort, and nothing to show for it (except for a greater understanding of the plan of Salvation and the atonement and the Lord's timing, which, upon reading over, is actually quite a lot of things to show). But still no baby, which is what I want.
I thought I was having a boy last time, but now I want a girl next, because if we have a baby sometime from March through May, she'll be able to perfectly wear all of Lydia's clothing, which means we'll have that perfectly down. Perfect, yes?
Camilla came down yesterday and helped me pack, organize my packed boxes, and most endearing, did my dishes. Many people think the way to a woman's heart is to compliment her children. Although I do like it when people adore Lydia, the way to make me love you forever is to do my dishes. I don't know what this says about me; perhaps I have deficient motherhood genes. Or maybe even more deficient dish-washing genes, and so those ones win out.
Well, my ruminating writing has petered out for the morning, so I will sign off.

In Which Avram and Thora Experience Sleep

We've been somewhat trying to move Lydia from our bed to her own crib in the other room. There has only been limited success, because after the first two nights, the first time that she cried we brought her into our bed, instead of taking the time and effort to settle her down again. We had tried this before, about four or five months ago, with complete and total failure. I've enjoyed having Lydia sleep with us, because it made nighttime nursing much, much easier, but I'm ready to be done with night nursing, and both Avram and I would like some space in our bed.
Lydia used to share a bed with us very well, but now she has an aversion to covers, and so will kick them off, or change her position to sideways so that she can avoid them. The second option means Avram and I each have a small strip to sleep on, while she holds down the majority of the bed.
This most recent half-hearted attempt seems to be working miraculously! At first Lydia would wake up at 10 or 11, and then after settling her down she'd sleep until anywhere from 1-3. Not too bad (for us, at least). But the last several nights she's been moving into an even better schedule; we lay her down at 9, and then she sleeps until oneish. Then a couple of nights ago she slept until 3. And last night she slept straight from 9 until 6 in the morning in her own crib.
It was heaven, and I hope that it wasn't just a freak experience, and that this wonderful sleep (and no night nursing) will continue from here on out.
This has happened a few times; Avram and I will decide that Lydia needs to do something, like take naps by herself, sleep through the night, etc, and first I'll try and implement it, and have no real success no matter how hard I try, and then a few months later Lydia just eases into it with minimal effort. I guess children really have their own timeline, independent of what parents think should happen.

A Jonah Day

Today I had grand plans; I needed to plan my lesson for Relief Society tomorrow, make four Pumpkin Pies for the BBQ, clean my whole house (it gets messy when I work all week; I'm not very good at multi-tasking), get ready for the BBQ/Graduation Party for Avram, and go to a Bridal Shower.
Grand plans, yes. Accomplished? Not really.
Avram got up at 7:30, and Lydia woke up then, too. But I couldn't get up. I really mean it; my eyes wouldn't stay open. I think they were swollen shut. Really. So Lydia crawled all over me, because she wouldn't let Avram take her away from me. Then Lydia finally went with Avram, so I got some sleep. Unfortunately that meant Avram had to take care of Lydia instead of focusing on a paper he needed to write. (I, however, got to stay in bed and dream about living in Alaska with Avram, and our teenage son's girlfriend.)
So I finally got up at 9:00, and then the day seemed like it would progress fairly well. That is, until we made Pumpkin Pies. I had bought extra deep Pie Shells, so that all of the pumpkin pie filling would fit, but there was a lot of extra room. And the filling seemed awful dark. Avram and I both noticed this, but didn't really think much of these two thoughts. We proceeded to put the pies in the oven for 15 minutes, and then we switched the pies around, so they would brown evenly. While doing this I had an epiphany 15 minutes late; we had forgotten the evaporated milk!
I'm embarrassed to admit this, because I pride myself on being a good cook, and Avram too cooks a lot, and is good. I had already given into conveniance by purchasing pre-made pie tins, and now on top of this the filling was substandard! After we both had a moment of panic, we pulled the pies out of the oven. I was tempted to just throw everything away and give up, but I paid a lot of money for these pies, and besides then we would have nothing for desert.
Our brains already being broken, we thought it might be a good idea that as we needed four cans of evaporated milk, and we had four pies, that we should pour one can into each respective pie, and that would fix everything. I poured one can into one pie, and the milk overflowed all over the table, and what was left in the poor pie shell didn't mix at all with the filling. So we ended up pouring the contents of all of the pies back into the mixing bowl, and finishing the recipe that way.
Luckily it seems to have worked, except for all of the pie crusts have large swaths of burnt edges where the pumpkin pie filling poured over the crust.
Meanwhile all of this put me incredibely behind with cleaning the whole house. I managed to do most of the dishes before I had to leave for the bridal shower, but then I had to get the pies out. While I was looking at the pies to determine doneness, Lydia came crawling over to the oven and tried to stand up by means of the door. She began screaming, and at that moment I knew that I was truly having a Jonah Day.* Luckily after running her hand under running cold water for a while she seemed to be okay, because I don't know how we would have bandaged her entire hand.
And now I've returned from the bridal shower, and my family's going to be here in a half an hour, and my house is still a mess, and instead of cleaning it I'm writing this blog. Productive, aren't I? Which means I had better go and at least pretend to clean until people arrive.

*A Jonah Day refers to Anne of Avonlea, when Anne has a toothache and she is in a horrible mood and beats a child at school, and she calls it a Jonah Day.

I went to the Doctor today, and we're not going to do any surgery. I've kind of started miscarrying naturally, so hopefully that's what will happen.
I've decided the subject of my post today shall be Lydia, because with me working I sometimes feel like I don't spend enough time focusing on her. That means that writing a post about her to make up for it must be the poor man's version of buying ones childrens clothes and toys to make up for working too much.

Lydia is really made up of three different areas - eating, playing, and sleeping.

EATING

1. Lydia loves almost all vegetables; she'll eat corn, green beans, peas, cucumbers, lettuce, and (here's the weird one) asparagus. For whatever reason Lydia and asparagus really get along. Either my daughter is born for higher, richer paths of life, or she just doesn't know that most people don't actually like asparagus, and that they only eat it because it's a socially refined vegetables, which I suppose they think will make them socially refined with lots of connections as well.

2. Fruits. Now, this is a trickier area. Lydia loves bananas, although recently she'll only eat them "monkey style," meaning out of its peel, instead of cut up on her tray. She loves oranges, but only the peels, really. She has digested quite a few orange peels in her time, although it's really more of a love/hate relationship, because often the oils in the peel will squirt her, and she'll throw that orange down and cry a lot. She likes apples, and as a younger babe of eight or nine months discovered a box of old apples and helped herself to them. The apples were mushy instead of crisp, and so she was able to gum her way through many of them. The problem with apples is that Lydia can quite easily choke on them, and usually coughs her way through eating one. So she rarely eats apples. That concludes the fruit that Lydia eats; basically, bananas sometimes. I've tried to sneak her strawberries, and even forced one in her mouth; one would think I was torturing her. Same with peaches, grapes (she doesn't hate these, but is just more indifferent to them), pineapple (except she will eat pineapple on pizza...interesting).

3. Grains. The staple of Lydia's diet since she began eating.

4. Milk. Mama's is preferred; she recently pointed to a glass of milk, and said Mama. We think that her calling me Mama (usually it comes out more like mamamamamamama) must actually mean "Milk Lady."

5. Other Dairy. Cheese is a winner in all its varieties. She also loves yoghurt.

6. Meat. She's not good at chewy meat or red meat, except for once when she sucked on a peice of Ham for a long time. I figure she must have been sucking all of the salt out, because she couldn't chew it, and I actually had to extract the entire peice from her mouth after she got bored of it. Lydia will eat easy to eat meats; lunchmeat, fake dino-chicken, precut small peices of poultry.

7. Desserts. I wish that this category didn't exist yet. Lydia will now follow Avram or I around and beg for our desserts/candy. I got Andes mints for Easter, and Lydia found them, dumped them out of their container, and bit through the foil to get a bite (yes, she ate the foil along with her bite). I wish she hated sugar.

This concludes Lydia and her food. Probably it's boring to everyone except my mother, because Grandmothers get a kick off of useless information about their grandchildren, but it's your punishment for reading my blog in the first place.

The City of Dreaming Spires

I love the title; that's the real sub-name for Oxford. It sounds so dreamy and romantic; I feel like I'm twelve years old again, and convinced I'm Anne of Green Gables, where everything has a romantic name.

I've started looking at information about Oxford and college life in the UK. I've found some different sorts of things about living in England.

1.One must buy a TV license for a TV. It costs 131 pounds sterling - about 262 American Dollars. If one gets caught without a license, there is a 1000 pound sterling fine! Good thing Avram and I don't even own a TV in America, because a TV is definitely not worth that much to me.

2. In reading a guide for saving money for college students, they tell you to only take 20 pounds out for drinking, and to leave the cards at home, to avoid a drunken visit to the ATM for more money. Although I'm sure this wouldn't be that weird of advice to most Americans, to me it's funny. It's nice how much money Avram and I save by being LDS.

3. We can go on day tours from Oxford to Stratford-upon-Avon (where Shakespeare's from), Bath, Stonehenge, the Welsh Border, London (of course; it's only an hour away), and just about anywhere else in England. Day tours from Provo could just mainly take one to the desert.

4. I don't personally care about this one, but some scenes from the Harry Potter movies were filmed in Oxford, and I can even take a tour of them. For example, the outside of one of the colleges that Avram applied to (one has to apply to college inside the university, after admittance to the univesity of Oxford), Christchurch is the outside of some building at Hogwarts.

5. In looking at Hotels to find the cost of accomodations in Britain, I came across a room description which included a colour telivision (do some places still offer black and white?) and a trouser press (I don't even use my normal iron). Also, this hotel was in the cheapest set of hotels; it only cost up to 60 pounds - 120 dollars. Ouch!

6. There are speciality used clothing stores that only sell used Graduation gowns, because at Oxford the students not only wear them for Graduation, but also for Matriculation (starting school), formal dinners in their college, and taking tests. There are many different kinds for each person, with formal regulations dictating what one wears; Avram's has lace on it!

7. In America Banks are notorious for their holidays in remembrance of everything. In Britain that is so much so, that Holidays are referred to as Bank Holidays.

That's everything odd I can think of right now. Except that everything is twice as expensive as in America. At least their minimum wage is twice as much; it's 5.35 pounds/hour, or $10.70/hour (Avram's planning on obtaining a part time job to help decrease the cost).

Changes

Avram called the University of Pennsylvania today, and we're officially rejected. Which is a relief that we know, mainly, because now we can get really excited about Oxford. England here we come! (actually, Avram still wants to think and pray about Fordham, but he does feel really good about going to Oxford).
Also, my midwives finally got ahold of me, and they're scheduling an appointment with a Dr. so that way I can make an appointment for a D&C. So that section of my life will soon be cleared up as well. (This sounds so impersonal; it's not that I didn't care that I miscarried; I did. It's just that I don't want to be waiting to miscarry naturally because I'm moving in three weeks, and also I just want to move on with my life so that I can try and get pregnant again). I'm going to see Dr. Saunders on Friday the 13th, which is okay, because what is left that can happen?
Because of the time it takes to move and graduate as well (since I'm walking with Avram), I'm going to stop working next Tuesday, so I only have five days left, counting today. It seems as if everything in my life is changing.

The vagaries of life

So, I've had a missed miscarriage, which means that my body hasn't actually managed to miscarry. I feel like I get a D in Physical Capabilities and keeping on the job (or at least my body does). Anyway, this all leads to the fact that I'm currently attempting to make an appointment for a D&C operation this Thursday.
Thankfully Camilla is going to come down and watch Lydia, which is very angelic of her. I just want everything to be all over, so I can get on with my life. Partly I'm even writing this into an entry instead of the exciting adventures that I promised is that it's the only think I'm doing in my life right now. How can I have exciting adventures when this is the content?
In truth, there are exciting things happening. For example, Avram and I are very close to knowing where we'll be going for Graduate School. It looks currently like Oxford is going to win out, but Fordham (in New York) still is in the running. After all, although Oxford costs more, yesterday Soren pointed out to me that Avram's higher job potential will more than make up for the extra money we'd spend sending him there. And although we wanted a baby, it will be nice to move to England not being nine months pregnant.

Here We Go: wherein I state my intentions and purpose of beginning an account of my life

Here is my first ever blog-post. Having said that, it will be very short, because Avram actually needs to write two papers today, and so the computer is at a premium in our house.
I'm beginning an online journal because in less than a month we will be leaving Provo for the greater beyond, also known as Virginia. As we leave behind friends and family I wish to keep in touch with them (or at least allow them to keep in touch with me, since I'll still have no idea what they're doing), and hence the formation of this public journal. Actually, I could just as well call it a journal in general; it's not like I keep a private journal, really. Since being married I could probably post the contents of my real journal online, for all that anyone would care, because my life doesn't have the soap opera content it used to (and then he said, and then I said, and then he said...).
Thus this adventure of the Thora Tales begins; to all who embark forth, fare thee (and me) well.
Thora