An Updated Bucket List for Life

In January 2012 Avram and I made a bucket list post,  which I happened to reread last night. Today is our 19th anniversary and so in honor I, in consultation with Avram, updated the list with what we have done, what is no longer on the list, and new bucket list items. But first, a small trip down memory lane.

Here we are in 2005, as young babies. These were our engagement pictures.

At Christmas 2011, shortly before the original bucket list was written.

And here we are now.

 (I'll let you decide whose goals are whose, and which ones are joint.)

Bucket List:

1. Become a full professor Still in the plan - things are looking great!

✔️2. Have six ten children What can I say? We are overachievers on our goals. 

3. Visit the five sacred places (to Avram): Jerusalem, Rome, Karnak, Jackson County, Missouri, and Nauvoo. He has been to three, I have been to four (Can you believe I have been to Egypt and Avram hasn’t?? Especially sad since he loves Egypt more than I ever could.)

4. Live in Jerusalem This was mine - still hasn’t happened but should in several years when we spend a year at the Jerusalem Center our school has. Avram had spent the previous summer living in Jerusalem and studying Hebrew while I stayed in Ohio with our girls.

✔️5. Get a PhD 

6. Buy a house I love - 😬 We have bought two houses - I cannot say I have loved either. Someday I still hope for this. 

✔️7. Get published We have both done this - Avram has published many articles, and Avram and I have published two articles together. One on Models of Motherhood in the Old Testament and one on Jesus Christ and the Law of Moses in the Book of Mormon (I am particularly proud of the latter).

✔️8. Get a tenure track job

9. Go to Gen-Con

10. Go back to school, get a Master's and maybe a PhD

11. Visit England again, and go to all the touristy places; watch a Shakespearean play, Stonehenge, Wayland's smithy, lake country, Cornwall, Ireland, London, Monthly Queen's college dinner, walking (as the national hobby), etc.

12. Visit the Continent, especially France and Italy.

13. Visit Alaska  While Alaska is cool, I am not sure why we put it on the list. There are a lot of other places higher on the list we want to go to.

14. Go on a holiday, where we rent a beach house for a week, and feel like amazing people.

15. Read the Three Musketeers in French This was Avram’s goal, but it is no longer.

16. Decorate a house (my house that I love - #6)

17. Go scuba diving

✔️18. Go snorkeling again 

19. Attend my children's Temple weddings/sealings  While we still fully desire our children to follow in our faith, what was less clear as parents of 3 under six years old was that we cannot put anything on a bucket list that involves others’ agency alone. We still have a goal of guiding and teaching our children and fervently hope they will all nurture life long testimonies, whether they get married or not, but not a bucket list item (Also, I am less focused on them being married, per se, than believing in God and our religion).

20. Finish the Hebrew bible in Hebrew

21. Read the Greek New Testament  What is also apparent to Avram is that in life, even an academic one, one can only focus on so many things, and while Avram has done some Greek it is not his focus. 

22. Go on a biking trip in Europe  I can still imagine biking in Europe, but more for a couple of hours. Long distance biking is more intense than I am looking for anymore.

✔️23. Teach a course on Biblical translation ancient Jewish interpretation. Avram just taught that this semester, and we figure it is close enough.

24. Visit the Grand Canyon, specifically go down inside the Grand Canyon. Ideally raft it.

✔️25. Visit Maine, stay by the ocean

26. Have a flower garden

27. Take the family to Disneyworld/Disneyland

28. Go river rafting

29. Visit the Berlin Museum

✔️30. Do a seminal camping trip with the family We have camped for a week in Maine, camped at Yellowstone and Sequoia national park, and have many more camping trips I want to take in the future, both big and small. I don’t know if by seminal I meant long or in an awesome place, but we have done both.

✔️31. Have all natural births (3/3 so far) Ok, I did have two epidurals and seven natural births, but honestly that feels close enough for me. I admit that this goal, while I had good reason for it (less intervention, the most birthing options, safer for low risk deliveries), feels a lot less important to me than other things now that I have lived a lot more life (like living children, parenting children). Also, while there are risks to epidurals, they are low enough that while I don’t regret a single one of my natural labors, and would do them the same way if I did them again, I wasn’t too worried about being required to have an epidural with the twins because other aspects of the birth were so much larger (trying to have them vaginally rather than a c-section, wanting to be awake and not put to sleep in an emergency c-section, which are much more likely in twin births- to the extant that they are all delivered in the OR).

✔️32. Nurse all children (unless they're adopted) I nursed all my living children. 😕☹️😢. Even Rowena nursed a dozen times or so. She never transferred very much milk, but I am grateful we were able to briefly do it, I even got to tandem nurse one single time in the NICU.

33. Do foster care  I still really care for foster care, but as our family has expanded I no longer feel that it will be something our family ends up pursuing. Perhaps something in ten or fifteen years will change my mind, but it is no longer a plan of mine.

✔️34. Be a temple worker Avram was a temple worker in the Columbus temple. We still plan to do it again together when our kids are a lot older.

In addition to the 17 surviving items from 2012’s bucket list, here are new ones we have added with 12 years’ more life experience.

1. Publish a book to the academy and a book for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (ideally a few more books, too).

2. Write an article for the Burgon society, a society devoted to the study of academic regalia.

3. Visit all 63 (as of 2024) national parks - I am 11 in.

4. Visit Hawaii 

5. Go on an anniversary trip to Monterey Bay, California. This was our original location for our honeymoon but we were intimidated by the cost and moved it to Cedar City instead and have always regretted that. We have been a couple of times as a family and love it there (Avram lived there for two years as a kid), but never as just a couple.

6. Have a fulfilling job or career outside the home.

7. Do an extended camping or RV trip around the US (for 6 weeks or 2 months).

8. Take our family on a cross country religious pilgrimage trip to LDS church history sites (and to national parks and DC and Avram’s parents in Virginia and friends in Ohio).

9. Someday have family reunions with my kids and their families where we all pile into a huge house or campsite and play games, talk, do fun things, visit nature and swim in a lake or an ocean, eat and laugh and play together and have s’mores around the campfire late into the night.

A Double Rainbow

 I feel like blogging. And Avram has begged me to write a blog post, any blog post to get the very, very sad post about our son Torvald off the front page of my blog, as it is his post that greets us anytime we go to my blog (which I still use as a landing page for accessing other blogs, or reading/showing past blog pasts and pictures to my children.) This blog, although poorly updated for much of its history, is 17 years old this month. 17 years! The least I can do is write a shiny new post for its birthday. 

Of course, in the universal song of bloggers coming back to their derelict blogs, much as happened. So much I could not even update you all (I am assuming all two of you) in one blog post. So I will stick to the cutest of my updates, while also distinctly NOT promising you to go over everything else  that has happened in our life for years in detailed and many future blog posts. For one thing, I do not even know if there will be future blog posts. I have read too many false promises from other bloggers that were never fulfilled in this vein, and I do not trust myself enough to be any different than they have been. Enough excuses, onto the cute (after some emotional trauma).

After Torvald we did not plan on trying for any more kids. Our hearts were broken, our family felt broken, my mental health definitely was broken. However, in September of 2022 I got a positive pregnancy test, and was shocked - it did not seem possible for so many reasons. I cried and cried - I was so terrified for the future, for the possibility of another baby dying. I hate being pregnant at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. Torvald’s pregnancy was very physically difficult, and I worried this would be as well. Plus I had started taking a few classes at Avram’s university where he teaches so I could be prepared to apply for graduate for the next year. (I actually took the test on campus, and watched it turn positive in his office, where I did my studying every day). 

I scheduled an early ultrasound and at seven or eight weeks I went in to the office for it. Everything there reminded me of being there for Torvald two years earlier. By the time I was called back I was crying so hard I couldn’t remember how many pregnancies I had had to tell the sonographer. And then she brought my baby up on the screen and it was blessedly alive, with a heart beat and everything! And then she zoomed out, and there was another heartbeat, attached to another baby! I stopped crying, and then moved straight into a state of surprised shock I am not sure I have moved beyond yet, a year and a half later.

Sadly for me, it was a hard pregnancy. I felt mostly dead, most of the time. I continued auditing the two classes I was taking, but dropped the Ancient Greek class I was taking for credit because my nausea became too intense. I spent the entire pregnancy nauseous, even on drugs, and sick and even fainted once (briefly, but in an elevator full of college students, so fun!).  I spent the whole pregnancy terrified my babies would die, that I would lose not only them but my sanity as well. I audited two more classes the second half of my pregnancy, and going to campus and studying for my classes was the only thing that got my through, I couldn’t do physical labor, because I was so sick, but I could still read, and I could still sit in a classroom.

Early, but not entirely unexpectedly, my twin girls joined us earthside on April 25 of last year - 7 weeks early, but thankfully alive.

Somehow when I brought the pictures in it sized them differently. Do not take this as a sign of unbalanced love between my babies, but rather of my unbalanced knowledge of technology. Rowena Isis Ruth is the first picture, born 4 pounds 4 ounces and a full five minutes earlier than her sister at 7:40 am. Rowena has a softer spirit than her sister, but she also has a devious streak. She chortles when she laughs and has a superglue grip on anything she can get her hands on. My poor girl spent 63 days in the NICU because it turns out she doesn’t eat (long story short - had penetration, where liquids partially go down wrong tube, which led her to an extremely strong oral aversion and for seven months had an NG tube through her nose but now has a g-tube in her stomach), but she is a cute, if still petite, fighter.

Artemis Mary Nephthys is the second picture, born at 7:45 am and weighing 4 lbs 14 oz. She continues to weigh more than her sister which has led multiple people to exclaim that she is clearly the older sister, as if sizing of twins worked that way at all. (Someone else once told me it was clear that Artemis is the older twin because she was crawling and Rowena couldn’t yet. 🙄 Let us just say there are many myths about twins, most of them malarkey.) Artemis spent 3 1/2 weeks in the NICU, and then her and her sister were tragically separated for a time. Avram often says that Artemis is a hollow tube masquerading as a baby - she will nurse or take a bottle of pumped milk or take any formula she has been offered (in our search for a formula to help with Rowena’s extreme reflux we have tried many and Artemis just gets dragged along for her couple of bottles she has had a day for most of her life). Artemis loves crawling, although only army crawling, and has two bottom teeth that are stinking adorable. She wants to eat anything, move anywhere, and generally will be with anyone. 

Both girls are quite easy going and never cry unless they have a real need to be met.

Oh, enough talk and you need more pictures, you say? I live to oblige. Rowena has a rounder face, blue eyes, a light complexion and light hair that almost (maybe? Hopefully??? Is strawberry blond, and for the first seven months has a nose tube. Artemis has a more olive complexion, a more noticeable chin (Rowena seems to have misplaced hers somewhere), and dark brunette hair and hazel blue/green eyes.

Sorry, I don’t know why the pictures posted out of order - use your imagination to place them in order.

This is the most recent picture, so you get a bonus of my friend Carol from collage (best friends I have ever made were in college! Friends for life!) But for the purpose of this post the focus is on the two baby twins - my baby twins. Wait, what??? I have twins??? I know, I am still in shock too. My plans for going back to school for my master’s is pushed back a few years, but I still don’t know exactly what degree I want, so that hasn’t been a big deal. Twins have been hard, especially one with extreme reflux and a feeding tube, but I feel like we are slowly coming out of the hardest baby phase and maybe someday soon will feel like our lives are functioning again. But at least this hard, unlike so many of life’s trials and hardships, also comes with a mega dose of cuteness. These are are best bookends to our family, and the sweetest spirits I am grateful we have with us.