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.
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