Balance

Life is all about balance, that is what I'm learning now. You can have too much or too little of everything. Take chocolate for example. All my life I have been a chocoholic, and I feel good about that. It means that I have at least some chocolate every day... otherwise I'm grumpy and grouchy. However it can be taken to the extreme. Like last night when I ate half a king-size Mr. Goodbar while watching "Chuck" on TV (Joe ate the other half at the same time). Because I wasn't paying that much attention to how much I ate, I obviously got carried away a little bit and had to pay for it during the night. First, Rachel got a big sugar high and was doing flips and dances until almost midnight which made sleeping difficult. Then, I woke up a couple hours later incredibly thirsty, and with all that sugar inside it was hard to get back to sleep. Then this morning I had my glucose test at the doctor. This is even more sugar (I think) than my half candy bar, and the cute parasite I call Rachel went totally nuts. The doctor could hardly get the heartbeat on the dopplar she was kicking so much. Between these two events, I need to refrain from the sugar/chocolate for a while (at least a few hours I guess) to get myself back into some kind of balance so Rachel doesn't kick her way out tonight!

Someone in our family who is literally working on balance right now is Karen. She is so cute and fun at this stage, but she is growing again and it's totally thrown off her balance. She has bruises all over her head from running into things. I think it's because a few days ago she wasn't tall enough to hit them with her head and her legs were shorter and so were her steps. As those cute chubby legs get longer and thinner it takes fewer steps to get to the same place, and she hasn't quite figured that out yet. As a note to illustrate how much she's grown recently... Her Halloween costume went all the way to the floor and she kept tripping on it while trunk-or-treating, but now there's a 1/4 to 1/2 inch gap between the costume and the floor!

Joe is working on balance in another way. As I mentioned in my last update, our ward got split just over a week ago. Almost all of the leadership was taken to the new ward and the bishopric has been spending hours in meetings and interviews trying to get everything put back together. As part of that, Joe now has another thing to balance besides just home and school/work. He got called to be the Young Men's President. If you're laughing in shock and/or disbelief right now I don't blame you. Neither of us saw this coming really... until we look back really hard and say 'oh, so that's why that happened'. So he's busier than ever and I'm going nuts trying to figure out if/when I'm ever going to see 'daddy' again! So much for the 'easier semester' we were expecting to start in January.

As a last note, kind of in conjunction with Joe's new calling we bought a minivan on Saturday. It's a 2001 Honda Odyssey, white with gray interior. It's definitely not the 'coolest' van out there but it's really nice that I won't have to drive Joe to school anymore! And it's so much easier to get Karen in and out. Hopefully it will be a good car for us and will last until it's paid off and we can afford to trade it for a nicer, newer 'cooler' van. For now it will work to haul young men on service projects and temple trips. I think that's about it for now; I'll try to post some pics later on this week, since I figured out how to get them on the computer now.