We are back from our trip! We hopped on over (a very long hop on some planes of course) to Utah to visit family and enjoy some fall weather for a week. It was really fun and we’ve decided retirement and vacation is the life for us! Okay nevermind. Trevor says he pretty much likes his job. And he didn’t even say it in response to me writing that sentence but it was just perfect timing. I guess we’ll keep our life for a while :)

Here we are enjoying the cold - you can view the rest of the pictures here!

Every now and then I wonder if I’m abnormal because I don’t feel some irresistible urge to buy cute baby things whenever I see them, or because he’s coming in 11 weeks and we still haven’t gotten him so much as a pacifier. Or because I was not excited and chomping at the bit to start wearing maternity clothes as soon as my stomach turned into the tiniest bump. I just barely made my first very reluctant foray into the world of a maternity clothing store yesterday. I now own two maternity shirts. That may be a step up, but actually bringing myself to wear them is going to still take quite a bit more mental preparation. I’m quite content with my long T-shirts and I want it to stay that way. And they work just fine I think… but not really for church. One of these days I am going to have to accept it! Even Trevor is now antsy to go buy stuff and has to try persuading me that we need to go shopping. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around! I just haven’t ever seemed able to get into what I thought was that typical first-time-mom groove.

Don’t get me wrong, I am really excited for Baby to get here. I love him a lot. I also like new stuff a lot, and if all these baby things were already in our house, I would be in heaven organizing it all. I think maybe it is shopping that I don’t like. I guess that makes it a good thing I’m not having a girl :)

I am a minimalist. And by that I mean I can’t stand having around more than what I need. I’d rather have a big empty space with perfect essentials than a tiny (or any size) space cluttered with things I might use in the future. I love how Trevor agrees with me on this. I love how we throw things away. I think we got rid of at least 40% of what we owned before we moved. I hope we don’t look back on our lives 93 years in the future and wish we’d carted more junk around just to avoid having to buy it again once each decade when we needed it. I don’t think we will.

I mention this because over my months of research and reading, being presented with all-things-baby on television, online, and in stores, I’ve been bombarded with messages implying certain minimum standards that a good parent apparently must strive for at all costs. I hardly find these minimum standards to be a minimum - rather I think they are a step backwards. Frankly getting caught up in all that stuff would clutter up my house and bring entirely unnecessary stress to my life - both in the cleaning department and in the wallet department. There is so much junk made for babies! I think most parents are smart enough to not subscribe to this. But I think there’s probably also a lot of other parents out there making their lives much harder than they need to be as they try to match this idea of what they should be giving their children (everything available). These might be my pre-mom famous last words, but I intend for this to cost much less than what I hear is the average cost of outfitting a baby for the first year (apparently $6000 in the U.S., excluding delivery/medical expenses).

Every time I walk into a baby store, this is what I feel like ranting to the salesperson: My son does not need a $500 crib with fancy designs. He does not know the difference, and no I do not feel like I am endangering his well-being if we get him the $200 crib or if we don’t paint him a themed nursery. He can grow quite happily wearing solid-color onesies everyday and without 7 different variations on the same noisy toy. His life is not going to be ruined if we don’t go into extravagant debt for a bigger house just so that he and each of his siblings can have their own rooms. He does not have to be involved in six extra-curricular activities and three summer camps by the time he is ten years old. He should be able to play in the dirt and enjoy his childhood through his own explorations. I do not feel obligated to stress about saving thousands of dollars for him to go to college. We’ll help him when he needs it, but he’ll get a job and do just fine on his own.

We’ll love him and teach him, and he’ll turn out just great.

Trevor looks so handsome and spiffy when he gets his hair cut. He got it cut this morning. That makes today a spiffy day! :) We have a date tonight. I’m quite excited. Dating your husband is fun because he lets you pick anything, even if it’s just doing what you always do like watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and eating popcorn and ice cream, except you call it a date and that makes it even better than it already was.

Also, yesterday after my doctor’s appointment, I wanted to celebrate for only having 12 weeks left, so I bought a $5 Old Navy T-shirt that makes me really happy because I love trees. Saturdays are the best for wearing five dollar shirts.

All that I, along with many others I’m sure, keep wishing for in politics is somebody who is smart. Somebody with good judgment, so that I feel he (or she) will handle well whatever comes along. I’m tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils. I’m tired of politics being a game of who can make the most believable promises - as if they can guarantee what is, in reality, a very uncertain future. Look at what Bush’s handling of the 9/11 aftermath has done to his forever reputation. But before we knew what was going to happen, we elected him. I’m not saying I would rather have had Kerry in charge during said time period (definitely not), but I seriously doubt that when we elected Bush it had much to do with our trust in his credentials to lead a war. Why? Life was grand! We didn’t think we’d need it. We voted based on the issues of the day.

We shouldn’t be electing somebody based on their specific policies. We should be electing somebody based on their ability to lead. Their ability to create the best from situations. Their mind and judgment and fairness and self-control.

This election, that’s what I have been looking for. I even un-Republicanized, un-conservativized my self-perception, and started from scratch. I didn’t jump on any bandwagons without learning first. And as cliche as it may seem, given my faith, I really think Mitt Romney is the man for the job. Time and time again he leaves me convinced in his handling of all circumstances. He knows how to get elected. You seriously cannot tell me that this is not a smart, smart man.

Wow. I didn’t know this was even sold. I have always considered myself a real dark chocolate lover (yes, before the bandwagons of the antioxidant movement), you know, around the 60-70% range… but feel I must now raise the bar. My tastebuds’ current resume suddenly feels so amateur. Consider it added to my list of great life expectations.

Something new I learned today: The motto “In God We Trust” was not instituted in America until 1956 (found this out while reading “Latin phrases you pretend to understand”). I always thought it had been around for much longer. But no - it was only 50 years ago that we felt enough of a need to not just allow its use, but to actually call for its official use where there had been none before.

Things sure have changed a lot in only 50 years.

I ate a grapefruit yesterday afternoon. As I set it down on the kitchen table - perplexed by why I was eating something with negative calories when I am already having enough trouble keeping up with this baby’s food needs - I was struck by how very Crate-and-Barrel-ish my lunch looked (at least in my view from above). The orange and pink fruit in its simple white bowl seemed to complement the green placemat so well that I just wanted to sit and look at it rather than eat it. But who turns down good food ready to be eaten? Not me, so I ate it all and then went back for the other half. I brought it back to the table just to experience the view again. And then I took this picture of it. My four-year-old Kodak camera and apparently lacking photography skills were unable to replicate the colors or view in quite the way I first saw them that had made me so happy.

I feel justified in doing something as silly as photographing a lunch so low on the culinary totem pole because the resemblance seemed to validate my obsessive obsession with keeping our house feeling as put-together as said magazine. I don’t do this striving to elicit the comparison by any means… that’s just how it goes when you can’t function without an extreme organizational perfection. Half the time I clean up after Trevor before he’s even done using what I am taking away! Good thing he is very patient with me. I am, however, learning to compartmentalize this tendency. I think I have to before it destroys all semblance of the effectiveness it may have originally offered. I think having a newborn around might, of necessity, do the trick.