Musings on Life and Living

I can't remember if I shared with my friends and family here what I am doing with my hair these days. I have shared it on Facebook, I have shared it on my teaching blog, and I have shared it on the blog that is tracking the awesome project that involves my hair. And because this blog is meant to be a chronicle of the things Gretch and I are doing, I figured I'd post it here, too. Besides, I think there are some friends and family who don't actually use Facebook or follow my teaching blog, so there's that, too. I last got a my hair really cut back in March when Gretch last cut it. In early August, I got my hair trimmed and shaped, but that was all. At that time, it had reached approximately 8 1/2 inches in length. It is now somewhere around 9 1/2 or maybe even 10 inches. I haven't measured it lately to verify, though. I do know that when I straighten it out and come in straight back, I look like something that crawled out of the 80s. Gretch, who had been busy ...

Many of you are aware that Gretch and I have been undergoing the process of vitro fertilization (usually called IVF). This process has been the culmination of a year and half of treatment for infertility. After a failed intra-uterine insemination (IUI), our doctor got us approved for IVF. There were a handful surgeries between getting approved and finally meeting with the IVF specialist who works out of Indiana. We met with him for the first time in September and had plans made for IVF at the end of November. There was a huge period of concern at the very beginning of the process because of issues with Gretch's cycle going all crazy for the first time ever. Fortunately, things started on the last possible day and we got started with the month-long process of subcutaneous injections to prepare for IVF. This involved a daily dose of a drug called Lupron that inhibits the process of ovulation. Then there were the daily doses of Menopur and Bravelle, which stimulate the development o...

Whoops. I was going to update last week about Gretch's callings and I forgot. And the week before I said that I would definitely write about it. So even though I considered writing a post about the end of our first gardening adventure, I suppose I need to get this post about Gretch done. Gretch's dad wanted me to ghost-write for her, but I'm not going to do that. Even if she does have the ability to update this blog, I think we've all come to accept that I do the writing. She will edit occasionally and offer input, but it is mostly my responsibility for no other reason than I do it. So no, William, I am not going to write as if I am my wife. I couldn't if I tried. So, what has Gretch been up to in church? Well, when we first got married, she and I were called to serve in the Nursery together. Then we were moved from the Nursery to teaching the 10-year-olds' Primary class. I did a lot of the talking in class while Gretch prepared the materials, handouts, etc....

I wrote last week about the callings I have in church and said I would write about Gretch's callings this week. However, I've changed my mind due to events that happened in church this afternoon. If you were looking forward to reading today about what Gretch does in church, I apologise. I'll get around to it eventually. Besides, this post is somewhat related. Today was the annual children's Sacrament meeting presentation in church. For those who are not familiar, Sacrament meetings are the general congregational meeting in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Instead of having a minister, priest, or pastor deliver a sermon, members of the congregation are invited to deliver brief messages (talks), usually 5-15 minutes in length. But once a year, the meeting is turned over to the children in the Primary, who share what they have been learning all year through brief messages (30 seconds to 3 minutes) and songs. The program is outlined in general terms by t...

I somehow managed to forget to write a post last week, and now I don't even remember what the topic was going to be. In an effort to avoid having that happen, I am writing now, before Gretch has even woken up. I thought I'd give a rundown on the different responsibilities that Gretch and I have in church now, since I haven't done that in an awfully long time and I realised there may be family members and friends who may not even know. (And if you don't care, well, this is our blog...) However, I am turning this into a two-part series so that this post isn't too long. I'll update you on what I have been doing first, and then next week I'll update on what Gretchen does at church. For nearly three years now, I have been the Webelos Den Leader for our Cub Scout pack. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the largest supporters of the Boy Scouts of America, and nearly every unit in the United States has a Boy Scout troop and Cub Scout pack c...

Way back when Gretch was a little girl, maybe about the time she was eight or so, her grandmother on her dad's side taught her how to crochet. Gretch learned how to do some fairly simple stitches, but she didn't stick with it and the skill was lost for several years. Last year, I decided it was finally time for me to learn how to knit. I had wanted to learn for several years and finally tried. I actually started learning how to knit over the summer of 2011, but my friend who tried teaching me got so frustrated with my inability to hold onto my stitches that she gave up. A few months later, though, Gretch and I both started to learn how to knit by borrowing a very useful book from one of our sisters-in-law. We learned how to knit and both made scarves. Gretch actually made a few scarves. After spending the winter knitting, Gretch decided she needed to reteach herself how to crochet, as well. She watched a couple of videos on YouTube, looked up some basic directions online, a...

I hate sitting still. Like, really, seriously, deeply hate doing so. When I am teaching, I am always on the move. When I am on the  phone, I walk around the house. Even when I am asleep, I tend to move around, tossing and turning while cheerfully snoozing and hoping I'm not hitting my lovely wife. My desire to be constantly moving is probably a big reason why the past five days have been so hard for me. As (hopefully) you all know, I had a laparoscopic varicocelectomy on the left side done last Wednesday afternoon. (By the way, I love how the name of that procedure just rolls off the tongue. Before surgery, the nurse asked me if I knew what I was there for and I gave the full name. She seemed slightly surprised. Anyone who knows me, though, will know that remember things like this is just part of who I am.) The surgery involved having three small incisions made in my abdomen. One through the navel for the laparoscope and then one on each side, a few inches away from the central...

Gretch and I made our first attempt at pickling the cucumbers from our garden yesterday. I have no idea what variety of cucumber we planted, but I am certain that they were not the variety specifically bred for pickling (conveniently known as pickling cucumbers). We wanted to try pickling them because our garden produced vast quantities of cucumbers and we were running out of uses for them. As an aside, our bell peppers have been a catastrophic failure. They don't get very big before they rot and fall of the plant. We probably over-watered them. I also have a hunch that garden bell peppers don't grow nearly as large as the ones you can buy at the grocery store. Or we just really screwed up the plants. Our broccoli plants are finally starting to produce florets, and we have a few cantaloupe, but we are worried they won't mature. Our other peppers, however, have been doing quite well. But back to the cucumbers. Gretch had purchased a pickle seasoning mix from an Amish mar...

For a variety of reasons that I don't care to go into detail about lest I get bombarded with spam and unsolicited advice, Gretch and I no longer have a car. We have known this was coming for a while and have been planning for what we would do when we were car-less. We are fortunate to live in a community with excellent public transit, most of the places we need to go to regularly are within walking or biking distance, and we have friends and family who are close by and willing to provide rides from time to time. Of these options, riding bikes has become our preferred means of transportation. We bought our bikes before we moved to our current place, but put them in storage at Gretch's parents' house when we moved out and spent six weeks officially homeless. After moving in, we didn't quite have the room for our bikes and so they stayed on her parents' back porch. Over a year later, we finally got around to bringing our bikes home. Mine was in decent condition, pa...

There is a fairly well-known tradition, particularly among American Latter-day Saints, that when someone in one of our congregations, or wards, moves, the other members of the ward, usually the men between the ages of 18 and 45, help the family load up the moving van, truck, or whatever vehicle is going to be used for the move. In some areas, families move nearby and will make several trips back and forth using minivans and trucks. Around here, in the Champaign-Urbana-Savoy area (what I lovingly call Chambanavoy but most folks just call Chambana), many families that move are going cross-country, and so they rent a U-Haul or some similar commercially-available moving truck. From the time I was a teenager, I have been an active participant in helping with moves. Growing up in Washington, Illinois, though, it seemed we had the occasional family move in but rarely move out . So I learned how to unload a truck but didn't get much experience on the other end. While serving my miss...

(I apologise for not writing a blog post for the past couple of weeks. I was at the Cebrin Goodman Teen Institute without wi-fi for a week, then Gretch was recovering from surgery, and then I just forgot.) When Gretch and I first started our journey of overcoming infertility, I don't think either one of us knew what we were getting into. In fact, when we first started, I don't think we even realised it was about infertility. This is a topic I have discussed with a few people recently. After learning that we are both infertile (at least for the time being--there is a strong possibility of correcting the infertility issues), our doctors shared their surprise that Gretch had gotten pregnant three times; it simply shouldn't have happened. And yet, if she hadn't had three successive miscarriages, I doubt either one of us would have thought to seek out advice from a reproductive medicine specialist. It simply would not have occurred to us that there was an infertility issue...

Several weeks ago, Gretch and I embarked on another step toward self-reliance, namely, gardening . We'd been talking about it for a long time, but we finally did it. For those who may have forgotten, this is what it looked like when we finally got everything planted: Shortly after planting, our area was afflicted with record high temperatures and drought-like conditions. We watered our plants every evening, but then we started watering in the morning, too, in an effort to keep them alive. We tried our best to follow the recommendations for caring for the different plants (tomatoes, cucumber, bell peppers, broccoli, cantaloupe, cayenne peppers, and crazy-hot-insanity peppers). We worried that some of the plants, especially the cantaloupe, may have been planted to late, but we decided to go with them anyway. The hot of DOOM has subsided, and we've had a little bit of rain, but still not a consistent amount. With regular watering and constant care, though, we've man...

A few months ago, Gretch and I decided to become advocates for infertility awareness, especially when it comes to PCOS . We had been open about it before when people brought it up, but we wanted to be more forthcoming. It started with a lengthy blog post that received some wonderful, caring, and honest responses. Since then, we have learned that many friends and family members around the country have had similar struggles. Gretch and I are honest with others about what we've gone through, what we are going through, and what we will be going through. We share our successes and our disappointments, and we have become people to whom friends and family turn to ask for advice. We honestly didn't expect the response that we received. We knew that some of the people we knew had had experiences with miscarriages, PCOS, and infertility, but we didn't realise the extent of it. We also didn't fully realise what we were getting ourselves into when we decided to become advocates...

I could have sworn I wrote a blog post a week ago about our fourth second anniversary. Apparently not. I was all set to write a post yesterday and then somehow I didn't. I even had my new post page open and ready to go. Whoops. Sorry about that. It has been a good two weeks. As noted, Gretch and I recently celebrated our fourth year of marriage (that is our second anniversary; our first anniversary is on August 16--the date of our first date). We seem to have established a tradition of going to State Parks for our anniversary. I have been advocating for formalising this since our first second anniversary, when we went to Starved Rock State Park, but Gretch wasn't so sure about it. The next year we went to Moraine View State Park (actually for our third first anniversary, due to the fact that Gretch's sister got married the day before our second wedding anniversary, and we were traveling with her family at the time). Last year we did not go out to celebrate either of our...

I wrote a blog post about Mothers' Day last month, so it seems only right to write a companion post today. My Mothers' Day post focused primarily on why I felt it was not only appropriate but also necessary to address the reason I use the plural posessive form of mother when talking about the holiday. I feel the same way about Fathers' Day, but I don't think I need to go into it again. After all, the argument is essentially the same. Today, though, I want to share some bits of wisdom I've picked up from my father over the years. This is in no way going to be an exhaustive list, and I am sure that there will be plenty of things he's told me that were incredibly insightful and important that I will leave off. Sorry, Dad. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of wisdom my dad has passed on to me is this bit of advice: If you ever want to identify what is most important to you, make a mental list at the end of the day of things you accomplished; you wi...

When Gretch and I first moved into our current place, nearly two years ago, we were pleased to see that we had a large background and a space that appeared to be suitable for gardening. Of course, that space was filled with a vast jungle of weeds, spiders, and other various critters, so we didn't do much with it for the first year. After the weeds died during the autumn and winter, I considered pulling them all up and preparing the ground for a garden. But I didn't get around to it. Then spring came around and the weeds returned with a vengeance. Vague dreams of planting a small garden still floated around in our heads, but we had work and other worthy tasks taking up our time and so we delayed and put it off. After the school year ended, we started thinking about it more seriously. Then one day Gretch decided it was time. We were going to plant a garden! Not that either of us really  knew what we were doing. I mean, we had the basic downs: get rid of the weeds, turn th...

Gretch and I were out of town last weekend and, in an effort to focus our energies on what we were doing and those we were with, we tried to limit our computer time. Which is why I didn't update the blog last Sunday. And then we've been busy all week working on a new project (information about that to come tomorrow). So, what were we doing last weekend? Well, because neither one of us had work, we left on Thursday morning and went up to Washington for a day and a half. The first order of business was to get to my parents' house, and then I called up my old grade school and arranged to visit with my fourth grade teacher. We chatted for about half an hour about teaching, education, technology, classroom management, and students. What a wonderful experience! For those who did not know or just forgot, my fourth grade teacher is the reason I chose to go into elementary education. Over the years, I have kept in touch and she continues to tell students, teachers, and anyone who ...