The charmed life

sometimes involves.....

- waking up, going outside, picking raspberries and blackberries, and eating them with your cereal.

- breaking world records in all Track and Field events after 2 hours of playing Kinect Sports with your sister.

- tackling your siblings in a concerted effort to get stronger.

- becoming addicted to the Big Bang Theory, simply because there is so much time around here.

- eating all the caramel in the world. Literally. ALL THE CARAMEL.

- saying, "Julie! / Joseph! / Jacob! / Sarah! How come.....you're so cute?" every time I see one of those cute people.

- becoming a pro at shooting a basketball backwards.

- narrowly avoiding vicious scams by people who don't live charmed lives like stupid Patricia J. Hall.

- listening to this song on a loop:

  

- following up every family prayer with 12 push-ups and 21 crunches (or however old you are).

- trying to tackle your brother only to bang your head on the wall.

- wondering, "but why is the jam gone?"

- laughing hysterically because Pluto isn't technically a planet.

- blasting this song every time it is on the radio and singing along with Baby Sister:

 

- going to Rita's whenever I feel like it, because it is just like 5 minutes away instead of 2000 miles away like it is when I'm in Utah....

- having friends over who cover your brother's eyes when an inappropriate part comes on in the movie you're watching.

- having brothers who cover your friend's eyes when an inappropriate part comes on in the movie you're watching.

- phrases like "Screw you, Tower of Babel!" coming up in scripture study.

- spending a morning watching Steve Irwin videos on YouTube with Baby Sister.

- stacking up significant fines on your library card and feeling really embarrassed about that since they just waived $18.40 in fines from the last time you checked something out (February of 2011).

- lunching with the Padre.

- hacking into my grandma's Facebook. getting nice posts on Facebook clearly written by my grandma who loves me.

Dating Advices

As many of you may remember from May, I have a brother who is a man. And this man is getting ready to go on his first date in a matter of days.

To prepare him, I asked several of my friends (all of whom are awesome daters, obviously) for advice. For any of my readers who are seeking dating advice, I have recorded the advices below. Enjoy :)

"Open the car door for your date. Tell her she looks nice. Treat her like a lady. Don't worry about having to be smooth. Be yourself, and if she doesn't like you for who you are then she isn't someone to ask out again. You should have no problem because from what I hear you are a stud. If the conversation is hard to keep then don't worry about forcing it, it should be easy to talk with her. If it isn't, move on and ask a new girl out because she wasn't for you. Good luck with everything and don't worry about kissing a girl right away." ~the infamous Steve Johnson

"A good date movie is anything she wants to see, but the key is pretending like you're really excited." ~Zac Efron

"My main piece of advice when dating would be to date smart, by just having a good time by learning through experiences, and don't get too attached, just participate in wholesome dating :)" ~Brad

"Kissing is like drinking salt water. The more you drink, you more you want. And always google funny pickup lines before a date." ~Winnie

"Just follow your heart. That's what I always do." ~Napoleon Dynamite.

"Keep it short....no longer than 2 hours....and simple, don't overplan! Dinner and a small activity. Maybe not even dinner, just a dessert. Open all doors. Be a good listener. Ask her questions about herself, family, future plans, hobbies, etc." ~Nicool

"Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle! Yeah." ~LMFAO

Philip sent in this video with his advices:

"Just be nice to your lady, and treat her with respect, and she will do the same to you." ~J Biebs

"Be super-needy. Call and text every 2-4 hours. Act super self-conscious and continuously apologize. Just for starters." ~Thank you, Jared Yarn....

And finally, Usher had this to say:

"You've got to love all your fans without falling in love with them. I can't say I've never dated a fan, but it's not a good idea....understand that you are a fantasy to them and you should be mindful of that." ~Usher

Obviously the broder is very well-prepared now.

Family Fight Night

Every Monday night, my family meets together for Family Home Evening. We sing a song, go over the calendar, have a lesson, play a game, eat a treat, and disperse. I was the lesson this week and I had no idea what I was going to do.....

.....until a fight broke out! Perfect. Joseph and Jacob were fighting over a book. I seized the opportunity and gave everyone a piece of paper. I instructed them all to write on the paper things that made them happy, or things they enjoyed doing, or people they loved. Everyone got to work.

Then I passed around a Sharpie and asked everyone to write, in the very middle of their paper, something that had made them mad that day, or recently. Mom looked reproachfully at me. "If it's too personal, you can just write, 'I am MAD,'" I added as I realized that I couldn't think of something that had made me mad recently.

Mom's wasn't too personal. She wrote, "when Sid compared us to COWS!" referring to a comment he made at dinner when Sarah wanted more corn on the cob. ("Sarah, you know what happens why farmers feed corn to their cows? So they can get fat." Mom resented this. She grabbed a corn on the cob and ate it. Then she gave Dad a stern talking-to about not saying things like that to her daughters anymore. He thought it was a joke. He tried to kiss it better. Clearly this did not resolve the matter.)

Sarah spoke up. "Can it be a person?" she asked, indiscreetly glaring at Joseph. (She had gotten mad at him earlier in the day and I guess some negative feelings still lingered.) People were approved and Sarah bowed her head to write down the not-so-mysterious name of the unforgivable offender. I watched in satisfaction as the Sharpie got passed around, observing the way everyone jabbed at their papers as they remembered their anger.

"Can I share mine!" asked Sarah urgently. I nodded and she said, "Okay. My happy things are Mom, Dad, Kelly, Heather, Nicole, Julie..." pause where Joseph's name normally would fall... "Jacob, Emily, Kenzie, basketball, and horses." She smiled around the room, ignoring Joseph. The rest of us smiled back at her.

"Very nice, Sarah," I said. "Thank you for including...."

"And my angry thing was Joseph," she concluded quickly.

"Oh. Okay," I said. Joseph seemed unaffected by this.

Jacob shared his next. Not surprisingly, he was angry at Joseph for taking his book. Joseph, at this point, must have felt some need to defend himself, so he shared what had made him angry: Jacob being slow with the book and hogging it.

I guess there are two sides to every story.

No one else wanted to share, so I asked them to hold up their papers, really close to their faces, so all they could see was the thing that made them angry.

"I want everyone to concentrate on whatever made you angry for 30 seconds. We're just going to sit here and think about how mad we were. Then we're going to talk about it."

We had just reached the 20-second mark and I was thinking about what I could say next, when Joseph solved that problem for me. As we all sat with our papers pressed to our noses, he suddenly lunged at Jacob, grabbing at the book and knocking him flat on the floor. Jacob reacted quickly, drawing the book closer to his body and rolling over. Sarah, having allowed her anger to marinate for long enough, jumped on top of Joseph, joining Jacob's team by default.

"No! No!" I shouted, "That's not how we handle anger!"

But when I looked at my parents, I didn't see the alarm I had expected to see. Dad was sitting calmly, watching the fight with some interest. Occasionally he deigned to utter a perfunctory, "Now now." "Hey Joseph." or "Okay guys," but it was a halfhearted effort at best. Mom, on the other hand, was pulling out her phone to catch the scene on video.

So I thought, what the heck. And jumped into the fray.

Here is the resulting video:

Are you wondering what happened next? Everyone was better. Sarah, Joseph, and Jacob were friends once again. Peace had been restored. And so, I have made the following conclusions:

1. Sometimes a good fighting sesh is necessary for a happy home.

2. Little brothers who are taller than you might be stronger than you.

3. The family that fights together, rights together.

Current Events in the Connor Home

I would like to transcribe, as close to the truth as I can remember it, the conversation at our dinner table tonight, starting after the prayer over the food.

Dad: Alright, Sarah I know you had your eyes open for the prayer, so you are going to get served last.

Sarah: (Moan of disappointment).

Dad reached across the table and pulled the lasagna away from Sarah, placing it in front of himself. Suddenly his motives for punishing Sarah became all too clear. I reached across the table and pulled the lasagna away from him. Sometimes exacting justice becomes the duty of average citizens. I served myself and then passed it along to neither Sarah or Dad.

Joseph: I have been finding a lot of nibbled-on cheese sticks all around the house. And I don't, like, it.

Dad: (eyes bugging) Yes! Do you know who's doing that? (points accusingly at Sarah.)

Sarah: What!

Dad: Sarah, let me ask you something. Who is the one who takes a bite of an apple and then leaves it there?

Joseph: And, who took two bowls of macaroni and cheese and only ate half of one?

Sarah: (looks guiltily at her plate).

Jacob: And who eats all the Jasmine rice?

Sarah: ....that was you, Jacob!

Jacob: Oh. Yeah.

Dad: I have a solution for this. From now on, Sarah, you are only allowed to eat at mealtimes. No snacks for you!

Sarah's mouth dropped open in shock.

Mom: You know, Sarah did something really nice today.

She went on to tell a story about a conversation Sarah had on the phone with one of her friends. She had told her all about FHE and how our family does it. At this point in the story, everyone else had been served, so Sarah was allowed to get her lasagna.

Dad: (interrupting Mom) Hey hey Sarah!

Sarah: I know, Dad!

Dad: Only get how much you're going to eat.

Mom: .....So then, Sarah asked if we could invite her friends over for FHE and I said we could one time.

Sarah sat there, beaming. Finally, someone was saying something nice about her.

Joseph and Jacob: What!! No! (Cries of outrage.)

Mom: I think that was really nice.....

Joseph: Mom, NO. They are not going to invade our house again. They are always over here! They like, lived here last year!

Dad: Sarah, I have another thing I need to talk to you about. I think it's fine that your friends want to call you and talk to you. And I think that's nice that you talk to them on the phone. But I am not going to be your little answering service.

Sarah: Why is everyone being so mean to me tonight??

Dad: No one's being mean to you!

Sarah: No snacks, no friends, no phone calls.....

Mom (anxious to say something positive about Sarah): I think that was a really nice thing that Sarah did tonight. We can just have her friends over while you guys are at, Scout Camp. Or something.

Dad (anxious that his point has not been driven home): Ok! That's fine! But for now on, I'm not going to answer that phone anymore. When it rings, and someone's calling on that 2nd line, I'm going to let it ring. (Five more minutes of that. Mom finally cut him off.)

Joseph (for some reason trying to keep this conversation going): But! What if it's a stranger and they come and kill me?

Mom: Awesome.

Heather: All the better.

Mom: How about, everyone says something that they learned today.

Jacob: I learned, that I was constipated today.

Disgusted looks in his direction.

Sarah: What's constipated?

Heather: Do you want to know?

Sarah: Ooooh.....no.

Dad: Alright now, I learned something today. Do you guys know what a current is?

A few people made some feeble guesses. Distraction quickly prevailed. I have no idea what Dad said next; it was something about electric currents. I started listening again when he said,

Dad: So, for the next 24 hours, no one in this house is going to use anything that requires electricity.

Mom looked at him sideways, quickly decided that this wasn't something that needed to be taken seriously, and went back to eating.

Julie: What! Dad!

Her voice strained as she listed off the things that she had to do in the next 24 hours that would require electricity. She alone seemed affected by this declaration. Everyone else continued eating in a distracted silence, having already decided that Dad wouldn't enforce his decision for even a half-hour. Maybe in a few months or years, when he'd had time to think it over, he would, but for now, it was an idle threat. Dad grinned, interpreting our quiet as tacit compliance.

Dad: Until you know what a current is. If you can come to me and tell me what a current is, you can use electricity.

He listed off two other words, but I can't remember what those were either. Julie argued with him a little bit more, just enough so that he felt powerful, but not so much that he got angry and really turned off the electricity.

Mom: Alright, can we go over the calendar?

Dad, who seconds before had been thrilled with the feeling of authority he had been building up all dinner, must have realized that going over the calendar would push him right off his new throne. He glanced around restlessly, looking for another mandate he could issue. The perfect opportunity was right at the end of the table, where Julie, who had just gotten up from a nap before dinner, was pushing uneaten hamburger meat around her plate.

Dad: Julie, you have to eat that. It's good stuff.

Julie's head snapped up, her eyes enraged.

Julie: Dad! I don't. Like. Hamburger meat!!!

Mom: Julie, can you go get the calendar.

Julie got the calendar. We made it through about a week and then everything dissolved again. Nothing can clear a room at our house faster than the promise of productivity, and we were whizzing through the calendar. By Saturday, May 21, the children had scattered.

Happiness and Familyness

On Friday of last week, I got my first letter from Jake, and on Saturday, I got part two of that letter. So Friday was pretty much the best day ever...I made appointments for 4 people at work, went home, got a letter, and then went out with Kelly to Rita's. I've always loved writing and getting letters. I think I'm a good letter-writer, and when people write back it makes me sO happy. Especially this time! Jake is doing so well. He is loving the MTC and he's learning so much and making so many friends and he is so happy there. Reading his letter, I could tell that he was just happyy and it made me happy, too.

I also taught my sister Sarah a piano lesson on Friday. She's 7 and she lovvves piano. She reminds me a lot of myself at her age actually. I used to practice so much and I would go ahead in my book and try new variations on the songs and I thought I was so good and I just loved it. She is a fast learner and she likes to go ahead in the book, too. I'm also teaching Jacob piano, and Sarah is just a few songs behind him. I am worried that if she catches up to him, he will lose motivation and he won't want to practice as much anymore, so I've been trying to assign Sarah more songs from other books to make it take longer for her to move ahead. But she keeps trying new things on her own and that makes it a little more difficult too.

This week she started working on this one song that Jacob is still working on and even though it sounded good, considering that she had had no instructions from me on it, her timing was off, some of the notes were wrong, and it definitely wasn't ready to be passed off. I told her she did a really good job and that it was cool that she had worked on it on her own and she got really excited and said, "So I can pass it off?!" I said that we would have to keep working on it. As I was writing that in her book, she got really quiet and when I looked over she had tears in her eyes. I was alarmed because I had just told her that she had done a good job! How could she expect to pass off this song that she had been working on on her own after just one week of self-tutelage?

Then I stopped and thought a little more about it. She probably had gone on thinking of how much she would impress her piano teacher at her next lesson. Surely I would be so impressed by her initiative that I would enthusistically allow her to pass it off right away. She probably imagined me gasping in shock at her impressive abilities to learn a song of such difficulty on her own, me calling in other family members to hear her play. When you are seven you have such high hopes for yourself. Kids can envision themselves performing any number of things. They will be astronauts, ballerinas, firefighters, and actresses. Even though I told her she had done a good job this week, my praise was so much less than what she had anticipated, what she had worked for. And so, realizing this, of course I felt a little bad.

But then I thought about it again. Sarah would recover. She really hadn't done well enough to pass the song off. And that was okay, because eventually she would get it. She would walk away from her piano lesson, practice really hard for another week, maybe another two weeks, and then she would pass it off. If she had imagined higher acclamations than a simple sticker and a few words of glowing praise from her teacher, she might be disappointed, but that was okay. Everyone is a little bit disappointed sometimes when others don't think their joke is as funny as they think it is, when a relationship doesn't work out because one person isn't as interested in the other, or when they don't get a job they feel they are perfectly qualified for because whoever is hiring doesn't see your potential the way that you do. Little disappointments happen, but we recover from them, and if we handle them the right way, we will grow from them, too.

Moving on....today at nannying, I showed my letter from Jake to Malan. Jake also sent me a picture he drew of us which I thought was reallyy cute, so i showed that to Malan, too. She got very jealous and said that she wanted Jake to write her a letter too. I told her that if she wrote Jake a letter, he would probably write her one back. She dictated to me the following letter:

Dear Jake,

T. Please send Malan a letter. M. Or a fan. It was so great of her. Jacob. I want you to hold my hand too. Why didn't you say I love you, Malan? Jake. Jake-a. I love you and you want to hold my hand. Can I hold your hand please in one two three days? I did it so you love me. My grandma Tori loves me too. I will send you a mail but you didn't send one back but you don't love me. Look I have. You will hold my hand too. The fan is not for you, it's for my grandma Tori. Because you don't love me, but I said I love you Jake so you will hold my hand. Thank you. Thank you to your mom. Jake-a. Write me a letter too or Heather will cry and her family will be mean to her.

Love,

Malan

which I thought was hilarious. Nannying was so good today because Owen took a four-hour nap, which he practically put himself down for. While Malan and I were coloring, he started to fall asleep on the floor, so I fed him a bottle and put him in his crib. I seriously love nannying. I love Malan and Owen and I know I am going to miss them when I go back to BYU. I like hanging out with people my own age....I like it a lot, but I also really like hanging out with kids. They are just sweet, and even though we learned in my human development class that kids are very egocentric and they aren't really capable of thinking about other people as separate individuals who have feelings too, I know that kids care about other people. They understand raw emotions better than pretty much anyone else in the world. They haven't learned all about propriety and social taboos and so they are as pure as can be. Plus, how can you not miss getting paid to color, eat, and take naps?

Tonight we had family home evening. With 7 kids.....all of whom are really weird.....it gets pretty loud at my house. We all really like each other, and there is so much weirdness and so many inside jokes that it can get really crazy when we are all together. I can't even begin to explain it. People just use weird voices and say stupid things and then everyone else cracks up. I often think that living with my family is like living in a musical, or in a reality tv show. (I swear that would make money if it existed.) At this particular family night, we were talking about the family reunion that is coming up on July 9th. We will all be flying out to Utah at about 7 a.m. We have never taken a flight as a whole family so it should be interesting. As we were going over the calendar for the upcoming two weeks, the noise level kept rising and rising. I am pretty sure my dad's blood pressure is directly related to the noise level in our house, so as we got louder and louder, he got more and more stressed. By the time we were halfway through Wednesday and our neighbors could have listened in if they wanted to, my dad decided that was enough and started yelling about how we really needed to be quiet because it was way too loud and he was going to start sending people to bed and they weren't going to be happy if this kept on, etc. My mom decided to start a quiet game in which participation was mandatory and for the rest of the night she kept a running tally for everyone who was talking out of turn with the promise of a fantastic reward to be given to the winner. Things quieted down considerably, but my dad was still very stressed and I guess he felt like someone had to be punished so he stopped listening to the calendar entirely and glared around the room instead, pouncing on anyone who opened their mouth too widely. It turned into a big pick-on-everyone-else-fest and by Friday, July 10th, feelings were hurt and three people had left the room in annoyance. With the calendar over, Dad yelled that it was his turn and that everyone had better get back in the kitchen for his lesson on.....etiquette?

....Ironic? Maybe?

Regardless, everyone came back and soon the musical started up again, our collective good humor restored by togetherness. It is one of my favorite things in this life that I am friends with the people in my family. I love love love all of my siblings and my parents. They might drive me crazy sometimes but I honestly wouldn't trade them for anything.