MormonsMadeSimple.com

My sister Anna passed this website along. I liked it's straightforward explanations of certain aspects of my faith. There are additional vids, explaining what Mormon missionaries are all about, Mormon temples, the Book of Mormon. One corrects many of the common myths about Mormons, too.

My funniest experience with a "Mormon myth" was my freshman year at Stanford. A friend in my dorm, who came from Southern California, asked me why Mormons couldn't drive cars. What? We can, I told him. He said, "But I've only seen the missionaries on bikes." He went on to explain that he assumed that we were not allowed to drive cars, and furthermore deduced that it must be because we didn't want any physical obstruction between ourselves and God.

I assured him that I had no qualms sleeping in a building or opening and using an umbrella! LOL!

What to do about Santa?

Last year David screamed his head off when we tried to do the Santa photos. I think he will smile this year, so I'm tempted to go to some of the Santa photo shoots around town.

But then I have misgivings. I like that so far David's concept of Christmas is mostly about the birth of Christ. We've put up our nativity sets, and emphasized that Christmas is celebrating the birth of Jesus. He recognizes Santa, but we don't have a lot of Santa images in the house (though come to think of it, lots of the "extra ornaments" that go on his little tree are Santa!). Today at a function BYU sponsored for the families of all its employees (yes, it was a big event!), David cried when we tried to pull him away from a Nativity scene. Very few kids were there...but there was a 1/2 hour line to see Santa (which we skipped).

What do you do to make sure the impostor (Santa) doesn't take over Christmas in your home? I don't know if we'll banish Santa completely, though Taylor has said how silly it is to create a whole fabrication around this mythological guy, who shouldn't even be our focus. What do you think is a good Santa policy?

The Twelve Days of Christmas

Along with 3 or 4 other families, my family did a 12 Days of Christmas each year as a way to share with a needy family in town. My mom would find out from a Church or school leader of a family whose Christmas was going to be rather bleak. We'd drop off an explanatory note on the 1st Day of Christmas. For the remaining nights, it was drop-and-run -- which got harder to do covertly as the kids of the family tried to lie in wait for Santa's elves. On Christmas Eve, Santa -- and sometimes a couple of elves -- dropped off a big collection of gifts drawn from all 4 families. Some years we recruited Santas who could speak a foreign language, if the family members were English language learners.

Then the "elf" families would gather for goodies and sharing of stories. Santa would describe that night, and we'd swap other stories of nearly being discovered.

Hopefully some day Taylor and I will restart this tradition in our own family. For all the years of our marriage so far, we haven't even stayed in town for Christmas. That will probably change if we can adopt more children, and it starts costing big bucks to travel at Christmas.

My friend Sally Baird gave Taylor and I a different kind of "Twelve Days of Christmas" a few years back, and we're enjoying the gift again. She found 12 Christmas-related stories or talks from Mormon Church leaders, printed them out, and gave us a bundle, each dated for the 12 Days of Christmas. Since David and I leave for Oregon on the 15th, we decided to read them over the first 12 days of December.

One was an article from The Ensign, a publication by the Mormon Church for adults (as opposed to the children's publication, called The Friend, and the teen one, called The New Era). It was called "The Christmas Coat" and was a really tender story of a family who gave gifts to a needy family every Christmas eve. It has a beautiful surprise twist at the end; read it to find out!

Thoughts on the Twilight Series

My mom sent me this article about Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series from Meridian Magazine, the online magazine for a Mormon audience (which Taylor used to write for, and which was how we connected).

Here are my thoughts to my mom:

Fun to read! I'm not sure what Meyer's motives were, but she does definitely get across a view of abstinence.

Kind of. I mean, Edward is in Bella's room every night. They kiss a _lot_. Bella does beg Edward to have sex with her, though he doesn't give in (well, finally he says he will, but by then she's convinced she can wait). When they finally do get married, I was kind of surprised at how much we hear about their bedroom life. Not graphic, but still there are some details. Wonder how they'll keep the next movies PG13! <: So it isn't complete puritanism. Still, the message does come across that true love = willingness to wait and to control oneself. That's a much-needed message for our day!

I did not love Meyer's writing style, though it got better as her books continued (too many times the same lines came up about Edward's chiseled jaw or chest). But I did find the plot line fun, and loved the werewolf/vampire universes and histories that she created. And I'm a sucker: I liked the resolution of the Jacob/Edward dilemma. (I was in "Team Jacob" for a while, disgusted by Bella's moping around in New Moon.)

Salmon Rushie: Any Recommendations?

I was listening to Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat today. I'm on the second-to-last cassette tape, and he is discussing "Islamo-Leninism" and the threat that Islamic fundamentalists have in terrorizing away the trust necessary for a flat world. He mentioned the fatwah issued against Rushdie, and I was reminded that I've never read any of his books.

Have any of you? Are any particularly good? I don't want to read him simply because he was banned in the Islamic world. But I have heard that he writes well too.

So many books these days are full of sexual stuff; I'd rather stay clear of that, too. Not sure whether Rushdie feels the compulsion to pepper his books in that way!

I'll write more about The World is Flat once I finish it. But it did make me sad to read that the Arab Islamic world is stuck: humiliated because they are half-way between the flat and the unflat worlds, and thus able to see what they are missing; angry because the US has supported injustices both from Israel and from Arab dictators, for our own oil and security interests. I haven't been to the Middle East for 10 years -- pre-9/11. Will I feel the same warmth from Palestinians when Taylor and I go to Israel in 3 weeks, or will there be more anger seething under the surface?

It also makes me sad -- angry, even -- that there has not been enough push-back within the Arab Muslim world to the way that fundamentalists are reinterpreting their religion. I think there is some deep evil in the way Islam is used by terrorists, and yet the Arab states have not waged the necessary ideological war against those fundamentalists -- in part because they themselves are often illegitimate and thus cannot lead a discussion about democracy, pluralism, peace, and tolerance. This makes me mad!

Should Mom Go Back to Work?

My mom sent us this clip, with a message about whether she should consider going back to work:

Sorry for the blonde joke. I didn't even notice the title until I'd posted this!

Sleep Patterns

We're struggling to get David into a good sleep pattern. I usually don't get him down for a nap until 2 pm, and then he sleeps for 2 hours, sometimes longer. But if he romps around in his room for a while, which he does too frequently, he may not fall asleep till 3 pm. That means he's often not waking till 5 pm or later. It's hard to get him to go back to sleep at 8 pm, which we'd love to have as his bedtime. Last week there was one night where he didn't go to sleep till after 10:30 pm!! (He was in bed long before that, but sang and talked to himself, playing for the looongest time.)

I need to get him to bed earlier. I've settled into the 2 pm pattern, so I need to break that in my own system, before anything will change for him. But he usually doesn't seem that tired, even at 2. What to do? We set up a Christmas tree in his room and are hopeful that the incentive "If you don't get out of your bed, you get to keep the tree lights on" will help.

Here are some funny shots from the past few weeks of David asleep. You've already seen the one in the high chair, but it fits thematically! And no, he didn't roll out of bed; he told us himself that he chose to sleep on the floor.






On Thanksgiving, we put David down at 2 pm, but he didn't fall asleep until 3:45! I think I got him overworked: I was trying to encourage sleep, explaining that he needed to fall asleep so he'd be awake when his cousins and Uncle Bobby showed up. But I need to remember he's two, and not that logical. I think it made it harder for him to sleep.

So his cousins showed up only 1/2 hour into his nap. I let him sleep till 4:30, but then asked Jimmy and Johnny to go and gently wake him up. Minutes passed, and finally Anna went to investigate. Softly, softly, her boys were touching David's shoulder and whispering in his ear. I guess he "inherited" his (adoptive!) mom's mode of sleeping: like the dead!