7 Things

I've been tagged by Suzanne!
Here's how to play:
1. Link your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I'm usually pretty reserved and usually don't share much personal information. I prefer being mysterious, so this puts me in an uncomfortable situation---but I'll try to get over it. ;)

1. I have a few obsessive/compulsive tendencies. I'll only mention the ones that I seem to be over. ;) When I was little and couldn't tie my own shoes, my older siblings would fight over who had to tie them for me. If the loops didn't match, I would untie them, cry and demand them to be retied until they matched (sorry!). When I was eight or nine, I was a "lip licker" and licked so much that there was a red chapped ring around my lips. Sooo funny, now.

2. I LOVE making and decorating cakes and want to be better at it than I am. I was always my sister Holly's assistant when she made wedding cakes. Several years ago, I volunteered to make a friend's wedding cake having never done one by myself. It turned out pretty good, and I have now branched out into other themes. I'm so excited to have someone (McKay) to make fun cakes for...Nathan always chooses pumpkin pie over cake for his birthday.

3. I only have one adrenal gland and am a cancer survivor! I had a malignant fist-sized tumor on my right adrenal gland. The tumor was discovered when I was six and was surgically removed along with the adrenal gland when I was seven (I have a 12 inch scar across my midsection).

4. Due to the cancer and adrenal gland removal, my growth was abnormal and my bone age was five years ahead of my actual age. Throughout grade school I was much taller than all the other kids in my grade. On picture day, I was always called "Daddy Longlegs" by the photographer (he had cuter names for the other girls like "Angel Eyes" and "Princess"). I haven't grown any taller since the sixth grade, and I'm now the shortest in my family at 5 feet 5 inches.

5. I (like my cousin Melanie) have a strong aversion to needles. I still remember the first time I had to have my blood drawn---I was four and going to have my tonsils out. I didn't pass out, but had to lay with my head in my mom's lap in the waiting room for quite a while after. Since then, I have felt like passing out many times and have actually passed out three times. On one of those occasions, I just had my blood drawn at Primary Children's for a checkup. I was walking out of the lab when I felt that fainting feeling come on. I fainted, and in the process of falling to the floor, I hit my head on the steel door frame. My sister-in-law, who is a nurse, ran back into the lab for help and in the meantime, happened to notice the lab had mislabeled my blood. They had mixed up my blood with someone else's who was having a brain tumor removed later that week. Yikes! In that case, my fainting was a good thing...I think. Because of my cancer ordeal and having to get poked so much, I truly believe I have developed a sixth sense and can discern whether or not the person doing the poking is good at it or not before they even try. (Those are stories for another post.) Okay, I'll share the last one. When I was getting my IV during my labor with McKay, I knew the nurse wasn't experienced and would have a tough time. It was in the middle of the night and they were short on nurses so I didn't ask for someone else. After the third try, I did ask for someone else. They got someone from the lab and I knew right when she walked in that she could do it. I was right, and it only took her one try. (I really do have many more similar stories!)

6. My fourth toe is taller than the third toe on each foot. Nobody else in my immediate family has the same issue. However, when a distant cousin was visiting from Sweden, we noticed our toes matched...EXACTLY!

7. Four pages of my music disappeared while I was accompanying the Institute choir in front of President Hinckley and a packed arena of college students. The song was an arrangement of "Praise to the Man" and there were a total of eleven pages. We had rehearsed right before the meeting started and I left my copy of the music sitting on the piano. During the performance, when I got to the third page, I saw that the middle portion of the music (four pages) was missing. I had a girl turning my pages and I told her of my dilemma. She started looking around the piano and got up and ran over to our seats to check for the music but couldn't find it. I could remember enough of the music to help the choir through a key change, but I actually stopped and left the choir to sing a cappella. I even got up from the piano to check for the music...all while the choir was singing. The choir was high up on the stage and I could see the choir director looking in my direction with a surprised/worried/anxious expression. I couldn't find the missing music and went back to the piano to pick up where the music started again. It happened to be right where the key changed again and I had a little solo. It turns out that no one really noticed except for the choir and President Hinckley's bodyguards. I never found the missing pages of my music. The choir director still tells this story when he speaks at firesides and has the choir sing it the same way it was sung that day for President Hinckley.

Whew...that was hard! I'm tagging everyone who reads this and hasn't been tagged yet. If you choose not to participate, I understand.

Fun Family Fall Foliage Photos

We went up to Cedar City on Saturday to spend Conference Weekend with our families. One of my goals was to make it up Cedar Canyon to check out the Autumn scenery. We did make it up the canyon, and we were also able to talk Nathan's sister, Misty, into coming along to take pictures of us with her great camera. Misty did a fabulous job and we are so grateful for these pictures:

I'm not sharing my favorite family one, yet. It is to be revealed at a later date...perhaps in a Thanksgiving blog header, or on our Christmas card. (I'm actually going to send them this year!)

Cat Rant

I actually don't have enough time at the moment to list every reason I STRONGLY dislike cats, but today's incident has urged me to write a post for therapy's sake.

When I went out to check the mail today, I was greeted by a gory mess on my welcome mat. This isn't the first time this has happened---more like the tenth. Not only were there the remains of a dead bird (several little pools of blood, inner organs, etc.---sorry for the graphic description), but we were left a bonus present by the perpetrator (that's how I know it was a cat). I could feel my own blood start to boil and my blood pressure rise at the thought of having to clean up something so yucky---again. I'm 99.9% sure of the specific cat, but there really isn't anything I can do about it. I'm also embarrassed because I didn't see the "present" until my visiting teachers had come and gone---with their kids.

Arrrgh!!!!

I feel a little better, now.

McKay: A Five-Month-Old Baby!

Another month has flown by---it seems like I just barely posted last month's picture! We are enjoying almost every minute. McKay continues to be a happy, smiley and content baby. He is such an independent little man! It's amazing so much personality can be packed into such a little body. He's bursting with energy and his favorite thing to do still is jump, jump, and jump!

Along with his five-month birthday came McKay's first cereal feeding. He pulled a few funny faces and here is a picture of one of them:

I tried my hand at a "wordle" from wordle.net. This one helps describe McKay's personality:

I copied the image and added the border, and will use it later in one of my digital scrapbooking layouts.

It's Here! It's Here!

My favorite time of the year!


Nature XXVII, Autumn
by Emily Dickinson

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.

Here's the "trinket" I put on my door:

First DigiScrap Pages

I'm not sure if anyone else will find these interesting, but I'm excited to have completed my two first digital scrapbooking pages for McKay. I didn't start with his birth...I just picked some random pictures to practice with. I better get started with the rest though, because the pictures keep piling up! (You can click on the images for a close-up.)

I Have an Addiction

At least I'm admitting that I have a problem. Earlier this week, I so innocently decided to check out online digital scrapbooking options. I can't believe how many websites there are dedicated to such a thing. I've been able to download several digital scrapbooking kits for FREE! I've been amazed at the detail and how real it all looks. The best part is that it doesn't take up any space on my scrapbooking shelf (I haven't been a big scrapbooker anyway, so all my stuff fits mostly on one small shelf), and there's no mess to clean up! So now that I've spent most of the week searching for and downloading every free item I could get my digital hands on, I'm having a hard time pulling myself away from the computer (only when my baby's asleep) to do the other stuff I'm supposed to be doing. I'm sure the newness and fascination will soon wear off and I'll be able to find the right balance between work-time and creative-time.

The actual scrapbooking part is done with photo editing software like Photoshop. In case you don't have Photoshop and don't want to buy it, I suggest downloading GIMP, a FREE program with mostly the same features.

Check out my favorite digital scrapbooking sites for FREE stuff :
http://www.shabbyprincess.com/
http://www.freedigitalscrapbooking.com/
http://www.simplycleandigiscraps.com/
http://www.scrapblog.com/ ***You do the all the scrapbooking (arranging, editing, etc.) on their site and then download it to your own computer. The downside is that the overall size is smaller (12x6), but you can change it a little in a different program.

I must admit, I wouldn't know how to do all this fun stuff without help from my cute techno-savvy husband. Thanks, Nathan!