...sleep in heavenly peace!

An Early Morning Intruder

Sunday, 19 December, 2010, 2:21 AM:

I woke to a rustling that was obviously coming from outside. Late at night, when these sounds occur, I have to say my heart gets to racing a little. My wife trusts me to protect the house, and I do keep a fire bat under the bed - not just for breaking windows during fires. So I know, when there's a sound, it's up to me to confront whatever is lurking in the darkness.

But before I confront anything, I try to listen closely to determine what I'm up against. In the past, I've never been up against much: a child wandering around the house; neighbors up making a lot of noise outside, or even upstairs. The scariest moments I've had to confront up until last night is Liz crying about some nightmare she's had. Typically, I'm pretty asleep, and I hear her scream out for me. In my fog, I try to understand why she's crying - only to learn that it was a nightmare from which she needs a parent's comfort to calm her.

She would wake from a nightmare on this night, too, but that isn't the sound I was hearing at 2:21 AM.

Instead, the sound I was straining to hear was something I hadn't heard before. Foreign sounds are definitely the worst. At first, I couldn't locate the sound spatially. We live in a bottom-level condo that is partially underground. All of our windows are on the south side of the building. Each bedroom has its own window; ours has a sliding glass door leading to our back porch. As I strained to hear, I knew the sound certainly came from outside, but at times it sounded far away, as though someone were trying to open the blinds in one of the kids' rooms; at other times, it sounded quite close, like someone were on the back patio - right outside our glass door.

But, after a bit of straining, I was sure that whatever was making the noise was on our back porch.

I now knew where the noise was coming from. I lay for a few moments trying to determine what was making the noise. I'll admit, I was a little scared to get out of bed and look out the blinds.

Sometimes, it's harder to be brave when my wife doesn't hear the noises. I suppose that's because if all else fails, I want her to hear me falling to floor and writhing in agony when whatever the disturbance is beats me up or shoots me. Even if there's nothing she could do at that point, it would be nice to know she knows I'm risking my life for her.

It was quite a relief when, through the fog of being just awoken, mixed with the emotion of having something just outside our door, to hear my wife speak up:

"I think there's an animal on our patio."

I could be brave now, because when she said that, I was finally able to place the sounds that were being made: a rustling of leaves (we have something of a collection on our porch from all the storms lately) and the scratching on the glass of the door, that could not have come from anything larger than a ... cat? No, too small. Mouse? No, too large. Rat? Outside of our door?

Sort of.

Turns out it was a muskrat (we have a creek that runs through our property). I'm glad I didn't have to use the fire bat. But I did have to get the thing off our porch. Since the porch is underground, the walls are cement; a cat could get in or out; a muskrat would be stuck there all night, scratching at our window.

Anyway, long story short: went to the dumpster and dragged a large tree limb over to see if I could get it to climb out on its own; that explains all the sticks in the picture; he used it as a good hiding place. So I removed the limb and used a shovel to...

...scare it into a bucket, which I promptly threw over the side of the porch (hey, I thought it could be rabid or something). I think it was just as relieved to be out of there as I was to get back into bed.

Home Security

1 Fire-bat

1 Shovel

1 Bucket

A whole lotta courage!

A pinch of wimpering in bed

P.S. In the middle of the ordeal, Liz woke from her nightmare - which I think turned out to be a half frightened/half irritated man walking through her house trying to decide how to get a muskrat off the porch.

Forgive My Self-indulgence (just this once)

One of the reasons you don't see me post so much is because I'm not really sure what to blog about. A lot of blogs are online journals and I suppose I don't care to leave a more detailed record of my life online. I guess I'm afraid the world will find out how self-centered I am, then more than just my closest friends and family would know. So I just keep to myself and let my wife do much of the blogging. But for some reason, I couldn't resist this one clichéd blog.

Apparently, the BBC says that of the list of books below, an average person will read six. I have bolded those I have read and italicized those I have read some of (not just opened). I've also added some parenthetical commentary after some of the books, in case that's interesting to anyone. Because I'm bragging, I should add that my PhD is in psychology, not the humanities, and most of these books I've read in the last 10 years while getting my degrees. Oh, and in a couple of months, I will have finished the first ten in their entirety. Thank you very much.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (just 120 pages to go, actually)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (only slightly a disappointment)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (probably the best book on this list)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (this was a good one)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (not that I'm proud of it...)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (this shouldn't be on this list)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (I read the abridged version, one of the most shameful things I've ever done - I didn't know it was abridged till about 3/4 way through)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (28 freakin' chapters! guh!)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

This happens every year

Halloween

Pumpkins…

Candy…

Charlie…

Happy Halloween!

Adventures in Breastfeeding

This post may not be suitable for children and male in-laws.

You would think that I would be used to it by now.  This is the fourth baby I’ve nursed but I still don’t know what to say when:

 

My wide eyed two year old asks,

“What’s that mommy?”

or with even bigger eyes,

“Is the baby eating you?”

or when my enthusiastic five year old says,

“Mom you should be a cow for Halloween!”

or asks skeptically,

“Does one of those have chocolate milk in it?”

Some Shots

The cross eyes…

A rare quiet moment

“I a big brother like Kipper!”

Just so sweet.

This year we spent Conference in the mountains.  

Sunday was just way too peaceful.

Happy Birthday Girl

I love my girl because she likes to wear hats.  She gets hats from school often and she wears them all day long.  Doesn’t matter what it looks like…last year she got a pretend yellow hard hat and she wore that one around for a week.  This one she got for her birthday and I’m pretty sure once she got it on it didn’t come off until bed.  I had to keep fixing the elastic.  Unlike me, she likes accessories. 

And she still likes princesses!

Happy 7th Birthday Sweetheart!

Gabriel Joseph Ostenson

So we finally decided on a name, the day after our new boy was born. Not quite sure how it happened, except that I think my oldest brother had to make the final decision. Appropriate for the patriarch of the family, I suppose, since his little brother had some sort of naming deficiency. Anyway…

So Mother and child came home today and I have a couple pictures I’ve taken. He was born in the early afternoon on the 17th of September, 7 lbs 5 oz, 19 inches long (for those who care about numbers). Labor was about 5 hours, pushing about 2 minutes (though it seemed a lot longer to Beth). And I guess that’s about it, right?

Here are a couple of pictures:

First shot of Gabe with his eyes open.

An excited sister and distracted brothers.

And a cousin – that’s about all the shots we have of him right now.

We haven’t been enthusiastic picture-takers yet, though grandma has some pics that I’ll try to upload soon. I’ve been napping a lot (almost as much – more? – as Beth) lately, so been kinda lazy. For now, you’ll just have to be content watching the next youngest, Isaac, bend some fire and some earth:

Some Friends are Meant to Be

We miss you already!  Good luck in all you do!

First Days of School

• 1 all Knowing first grader (“Mom, I got used to first grade SOOO fast.”)
• 1 nervous Kindergartener (changed his clothes three times)
• 1 sad little sibling (the only one who cried)
• 1 anxious mother (“Wait! don’t you need just one more hug?”)

Good luck kids!

Last of Summer

As our last summer hurrah we spent some time at the reservoir near my old home town.  In honor of the occasion, and in keeping with tradition, we didn’t let the kids bring their swimming suits since my parents were usually too poor to afford suits.  Yes, long ago I used to be the naked baby at this very same lake…. ah memories! 

Points for Mom

Last night we were all cleaning up for bed.  I was in the boys room helping (persuading) Kipper and Isaac to clean up the cars when Liz walked in and announced “Isaac gets 1 point, Kipper gets 1000 points and Mom gets 12 points.”

Joe said, “Gee honey, that’s not even good enough for runner-up.”

Maybe next time mom.

Boy Name Dilemmas

Many of you know that we are going to introduce yet another Ostenson boy into the world this September.  So far so good except we seem to have hit a brick wall when it comes to naming this little one.  Joe and I, being overly thoughtful, overly idealistic and overly symbolical, have run out of meaningful, faith promoting, character building, and otherwise cool names that also don’t sound awfully outlandish….at least we think.  It doesn’t help that there are nine uncles and twelve male cousins in the immediate family plus the scores of Hulets and Strebels that populate the Salt Lake Valley.  So we really feel like we are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Just to give you a glimpse: we considered Melchizedek for a whole day and then it dawned on us that it might be a little embarrassing to not be able to spell your own name as a sixteen year old.  Eros was a slightly better alternative but again we have to think about those teen years (“so guess who I’m named after baby …”)  We tried on Gideon, Nimrod  and Teancum thinking that it is possibly cool to name your son after a warrior, but then we decided not to ask for trouble, since we are likely to get it anyway.  Nicholas is too jolly, Wolfgang is too brooding.  Amadeus seems a little cumbersome and possibly guilt rendering.   We had a whole list of names given to us by Joe’s brother that have ‘inappropriate connotations’  some that I never ever would have guessed…so we just avoided those entirely.  Even though we do really like the “Avatar” cartoons I told Joe that we can’t name our son Aang, or Sokka.  We were inspired by the Lost season finale and tried out Desmond for a while only to find out that it  means “one from South Munster”.  How lame is that?

So one day we were in the car, we had just finished a lively conversation with some members of Joe’s family who decided that I was being way to picky about this little boy’s name…possibly I am…anyway; we decided to ask the kids. ‘What do you think we should name the baby?’ I think Kipper said Melissa or something like…he still thinks we should have a girl.  Liz was quiet.  “How about Shadrack,” I said, I was on this kick that Shad sounds like a cooler Chad…don’t worry that one passed.  “How about Gideon?” Joe said .  Liz said, “I can’t even remember those names!  Just call him Bob!”

So welcome to the family, Bob.

What does it mean to Believe?

 

I have to say that (most of the time) I have loved having my sweet four year old at home this year.  Since Liz is gone in the mornings Kipper and I get to go on adventures together…usually to the grocery store.  The other day we were out running all the errands that piled up during our sick week and I got to hear a little more of just how this guy thinks about things. Here’s how it went:

   

Kip, from the back seat:  “Mom, I believe in EVERYTHING”

Me, thinking:  “I guess I do too, bud.”

Kip:  “But I DON’T believe in coffee and alcohol and cigarettes.”

Me:  “You’re right, those things are bad for our bodies.”

Pause.

Kip, sighing:  “Mom, I believe in Black Tacos…!”

 

 

Kip’s Belief:

1 four year old

1 black taco from Taco Bell last October (now discontinued… “sigh”)

1 Article of Faith that I’m not sure we grownups understand

 

 

I sure do miss my four year olds when they grow up….

Has it really been that long?

So, I have recently been generating controversy over some of my strong opinions concerning gender roles and marriage. As an example, I thought (for a while) that women were supposed to maintain the blog. I was sure the proclamation meant something like that when it said that women should nurture. Anyway, I've since repented and decided that I could share in my responsibility to blog-readers.

I suppose I should start at Miami, since that is the first exciting thing to happen since Liz woke up with nightmares three months ago. I flew there three weekends ago to attend a conference with a bunch of smart Doctor types (of philosophy) like me. We talked a lot of steam for a few hours and spent the rest of the time enjoying the Miami weather in the middle of February.

I presented on what to some might seem the most unlikely of topics: the connection between psychology and ecology, or the parallels between our relationships to people and our relationships to creation. It was the most effective conference presentation I've given in the four or five years I've been doing academia, and likely the most fruitful. I was fortunate enough to tag along with some of the best minds of this coming generation and we had a great discussion during the conference.

But you don't want to hear about that, as must I as I could go on an on about it. What you really want to know about are my Epicurean adventures. So I'll start with the rental car: I split my trip (hotel, food, car, etc) with a group of students and, since I was arriving first, I was the designated driver. When I got to the rental car company, a cherry-red convertible Mustang was sitting smiling at me by the front door. I turned to Sam, the guy with whom I'd flown in, and said, "we should rent a convertible." To make a long story short, the guy at the counter gave us a screaming deal and we drove away from Avis with this:

In all honesty, the primary reason I got it is because I thought that as I went back and forth from the airport to the hotel, everyone would be happy to ride in a Mustang convertible. I wasn’t really sure how much I’d enjoy it. But I enjoyed it. Oh yes, I enjoyed it. It was worth far more than the extra $100 I paid.

By the way, lest you think I thought I was cool driving around Miami in this car, you should know that on the way to the hotel, a Rolls Royce passed me and, not ten seconds later, a Ferrari followed. Our Mustang was white-trash compared to the number of Bentley’s, Mercedes’, Maserati’s, Aston Martins, and other cars that characterize the amount of money floating around down there. Probably the best part was when we drove to Key Biscayne. Sam wanted me to put the top down (in spite of the threatening rain clouds), so I pulled off to do so. As we were sitting there, a bright red Lamborghini ($250,000 car) with its top down pulled out in front of us. Sam said it best: “I don’t really feel that cool right now.”

Here are just a couple other scenes from my Epicurean ad  venture:

We went to the beach Sunday afternoon to commune with nature (in the spirit of my conference presentation). The cruise ships were going out from port, the water was warm enough to swim in, and I was so relaxed, I actually wanted to go on a cruise. What a weird feeling.

 

Here are the trees as we left the beach while the sun was setting. Leaving Miami Beach at Sunday around 6:30 was quite an adventure. We had the top down and five people piled into a car really on meant for two. Traffic was jammed almost all the way into Miami, and you know what? I didn’t mind at all. In fact, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed being stuck in traffic. (That’s my shoulder in the brown t-shirt.)

And finally, I know this is backwards, but those of us from the Western half of the US are used to the sun setting over the ocean. In Miami, is rises over the ocean, so it seems fitting to end my trip with a sun rise. This view is of the bay across the street from our hotel. All in all, it wasn’t a bad trip.

Of course, it had to come to end. I drove our minivan home from the airport and lamented the entire way that it wasn’t a Mustang. Beth had to be pretty patient with me. It wasn’t long after I got home that it snowed. A cold reminder that all good things must come to an end. But I was a good sport and took the kids out to make a snowman:

And then reality hit the next weekend. After bath time, Kip was complaining about a stomach ache. As we got the other kids ready for bed, Kip decided to expel his stomach ache all over his bed and his bedroom floor.

And that was only the beginning.

About every 1/2 hour until ten that night, Kipper got rid of a new stomachache. Then, at ten, it didn’t end. Isaac woke up and started doing the same thing. Both Beth and I spent the first part  of that night on the floor with our boys – I with Kip and Beth with Ike – putting bowls to their faces every half hour. About 2am, it ended and Beth and I finally laid down together for a few hours of sleep. It certainly wasn’t Miami.

Thursday it hit Beth. Liz and I are the only two who haven’t yet caught the bug. But cross your fingers or pray or both – this thing tends to hang out for a few days before striking.

Finally, this weekend has been very busy as well. But not with Epicurean gallivanting, nor with late night carpet-scrubbing. Yesterday, while Beth was off judging some music festival and the kids were playing with friends, I ran my first official 5K since high school: the Rex Lee Run.

Those familiar with Rex Lee know he was not only an avid runner, but also died of cancer just after being released as BYU’s president. This is the run’s 15th year – and my first – raising money for cancer research. Running was both painful – primarily because I didn’t run for a week after coming back from Miami – and something of a pleasure; I ran in honor of my father.

Opposition in all things

1 Weekend of bachelor fun

1 Weekend of pure, having-children reality

1 Weekend where pleasure and pain seem to be the same thing