Where's Sam?

One day I could hear Sam in our mudroom/laundry room and he sounded distressed, so I went in to see what was going on. But when I got there, he wasn't there. What the...? Then I looked around a little more closely, and there he was...

He had climbed into the dryer and locked himself in!

Luckily, I saved the day. Sometimes moms really are superheroes to their children!

A Penny For Your Thoughts

This has been a busy week! I've had something going on every morning and almost every afternoon AND evening. That's a little too much for homebody me! But I got through it mostly fine and even managed to get my house decorated for the holidays in between everything.

We got our Christmas tree last weekend (a beautiful almost 10-foot fragrant Frasier Fir). But when Peter went to string the lights around it, we didn't have enough! (We're doing white lights this year--we have to switch off every other year because Peter likes colored lights and I like white.) So all week the tree has been half-lit with hardly any ornaments on it. Today I'm going to Target to get more lights and this weekend we will do our tree justice and decorate it!

On Cyber Monday I shopped my little heart out online (not really, but kind of) and one of the things I got done was our Christmas cards. I think this is the earliest I've ever gotten them designed and ordered! It usually takes me awhile because I have to decide on which pictures to use and I look at lots of cards on various websites because I'm a perfectionist and want to choose the best one. This time, I kept it simple: I used one website and I chose only from pictures from our family photo shoot this fall. That made it a lot easier! The cards should arrive today or tomorrow and I'm going to address them this weekend and send them on their merry way early next week. That's definitely a record for me!

 
As of this week, I'm officially a member of Mitt Romney's campaign volunteer team in Iowa. His Iowa Field Director got in touch with me and I had a good conversation with him about what I could do to help out. I'm going to be a part of the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd, which I'm excited about! I love politics (for some strange reason) and this is one of the things I was looking forward to about living here! 
I'm a long-time supporter of Romney, not because he's handsome, rich, and successful (although those things certainly don't hurt!), but because I know the Romneys from living in Massachusetts when I was in high-school (they were in my (LDS) stake) and I have long thought that he's a really smart, strong leader and a genuinely good person. I think he was a very effective governor of good old liberal Massachusetts (not an easy feat for a Republican) and that he would also be an effective President for this polarized nation. I like that he's more of a centrist and not a strict conservative about everything. I think that's an asset right now. So that's why I'm volunteering for him. Go Mitt!!

And speaking of politics and presidential candidates, just a few other quick thoughts...I think it's sad that Herman Cain has so much promise and potential ability to help the country but poor choices from his personal life are probably going to prevent that from happening. And Newt Gingrich has made similar poor choices, so why isn't that hurting him as much as it is Cain? Because it was already known? It's weird. In any case, I don't trust either of them. My favorite candidates are Mitt Romney (obviously), Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum.

The European debt crisis continues to worry me and I'm sensing real danger signals for the U.S. According to financial experts that I watch on the news, everything could collapse like a long line of dominoes. I don't think they're sensationalizing the dangers here. Will we go into a deeper recession or even a depression? Will the Stock Market crash? Aaaaggh! Let's hope not.

Did you hear in the news this week that studies are finding that there is potentially dangerous arsenic in some brands of apple juice? Guess what my kids' favorite drink is? Well, at least I always dilute their juice with water. I looked up the ratings and the Juicy Juice brand is apparently safe, so Juicy Juice it is from now on!

My sister Elizabeth is due to have a baby today, but he hasn't arrived yet and isn't showing much sign of being ready to make his way into the world yet. The last time she had a baby he was born a week early, so last week I booked a flight to Boston for a week from today, thinking that the baby for sure would be born by then. It's going to be problematic if I go out there and he hasn't been born yet! So I'm hoping he will arrive in the next few days so that I can meet him next weekend and hold him a lot. I LOVE newborns, especially when I'm related to them!

I hope you have a great weekend!

Hair Envy

This is an update on the ongoing saga of my hair and my quest to restore its health and get it to grow down to my shoulders again. This week I found a file of my husband's cell phone pictures on the computer that he must have recently uploaded, and this was one of the pictures:

This is a fuzzy not-very-good picture of Sam and I on a plane at night last year, but the thing about it that gets me is my hair! It was shiny and healthy and at my shoulders, and I wish I had it back again now! Little did I know that by the end of that year it would be breaking off on one side and would have to be cut a few inches shorter because of the damage apparently caused by some bleach-filled highlights that I got when I moved to Iowa, a situation that I'm still dealing with now almost a year later. This picture was taken on the way back to Boston from Iowa when we were house-hunting. If my hair could talk, it would have been saying "Donna, proceed with caution! Don't get the highlights when you move to Iowa!!"

The following pictures were taken just last year too, on St. Patrick's Day when we still lived in Connecticut. The healthy, desirable state of my hair just kills me now. 

 

Look at that volume! I'm so jealous of her! I mean, me.

This is making me a little sad, but also hopeful that if my hair looked like that just last year, it can look like that again! I've decided that if my hair hasn't gotten a lot better by next summer, I'm going to book an appointment with my wonderful former hairstylist in Connecticut when I go back East next summer and see if she can work some of her magic. She's the one who helped my hair get to the above state. (And I know this isn't that remarkable compared with other people's hair, but for me, it was really good!)

Another factor is the baby. A few months after having Sam, my hair looked like this. Maybe having another baby is what I need to do to restore my hair to its former, uh, beauty. Seriously! And if it's a boy I'll name him "Harry." (Not seriously!) Anyway, I think it's funny and ironic that I'm envious of the hair I used to have when I didn't really appreciate it all that much when I did have it.

Thank you for reading another one of my laments about my hair. There will probably be more of them because I'm vain enough that I won't give up on this. My hair will eventually triumph!! (Insert Rocky theme here.)