Abby has quite advanced language skills for her age. She doesn't talk a lot when we're out in public (except during Sacrament meeting), but at home she talks, and talks, and talks. She asks questions that amaze me, and when it gets noisy around here, she tries to talk louder than everyone else.

This morning, she came in my room when Bob and I were just waking up, and while she was sitting on the bed, she leaned over and asked "Where are you guys' (guyses) Mom?" Bob and I both thought, wow, that is quite an abstract question. I answered her: "My Mom is in Utah, and Daddy's Mom is in Romania." She sat, blinking at me for a few seconds before she repeated her question in a very clear voice: "WHERE are your GLasses, Mom?" Ah, now that is a more reasonable question from an almost two-year old.

She always says "My hair is so pwetty, Mom". Then she tells me: "Your hair is so pretty, Mom", (this made me feel great until she looked at our big chubby dog, Rocky, grabbed him by both ears, looked him right in the eyes and sincerely told him "Your hair is SO pretty, Rocky").

One day she told Andrew "Your hair is so pretty, Andrew." Andrew laughed in a deep chuckle, and said "Nooooo, it's not!" I told him that she just meant that he was handsome, and she doesn't know that boys are not called "pretty" yet. I told him just to say thank you. He must have really thought this through, because the next day when she tried to tease him by saying "you are a pretty girl, Andrew" he sweetly said "Thank you, Abby".

Never have a "bad day" again

This is from a recent BYU-Idaho devotional by Brother Waddoups, who used to be a veterinarian. I just had to share it with all of you, it is one of the funniest stories I've ever heard.

"I would like to ask you a question. Have any of you ever had a bad day? Raise your hand if you think you have had a bad day.

A number of years ago my brother called me and as we visited, I asked him that same question, he said he had had better days. He then asked me how my day was and I told him that I no longer had bad days; of course he wanted an explanation.

That day some unusual things happened. I was at work trying to keep pace with a busy schedule. I had just finished my morning surgeries and hurried to exam room one to see my first patient, in our practice there is a small slot in the door that holds the medical records where the technicians write their findings as they interview clients and examine the patient. Today the card was empty. That was strange and as that fact was beginning to register, something else out of the ordinary happened. The door softly closed behind me, and the technician who normally followed me into the room was on the other side of it. There was a scruffy white and black dog sitting on the exam table, you have never seen such an emaciated mess in all your life. He had one red swollen eye and what looked to be a large dirt clod on his head. His coat was dirty and unkempt and he was very gaunt.

Having no idea what we were doing, and learning only that the dogs name was Cholo from the record, I asked, “What are we doing for Cholo today?” For a moment no one answered, there appeared to be a whole family there, grandparents a mother and father and several kids, and they all looked at the floor. They were Hispanic and as is often the case an older woman touched a young girl on the shoulder and she began to speak. “We had Cholo put to sleep a week ago.”

With that flat statement my gut tightened slightly, I could envision that we had put Cholo to sleep a week ago and that somehow we had not done a very good job, and he had come back to life, you know that can be considered as one of the ultimate failures. That is a hard decision for people to make and if it had gone poorly, I could imagine that they were not happy, so tentatively, I asked, “Did we put him to sleep?” They smiled and the little girl said “no”. Now relieved but still confused I prompted them to continue. This time the mother in broken English began to explain. “A week ago Cholo ran into the road and was hit by a car, it didn’t kill him but he was badly hurt.” “His eyeball was popped out and his skull was fractured, we could see his brain!” “We knew he could not live and so my husband’s friend took him into the desert and put him to sleep.” I asked, “How did he put him to sleep?” She answered that he had shot him five times. I laughed and commented, “He must not have been a very good shot.” “Oh no”, came the reply, “Cholo was dead, and we buried him in a shallow grave.”

This was becoming more bizarre by the moment. Still perplexed, I ask, “How did he get home.” She said, “An hour ago the phone rang and my husband’s boss said your dog is out here and he doesn’t look very good, you better come and get him. We tried to explain that it could not be our dog that he had been dead for a week, but he said he was sure it was our dog and that we had better come down. It was Cholo and so here we are.” Still not sure what they wanted, I ask, “What do you want us to do, put him to sleep?” The mother became excited and began to shake her head, “No, no, Cholo is a good dog, after all of this, he came home to us. We want you to fix him.”

Cholo had had a bad day. He set a new standard for bad days. He had been hit by a car, had his skull fractured, his eyeball popped out of its socket. He had been taken out into the desert away from his family and shot five times. Then to end this bad day, he was buried alive. So with this as our standard, I would submit that I have never had a bad day and neither have most of you.

These were poor people so I began to explain that we would want to take x-rays and run some tests to see what would be best for Cholo. The mother looked at her hands and said “We only have $1200.00.” I am sure this was all the money they had in the world. I told them to have a seat and we would see how extensive his injuries were and then we could talk of the costs involved.

I really expected to find very little when we x-rayed Cholo, but when the pictures were developed, he had been shot five times in the head and neck. I don’t know how he was alive, but he was. The dirt clod on the head turned out to be a large laceration and a fracture into his frontal sinus. What they thought was the brain was actually the sinus cavity. We cleaned it up and sutured his wounds. The eye was very red and hemorrhagic; it had been proptosed and because of the loss of blood it had sunk back in to the socket and his vision was fine, even though the eye was very blood shot. Cholo required very little attention, a few sutures and some antibiotics and pain killers. He was a modern day miracle.

Many of you may think that these folks must have been cruel monsters to have put their friend through so much. But if you examine what they did, they were trying to help, not hurt. They knew that Cholo was hurt and that he was suffering, so they sought to alleviate that suffering.

Life is like that. Many times well meaning people try to help make things better, but inadvertently they make things worse. Something is said, offense is taken or help is offered and injury occurs. Once the hurt happens, then it falls to us to decide what we will do with it. Pres. Faust gave us this council.

“Most of us need time to work through pain and loss. We can find all manner of reasons for postponing forgiveness. One of these reasons is waiting for the wrongdoers to repent before we forgive them. Yet such a delay causes us to forfeit the peace and happiness that could be ours. The folly of rehashing long-past hurts does not bring happiness.” (President James E. Faust, “The Healing Power of Forgiveness,” Ensign, May 2007, 67-69)

Many of us feel that one day is much the same as the next. We allow with that feeling a sense of monotony and of the mundane. Sometimes we even believe that we have had a “bad” day. Yet if we look at the scriptures, the Lord feels just the opposite, as He uses phrases like, “upon this day”, and “the day of the Lord”, “there cometh a day upon which…” Over a thousand of these types of statements leads me to believe that the Lord accounts each day as special and as an opportunity to teach and lift us closer to Him."

Isn't that great? I don't think I'll ever say that I'm having a bad day again... You can read the rest of the talk at:

http://www.byui.edu/Presentations/Transcripts/Devotionals/2010_02_02_Waddoups.htm

Have a good day!
Tasha

Courtney's Happiest Day

I am sad to say that a certain 3- year old boy recently dropped my camera and it will not work. So, the pictures of this event, and many others (like Christmas) are not available at the moment. I do have a digital camera that has one broken switch that I'll try to use to take pictures in the next little while.

Courtney recently got her ears pierced. I told her she had to be 12 years old, or finish her 6th grade math program. I don't usually bribe for schoolwork, but it worked quite well in this case.

I'm going to quote from her journal, because it is so cute:

"12-23-09 Math
Today I got my ears pierced! It is the happiest day of my life, (so far) & there's two days until Christmas! I had a goal to get my ears pierced by Christmas, it was 5 days until then, and I had 35 lessons left.

Well, the day before yesterday I did 8 lessons! 11 was my record. I had to get them pierced the day before Christmas Eve because the store would be closed then. I wanted them pierced by Christmas. I had no hope. I thought I would have to set my goal for New Years day. BUT, the next day, I did 25 LESSONS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had 3 lessons left and I did them today! So I did it & got them pierced today!"

It was interesting to see how she progressed in math. Earlier, she would get boggled if she would try to do 3 or 4 lessons in a day. (My children are assigned 1 or 2 a day) Each lesson has a lecture, practice problems, and then about 25 problems to solve.

After she did 11 lessons in a day, her mind seemed to learn to process math more and more quickly. She would fly through the lessons, and she usually gets 95-100% on each lesson. I guess it makes sense that if you are training yourself to solve problems, you will naturally get quicker and quicker at processing math facts.

Her concentration level is what really improved dramatically, though. The day before she got them pierced, she woke up before 6am, did all her morning chores, and was doing math when we got up at 6:00. We let her do it all day long, just pausing to eat, and do kitchen jobs, etc. When she needed a break, she would get up and do handstands or cartwheels, and then get back to math. I watched her doing a handstand in our kitchen as she listened to and watched one of the lectures. I don't know how well that would have gone over at public school :)

One of my main problems with extrinsic rewards is that they can often remove the instrinsic joy of completing a task. I've written on our homeschool blog about how this happens. But the goal of getting her ears pierced didn't do that in this case. Instead she says that she loves math and wants to see how quickly she can get to calculus. She is confident with her ability to do hard things in math, and that makes me quite happy. I better get her next level installed on our computer now!