How I use my brain cells these days

Today during a morning phone call my mom asked "so when are you going to start blogging again?"


I guess today.


When I first started being a stay-at-home mom I was at a party where I didn't really know anyone and someone asked me what I did.  I stammered around for a few minutes and said, "well....well...I guess I'm a mom?"  She laughed and said, "you must be new to this.  It get's easier."


The hard part wasn't staying with Claire.  I loved being with her (I still do) but there was something that was hard about redefining who I was.  Before I was a mom I had a really cool job.  I worked with a non-profit organization.  We did work with poor communities in Africa and South America.  My job was working with the staff we had in country to come up with the programs that they would use in the communities.  I helped them plan out what they were doing, helped them manage the funds as they were going along and helped with the follow up and analysis of the project.  My job was, by in large, a desk job but it did provide me with a chance to travel.  Several times a year I would go to South America or Africa to work with the communities and staff.  It provided me with many incredible experiences.  I have held a small boy in my arms who was dying of AIDS while we tried to feed him a special meal powder designed by students at BYU to provide maximum nutrition. He would be dead within 24 hours and when we woke up the next morning we would hear the whole town performing their traditional wailing for him.  I have cooked traditional bread in a hut on the savanna over a fire while the black smoke spewed and spewed and the baby who was in the hut with us just coughed and coughed.  I have seen the sun rise at Macchu Pichu and I have spent and entire New Year's eve celebration dancing to terrible polka music at fourteen-thousand feet.


Now that I'm 21 months into my parenting experiment one of the things that I am learning is that the job that I left and the job that I have now are actually very similar.  Both are packed with adventure, both have good days and bad days, both are changing the lives of other people.  


And both require a great deal of ingenuity.  


Case study: this morning.  Homemade yogurt is a little runnier than the store bought kind.  The last couple of days breakfast at our house has deteriorated into a yogurt finger-painting free for all.  Combine that with the fact that when Claire doesn't eat she gets really cross and things have been....tense to say the least.


Enter a trimmed bendy straw.

Ta-Da.  A whole breakfast consumed, a happy girl and a happy mom.