let's hear it for the boy

Cori atop Buenos Aires

I just have to give a little shout out to my man. Here are a few of the latest reasons I'm totally crazy for this guy:

• He calls me at least twice a day. I always get a call when he takes his lunch and when he's on his way home. Even if he's running late to a meeting he takes a minute to call and see how my day has been.
  
  

• Once he's home and has gotten kisses from his girls he goes straight into daddy duty. I'm usually just getting dinner on the table which means that Gracie and Grant are both fussy and needing attention because I'm not able to give it to them (you know how that goes?). Cori puts down his bag and dives right in.



• He pressures me to spend money on myself. I don't spend a lot on my clothes--mostly because I've spent the last two and a half years either pregnant or nursing and I don't want to buy the nice stuff I'd like until I'm going to be a more regular shape. But last summer he got an award at work that had a happy check attached to it. Cori cashed the check and put half of the money in an envelope and gave it to me with the explicit directions that it was not to be spent on anything but clothes for myself. Then, right after we moved here he claimed a bunch of reward points from his credit card and surprised me with gift cards to spend on clothes and a lovely check to put into our DSLR camera fund.



• We've spent a lot of time talking and laughing lately. That sounds kind of trite, but it gets really easy to fall into the same conversations; kids, church, work, the house, the house, the house, money... But we have spent a lot of time talking about different things lately. We talk about scriptures at night when we read. We talk a lot about politics. We talk about other random things that we've seen or read about during the day. I don't feel like a housewife when we have time alone. I feel like the more interesting person I was when he and I started dating.
  
  
• He's been really patient with me lately. The other day he held his tongue when I told him that there would be a late fee at the video store he was going to. The fee was completely my fault, and things like that are a pet peeve for him, I know. He started to say something about it, and then stopped and just gave me a smile. It really meant a lot to me.

Wordless Wednesday: Grant, 2 Weeks old

Today in Michigan

It is polling day

Blessings

• Staying at home. Being a stay at home mom is pretty great on the whole. But there are some days that I'm completely head over heels in love with what I get to do everyday. I'm so grateful that it has worked for us so that I can be at home full-time.
  
  
• The new year. Christmas is packed away. Thank you's have been sent off. Resolutions have been penned. I'm ready.
  
  
• There was 1/2 of a day this week that our laundry hampers, laundry baskets, washer and dryer were EMPTY! All clothes clean and put away for nearly 6 hours... until Grant had a blow out, and I changed Gracie into her PJ's.
  
  
• Normalcy. The kids are back into their schedules. We are all of us getting a lot more sleep. And with no travel plans scheduled at all for '08 so far (its actually the first time since before we became engaged that I can remember not having travel plans), its looking like the scenario will go undisturbed for a while.

Some Recomendations

NUMB3RS- on CBS

This is a show that I watched on DVD during our six weeks with out TV. Its a really smart crime show that has almost no explicit violence, and almost no s*xual content. I really enjoy crime drama. I LOVE Law and Order. But we swore off SVU a long time ago because it made us feel yucky afterwords, and if the crime involves a child I'm most likely turning it off. What I like to learn about is the process- not the gory details of the horrid things people do to each other. This show fits that criteria. And though I'm not a math person (at all) its still very interesting because the math principals are explained and related in complete layman's terms. And there are a lot of really nice and fun (and, again, nons*xual) relationships among the main characters. I haven't watched this season at all. The season I rented was the first or the second.



Stardust

We heart this movie! It was such a fun fairytale fantasy adventure. I'm not a huge Claire Danes fan, but Michelle Pfeiffer is ethereally perfect, and Robert DeNiro is hilarious. Its got a sweetly romantic story line full of quirky little sequences. More than once at the end of a scene, Cori and I would look at each other with the same smiley "What in the world?!" Visually, the film gave me a familiar ache. It captures the English countryside just how I remember it. (Sorry these pics are so puny)

Marie Antoinette

I was so impressed with this movie. The historical accuracy of costumes and locations was so compelling. I loved seeing Versailles full of people dressed in period wear. And it was nice seeing some furniture in Le Petit Trianon. When we were there last year, a couple of the buildings in the Domain of Marie Antoinette were starkly barren. I also loved Coppola's treatment of Antoinette's story. The movie felt like living through a teenager's perspective--a perspective so appropriate because Marie Antoinette was practically a child when she came to France from Austria.

The Human Agonies

AKA the Humanities. AKA the field in which I earned my degree. When I tell others what it is that I studied, I either get a blank smile--because the individual has no idea what the humanities entail, or I get to hit by a joke like this: What's the difference between a humanities degree and a cheese pizza? The pizza will feed a family of four. (This joke was truthfully the response of someone who once asked me what I studied.)

The humanities include the study of the arts at large: visual arts, literature, music, theater, cinema, architecture, and a whole lot of history. It is the study of the human experience in all the ways that mankind has found to express itself. And last night, I saw a show on the History channel that proved to me anew the reason why I find humanities so fascinating.

Undoubtedly, you are familiar with Dan Brown's best seller The Da Vinci Code. You are probably also a little familiar with law suite that was brought against Brown (and ultimately dropped) by a British publishing company. They claimed that he lifted the main ideas for Da Vinci Code from a book they published in the 70's titled, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. (Rearrange the letters in the name Baigent and you can spell Teabing. Coincidence?) The show I watched detailed Henry Lincoln's discovery process as he formed the hypothesis that the Holy Grail refers to the continued blood line of Jesus Christ.

The idea first formed from a grave pillar found at a church, Rennes-le-Chateau in France, built and kept by a priest named Sauniere. The pillar contained Latin text which held a coded clue written in French as well as the hidden symbol of the five pointed star. The five pointed star was a medieval symbol for the wounds of Christ, and to the Knights Templar, of the sacred feminine or Mary Magdalene. Lincoln's research brought him to a painting by Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, AKA The Shepherdess. A geometric study brought to light another five pointed star that touched on geographic landmarks in the painting. (This is getting long, but I'm getting to the point) Lincoln found the sight portrayed in Poussin's painting and mapped out said geographic markers. Markers which were ruins of churches built by the Knights Templar. The mapped coordinates gave Lincoln a specifically measured line which when used on a map as a radius created a circle that connected several other Templar churches. When the same line was used to connect the churches, Lincoln found, again, the symbol of the five pointed star. This was a phenomenon that he found not only in France but also in at least one other site where the Templars built churches. The angles and measurements formed in both locations are unusually exact. They are correct to a 1/100 of a degree in a time when the most advanced technology provided accuracy only to the degree.

I don't intend to talk about the whole Grail hypothesis. I have my own opinions about it. Rather, this show became intellectually engrossing to me when a certain expert from the British Museum said that if the placement of these churches means what Lincoln suggests, then Historians would be forced to change the way they look at the whole medieval era. The history of geometry and surveying would have to be rewritten. The things we build and the things we create say so much about us and our social environment.

This is one reason why I think the arts matter so much. There is information about the human experience that has been preserved through the artistic expressions of each era. In so many cases, the arts act like a lens through which we can correctly interpret factual historical information. I love that there are passionate people who study and ask questions.

Okay, I'm stepping off of my little soap box. Thanks for listening.

So what do the arts mean to you?

Wordless Wednesday: Snow Angel