Moving Day

Yesterday Jarom finished another semester of school and Alixa has about 1.5 workdays left until we head up to Delaware for the summer. I am not allowed to put our new location on the internet, because Alixa is terrified of strangers reading it and hunting her down and murdering her in the night. So if any of you find the urge to send cute baby girl clothes to us irresistible, you’ll have to contact us to get the address.

Despite the happiness surrounding school and work ending, the weather here in Knoxville has been a wee bit gloomy, with many rain showers. This is clearly not the way it is supposed to be. As Alixa wisely noted, “It’s April showers bring May flowers, not April showers bring May rainy-ness.” I couldn’t have said it any better. Fortunately, during a sunny week not too long ago Lix applied a coat of Rain-X to the Camry’s windshield. It was her first time and she was very proud of herself for doing a good job. Now whenever Jarom drives in the rain he gets the odd feeling of being trapped in a 1990’s Windows starfield screen-saver. Isn’t Rain-X great?!

Our last Sunday here in town was stake conference, only instead of the traditional format the stake was part of a SLC broadcast. Unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties that made it a little less watchable. There seemed to be some type of sleep-mode activated on the projector, which caused it to turn off after about 60 seconds of the movie. It took over an hour to fix the problem, so most of the conference was heard in 60-second sound bites separated by 30 seconds of resetting the system. You could tell that the speakers had themes, it was just a challenge to figure out what they were. It was all better by the time President Monson spoke, which was a good Festivus Miracle. As always, it was nice to listen to the prophet’s stories, even if some of them were repeats.

Jarom and Lix also attended their third and final birthing class on Monday. It is actually the third of five, but we won’t be here for the last two. It was a great class, covering such wonderfulness as episiotomies and tearing, labor pain, and unique delivery situations. Much of the class was focused on the variety of pain meds that can be used during delivery. Thanks to Coralie and a number of books that Lix has read, she is pretty set on having a natural birth. This puts her in the minority, especially in their class, where most of the women wanted an epidural as soon as humanly possible. I support women deciding for themselves how much to be drugged, but I am mildly skeptical of Alixa. Also in the class they ran a “contraction simulation” that really wasn’t. They guys and the girls had to hold a bag of ice for one minute while they practiced their breathing. Alixa made it about 12 seconds before she put the bag down because of the pain. She claims that labor cannot possibly hurt that bad, so she will be fine without drugs. I suppose we will see.