6 Things People Might Not Know About Me

I have been tagged by Karissa Kam and Amy Hymas. (Sorry I didn’t notice earlier – haven’t been looking at anyone’s blogs for a while). The logical thing right now would be for me to go to sleep, since it is nearing 1am and I have a sleeping baby in my arms as I am typing this, but I keep thinking that if I try to get a little sleep before he wakes up and wants to eat he will just wake up as soon as I go to bed and then I will be grumpy. So, I’ll sit at the computer into the wee hours of the night instead.

1. My favorite color is blue. I especially like most shades of light blue. I do not, however, like aqua or turquoise. Often I will see something that I like, such as a piece of clothing or a car, that is turquoise, and I will think that it looks very nice except for the color and wonder why anyone would choose to make something that color.

2. I don’t save my kids’ art work. The idea of keeping a cardboard box in the closet with a bunch of odd-sized pieces of wrinkled construction paper that shed glitter, stickers, and pieces of bottle cleaners every time you pick them up does not appeal to me at all. Instead I scan or photograph the more notable pieces of art work that are brought home from school, church, and playgroups and print these pages and put them in plastic page protectors in a special art work binder for each child. Then I give the originals back to the kids to play with until they get torn or a little brother eats part of them and they get thrown away (or, if the kids aren’t looking and I am trying to clean up the clutter of papers that always grows on our computer desk, I might just slip them into the trashcan underneath something else so they won’t see – what a mean mom I am, but at least I keep copies in their art books, so it’s not too bad to get rid of the originals, right?)

3. Michael knows that one of my pet peeves is having the closet door left open when we go to bed, and he will often close it just for me. As I am writing this, I am realizing that I like the closet door closed because if you can’t see the clutter inside the closet, it makes the bedroom appear more clean. I guess that’s why I always close the cupboards when I am in the kitchen, I got an armoire for a computer desk so it could be closed when we’re not using the computer, and I always close the medicine cabinet and the shower curtain each time I am in the bathroom. Huh, never thought about that before.

4. I have four little boys who are each about a year apart, and I don’t like to dress them in matching clothes. What I do like to do is have each of them wear the same style of clothing at the same time, or even matching clothes – as long as they are in different colors. Ideally, for instance, my boys would all be dressed in really cute overalls with a layered, long sleeved shirt, and matching brown leather shoes. When the boys were younger, it used to really bug me when Michael would get Kolby and Eli dressed and one would be wearing jeans with a button-up shirt and the other would have on overall shorts with a t-shirt. Now that we have more kids and it gets harder to buy coordinating clothes for all of them, and my kids get a little older so I rely on them more to choose their own clothes, I have become less picky about their clothes all being the same style.

5. I’m a little obsessive about photographs. (Ok, you could probably tell from the blog that I like to take lots of family photos, but that’s not all). I have several folders on my computer that I organize all my photos in – every photo I own is either a digital photo or is scanned so that I have it on my computer. And my family members know that I have spent quite a few hours scanning old photos of ancestors and pictures of family when visiting relatives’ houses. I use Photoshop to “tag” each photo with the name of each person pictured, so later on I can click on any name and it will automatically show every photo on the computer with that person in it. I have been working on tagging all the photos on my computer, and I currently have 11,040 photos tagged. I am rather proud of my diligence in being so organized, but I do realize it does seem a little OCD-ish. Oh well.

6. The first time Michael and I had a fight was about Christmas lights. Well, it wasn’t really a fight – more of a disagreement. We were at Temple Square in Salt Lake at Thanksgiving time about a year after we got married, and we were looking at all the beautiful Christmas lights on all the trees around the temple. At the end of the night, I made some comment about how I loved white Christmas lights, and I thought the brightly colored lights looked kind of tacky. Michael was pretty offended by this comment, since he had grown up with colored lights and loved how they looked. I told him that he could put up whatever color of lights he wanted on the outside of our house someday (although I would prefer white), and I would decorate our tree with little white lights. It wasn’t long before we were laughing about how silly it was to argue about the color of Christmas lights. [Right now, I am enjoying the glow of the white lights on our Christmas tree.]

Well, it’s now 1:45 am and besides writing this list, I have changed and swaddled Isaac and he is now sitting on my lap drinking his bottle. Cross your fingers that he will go to sleep easily for me after he eats so I can go to sleep too.

Oh yeah, I guess I should tag some other people too. Let’s see, how about Mel Mealey, Faith Kearl, Amy Rahm, Kim Morrison, Amberlynn Whiting, and Becky Wall.