Tumor Board Eve at 2 am.

G informed me that he would be presenting a case at the "Tumor Board" this morning at 7 am.  First of all, that is morbidly funny.  I do not know why they could not think of another name for 30 doctors discussing something very important like cancer and tumors.  I remember thinking it was fun to stay up late.  Now I can think of very few things that are less fun besides getting cavities filled, when your feet go to sleep at the same time, and really long red lights when you are in a huge rush.  Well, since G gets up before any normal human would voluntarily get up, we rarely stay up late but last night was an anomaly.  Since he had to work on his presentation, we were staying up like we were freshman girls in the dorm again.  At 2 am, we were still paryting.  Ok, not partying.  Here is our 2 am photos of what we were all doing while others were drooling in their beds:

G working away on his power point.

 

Liv at 2 am doing my favorite trick she does...sleeping. I think she must have been dreaming about doing a snow angle.

 I would include a pic but I was not looking like a beauty queen at 2 am after making over 50 cinnamon twists with pink frosting in order to commemorate breast cancer awareness.    I realize that these look like a 1st grade Valentines day creation gone bad but I eliminated the ugliest ones and am now wearing them on my hips and the rest we sent for the Doctors to eat while G gave his Tumor Board presentation. While it was thrilling to be awake past 11, I decided we are not missing out on much.  I like going to bed at nursing home hours.  I like G every hour. Especially on Tumor Board eve.

A real man....

Sometimes real life is so entertaining that there is no need to rent a redbox.  That is how I feel about our ward here.  I have always had church ADD but I never get bored in the Bluefield ward because there is too much to watch and giggle at.  The people here are in the salt of the Earth club.  There is nothing fake about them and they are so good at being them.  I sometimes could get a little intimidated by going to church in my ward in the Highland Utah area because all the moms have better bodies than their daughters and they are rocking the diamond jewels on their designer jeans while they wait in line for a snow cone with their Escalade running while they chat on their iphone.  Let me just say that there is no pressure like that here.  You can wear what you want, be what you want and do what you want.

 Example A: There is a woman in our ward named Betty Hanks.  She has electric red sun glasses that she wears to sacrament meeting no matter what.  She has the best West Virginia accent. She started her talk last week by having all the women yell, "Charity begins at home!" and then she had the men do the same and then we repeated it and then we did it together.  I felt like I was at a pep rally before the big game.  I was laughing so hard I couldn't recite it.  Anyway, her talk was so funny I had to put my head down and my friend April (also from Utah aka the outside world) was crying next to me because she was laughing so hard.

Midway through the talk she said (make sure to say this inside your brain with the thickest accent you have so you can grasp the full effect), "Now I would like to say that there is a problem with men today.  They don't know nothin about babies. Nothin. Some of them think that a diaper is a hat.  Well, I shore tell you that there is a man in this crowd and he is a REAL MAN, I tell you what, a REAL man, cause he sho knows how to take care of his baby girl.  I done told this man what I think of him because he is the REAL man of this ward because I see him always knowing how to help his baby and changing her and loving her and THAT my brothers and sisters is a real man."  The best part is that she was staring at Gar with her laser eyes beneath her red sunglasses the whole time and everyone already knew who she was talking about.  By now my stomach was hurting because I found this whole thing so funny.  It is true though, Betty Hanks even testified of it herself.  My husband is a real man.  He loves Liv so much and she loves him more than anyone else on Earth. Maybe partly because they look identical except for the fact that there are 30 years between them and different genders.  Maybe it's because G is the king kong of all nurturers and has an innate sense for how to care and protect.  Maybe its because G is always the one that thinks of things like putting socks on her or checking on her 10:1 times as much as me during the night.  Maybe it's just because he's a real man, like Betty Hanks shouted from the pulpit.  Either way, I love him more than life. Oh wait, he is my life...

Now as great as Betty Hanks is, she pales in comparison to my personal favorite, Ole' Brother Coombs who brings a coke with the label torn off every week and has his own soft chair set up in the back with a pillow where only he sits with his bug eye/lazy eye and curly eyebrow hairs that look like a  white wiry sea anemone and insists on standing up anytime a lady enters the room. There's nothing like this ward.  I love being around people who are so good at being them and comfortable in their own skin that they don't know how to be anyone or anything else. 

Ann Geddes gone bad...

I had a vision for childhood cuteness.  Do you remember when Ann Geddes came out with all those pics of babies with abnormally large flowers attached to their heads (sometimes it looked more like the whole bush) or in butterfly costumes, or coming out of flower pots?  They were a hit and people went nuts buying calendars of random babies in cute costumes that they had never met.  I never quite caught on to the phase.  Pogs? Yes, I admit I did have a sweet slammer and loved that fad, but not the Ann Geddes.  Anyway, I decided to attempt a little creative photography myself and had a vision for how cute Liv would look in her pumpkin outfit with this cute orange hat, smiling big and melting hearts around the world. I had visions of making entire calendars and putting Ann Geddes out of business once and for all.  Pictures like these are what I was imagining for Liv:





That is until I attempted and realized that all I had was a blue plastic bumbo chair for props, the cute hat actually looked like a chemo treatment cap and her facial expressions were about as awkward as a 14 year old in full bloom puberty at their first stake dance.  I shall post the disastrous results below:

 

 

So, I guess I will forget the idea all together and appreciate the fact that my little chemotherapy pumpkin model has a career in something else besides photography.