Life in June

The Polish community in Luxembourg puts on an annual "Children's Day" and the kids and I went with Maciej, Justyna, and Karolina. It was really fun to eat some of their food and watch some of their demonstrations, like this one with men in traditional garb with swords. Of course we loved the swords!

Maciej trying out his very fancy selfie stick. I'm serious, I've never seen a fancier one.

 We're all still in schooooooolllll! This is morning carpool a couple weeks ago. You'll note Noah in his WINTER COAT. Yes, sometimes it is still chilly in the mornings. We are coping as best as we can.

Little Bird in her nighty seeing if it's raining. Or maybe she was wishing she was playing outside instead of going to bed (since it stays light here from 5 am - 10 pm!).

 Luxembourgish Mother's Day was some time in June and I ate it up. The kids made some stellar things at school: Sienna a shoe box turned lady face with cloth hair, and Noah a lamp with marker swirls all over it. Don't forget the countless Happy Mother's Day cards Sienna sweetly created for me. Adam was traveling that day, but the kids spoiled me indeed! ;)

One random rainy afternoon we made Shrinky Dink necklaces. Noah made a planet, I made three hearts, and Sienna made a star.

 We celebrated our one year anniversary living in Lux on June 22! With a dinner all together (which is an unusual treat on a week night) and a photo! It feels so good to be on this side of the move. I mean, I even possess a Euro crock pot! Oh the luxury!

 The very next day was Luxembourg's national holiday and we went to our ward's BBQ to celebrate. I made indoor s'mores, which were not as universally loved as I expected, but I enjoyed them enough for everyone combined.

 It was a sunny, hot day. I haven't seen one like it since. We really enjoyed the hee-yeck out of that day.

 P.S. My good friend and running buddy, Megan, and I showed up in color coordinating outfits. This is not the first time that has happened. Another day it was kelly green cardigans. Coral and kelly green are very specific color matches, so .... we must secretly have the same stylist or something.

A couple more from the brass concert. Trombones, sousaphones, trumpets, oh my! Her leetle friend, Linnea.

 Also plenty of singing and dancing. It was great to see Sienna singing along. She absolutely adored performing. All day before the performance she kept saying, "I'm so excited I'm going to burst!" Afterward she said, "I loved being on the stage so much I want to live there!" I hope to see many more of her darling performances for many years to come.

 Noah had the special opportunity to take one of his class "pets" home for a night. This one is named Fuzzilappi. To hear him say it! Soooooo funny!

 Staring contest with Fuzzilappi. Noah, the reigning champ, didn't stand a chance against this wide eyed monster.

Sienna plays the trumpet

Sienna has been telling me all year that at music class she has been learning to play the trumpet. I figured she misunderstood because that sounded ridiculous. She was not mistaken, folks. Here's the proof.

Book Report: January - June

I set a New Year's resolution to read at least one book per month.... Let's check in and see how I'm doing.

JANUARY
Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions by Phil Zuckerman
I had heard this guy interviewed on NPR's RadioWest program and he intrigued me. Reading his views on life made me uncomfortable but I think that's precisely why it was important for me to read. I got inside of the brain of someone who believes almost completely opposite of me on all things, and yet I understood him. I'm sad for him but he's not sad for himself at all, so there's no need for me to take that view. I appreciated having a look into a world that is becoming increasingly our own - secularism. Life without religion. It's happening to people all around me and I think this book helped me understand why.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright
This was a mind-blowing read. Just when I thought it couldn't get crazier, I would turn the page and it got crazier. It's a disturbing religion. And then you get to the conclusion and the author makes a comparison to the LDS religion. DOH. It did cause me to look at some parallels I do see and think about them a lot.

Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini
I had not followed this actress at all, I just knew of her vaguely from that show with Kevin James on it. She is funny and outspoken and refreshing and her experience in Scientology was very much the train wreck that Going Clear talked about. It's a crazy place to be but you can see why people go there. She also made remarks about her religion that made me think of my own. It's hard to be confronted by thoughts like these but I'm so glad I got a peek into her religion as a way of understanding my own experience. Plus, the juicy Hollywood tidbits? Totes worth it. The dirt on Tom Cruise alone....

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin
Ugh. Gretchen Rubin. Third time's the charm. I've learned my lesson. I can't read her books anymore. I tolerated Happiness Project. I tried and immediately quit Happier at Home because it was essentially the same book as the first. And then I just tried Better than Before and it was essentially the same as Happiness Project. How does this woman keep getting book deals? I will say, in each book, I did glean some valuable insights that I've taken with me. So, all is not lost. But I couldn't get past the second chapter with Better Than Before. I guess I'll never be better than before...

FEBRUARY
Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience by Shaun Usher
I got this eBook on loan from the library and it disappeared from my Kindle before I could finish it. I wasn't really sad, though. This was a bit hard to get through. There were something like 260 letters and I think I only made it through 70. It'd be the perfect kind of book to pick up from your bookshelf and read a chapter at random. Sitting down and reading it in sequence means you have to re-adjust your expectations with every chapter. Is this one going to be funny? Serious? Sarcastic? Heart-breaking? I think owning the physical book would be better also because there are scanned copies of the letters themselves, so seeing that on a Kindle is less than satisfying.

MARCH
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
This book will always be special to me because I bought it in the bookstore in Paris (Shakespeare and Co.) where he went. There's a picture of him and the store owner in the 1920s in the book. As for the actual stories in the book .... they weren't that special to me. I liked learning about Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'd read The Paris Wife awhile back, a fictional account of what Hadley Hemingway's life at that time period might have been like and what she might have been feeling. It's always been hard for me to get on board with Ernest. At times I've felt exactly like Bradley Cooper on Silver Linings Playbook where he gets to the end of a Hemingway novel in the middle of the night, swears loudly enough to wake up the entire house, and chucks the book out his bedroom window. Hemingway is a tortured artist who seemed pretty full of himself. When he talked about writing that "one true sentence" and then I read a sentence like, "You knew many people finally, jockeys and trainers and owners and too many horses and too many things," I thought, that is not one true sentence. That is one messed up sentence. That sentence doesn't even make sense IN context, let alone OUT of context. He and I do have two things in common, however. He mentioned his distrust of adjectives, which I fully agree with. And we both love Paris.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
Adam works for Amazon and loves Amazon and he was reading this book and we share a Kindle library. That's why I read this book. It was a pretty quick read and super fascinating about how the business got started, its vision, its leader, its journey. I learned a lot about a company that is inventing the future. It's an exciting place to be.

APRIL
I started re-reading Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mays during our jaunt to Italy, but didn't finish it. I had read it in my early twenties when I lived in Taiwan. I remember loving it but being mad I wasn't in Tuscany while reading it. My view was not grape vineyards, it was rice paddies. The juxtaposition of drastically different landscapes was unsatisfying. So, I thought I'd read it in Tuscany. Unfortunately, I didn't have a ton of rest time even when we slowed down our trip in Italy. That's just the reality of traveling with kids. So, I didn't really read anything in April.

MAY
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
I kept hearing about this book on my business podcast, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It's minimalism combined with business strategy. So, I liked the advice about trying to cultivate focus and meaning in your life by keeping life simple, but the business side didn't really apply to me. Halfway through, my Mor-dar (Mormon radar) was going off. I finally looked up the author and he graduated from BYU. Pretty proud of myself for catching that one .... even though spotting a Mormon is not that hard.

Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis: A Simple Developmental Map by Thomas Wirthlin McConkie

This book came at a key time for me. I was searching for the book Stages of Faith by James Fowler but it's not on Kindle, so this one was on this list and I got it instead. Adam and I have both been going through various challenges related to our faith. While we are struggling in different ways, our struggles have to be shared because, well, we are married. This book was very helpful for the following reasons: 1) The author grew up Mormon, left at age 13, moved abroad at age 18, embraced Buddhism for 20 years, then came back to the church. He offers a very unique perspective about spirituality within and without a Mormon context. (I learned more about his life story on this A Thoughtful Faith podcast.) 2) It looks at faith changes through the lens of a relatively new field of study, that of adult development. We know a lot about children's development, but assume adulthood is a static state. It's not, and we continue to develop in every way, including the way we see the world. That all seems obvious, but I guess it was a helpful light bulb to turn on and think under. Faith changes are a normal part of a spiritual progression. They can be healthy. You just have to approach them that way. Easier said than done, but, hey, it's a start.

Woman Code by Alisa Vitti
This book is for women with problems such as ovarian cysts and endometriosis and luckily none of that applies to me. But I wanted to read it anyway, because it's about the way hormones rule every part of our lives and we should be paying attention to them. She offers up extreme lifestyle changes (eradicate all chemicals from your home; no dairy and no gluten; exercise, eat and plan your daily work activities according to your monthly menstrual cycle) as the key to getting your hormones to work for you instead of against you, and apparently it works for her clients. But I didn't really feel compelled to make all those adjustments. However, I felt like it was powerful information to have in my back pocket for someday if I need it down the road.

JUNE
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman
My only goal for June was to finish this beast. I started it several years ago and only had about 15% left on my Kindle. And I finished it!!!! Woot! This book is divisive among LDS people. For some, it reveals secrets and it's painful. That wasn't really the case for me. I already knew a decent amount about two main points that usually weird people out: his polygamous marriages to around 30 women and his translation of The Book of Mormon using seer stones inside a hat. Yes, all of that is weird. But his whole journey from farm boy to prophet is weird. It involves interaction with the otherworld for his entire life. Visions, angels, devils, ancient artifacts, violence, polygamy, politics. But it just reminded me of any leader of a religion that has gained traction with any group of people throughout the history of the world. He's a radical, he's a kook, he's a nut, he's a wackadoodle. He could be any of those things. Or he could be a person who has revealed some powerful insights into life before life and life after death, the nature of God, the bonds of families; he gave us The Book of Mormon, with compelling stories about human nature and Jesus Christ. To me he was all of these things. He was a conduit for sometimes odd spiritual insights (at one time saying, "I don't blame people for not believing me, if I hadn't experienced it myself I wouldn't believe me either"), but he also introduced teachings that are life-altering and totally inspiring to people searching for something more out of life. My main takeaway from this biography was that Joseph Smith thought the 2nd coming of Jesus was imminent, like only a couple of years away. It colored everything he did. Only nearing the end of his life did he relax a bit, realizing he might not actually be around to see the face of Christ while he was alive. But it really informed every decision he made. He wanted to gather his church members together in a Zion community to be ready for it (sounds familiar .... people gathering for the end of the world), he wanted to restore ancient practices (hi polygamy), he needed to build temples (symbolic worship made modern). He lived a life of chaos and hardship, but he was willing to die to defend his inspiration. I think it should be required reading for all Mormons because it fills in so many details that help paint a full picture of the man. And Lin-Manuel Miranda, if you're reading this ... Joseph and the Amazing Plates of Gold could be your next big Broadway hit!