Daylight Savings Time is a Terrible Idea

Oh my goodness - I was just reading the Salt Lake Tribune online and read the following headline:

House wants study on dumping Daylight Saving Time

Everyone knows my short list of the five things I despise:

1) Daylight Savings Time
2) Round-abouts
3) Dreadlocks
4) Making new Babies sleep on their backs
5) Polygamists (modern-day, not my ancestors). Specifically this one woman in particular who I ran into over and over again for years when I was grocery shopping at the Harmon's in West Valley City. It was unnerving. Early morning on a Thursday? We were both there. Late night on a Friday? We were both there. Our eyes would meet in a cold, stony glare as we sidled past each other in the soup aisle. After we moved to South Jordan, I ran into a polygamist family one day while shopping at Walmart. I decided to be a better person and smile if our eyes met. It was the man who caught me eye. He returned my tepid smile with a cold, stony glare. I quickly changed my smile up-side-down and frowned my smile away.

So anyway, HIP HIP HOORAY that the house is doing a study on dumping Daylight Saving Time (which I've always pronounced as "Saving(s)." When we get home from our fun trip to Denver this weekend to celebrate Jack's baptism on Saturday, I am going to join the movement.

Who knows, next year there may be a headline:
"Activist wants House to study dumping Round-abouts"
Associated Press: Political activist and leader in the "Dump Daylight Saving Time" movement, Barbara Sweat, led a sit-in at a round-about in South Jordan Utah yesterday, demanding that the house study dumping Round-abouts. She was joined by three other middle-aged women in patterned polyester blouses with poor eyesight and slow reflexes. Their theme "Come 'round, it's all about about safety!" has not caught on. Sweat stated, "This isn't Europe! We are all just fine with stopping and looking both ways instead of being flung into a flying centrifuge of split-second traffic decisions, not knowing where we're going to end up when we shoot out on the other side. " Her husband Dennis was not available for comment.


XO
Mom

Here is the rest of the Tribune article:
Do you hate switching to and from Daylight Saving Time? The House endorsed a bill Thursday that would allow people to sound off, and weigh in on a study about whether to keep it, dump it or at least avoid the switching.

Representatives passed HB197 on a 54-14 vote, and sent it to the Senate.

Rep. Ronda Menlove, R-Garland, sponsored the plan to require the Governor’s Office of Economic Development to hold a meeting on the issue, and invite "parents, senior citizens, and representatives from the agricultural, public education, recreation and business communities."

She said constituents have pushed her for 10 years to find a way to avoid the twice-a-year switch to and from Daylight Saving Time. But bills to do that have been consistently killed, so she is calling for the meeting to seek a solution.

"They don’t mind if we have Daylight Saving Time or regular time, they just don’t want to switch. They don’t like the disruption," she said about constituents.

Rep. David Lifferth, R-Eagle Mountain, said Daylight Saving Time "is a terrible idea and has been since it started."

My cup runneth over...........

The little Sweat brothers

Last week I got to babysit the six big/medium/little Sweat kids while Tony and Cindy were in Hawaii at a youth conference speaking engagement! What a a sweet gig (for them and for me)! I love the photo above of Eli and Calvin. They play together really well. It's like Calvin has grown up over night and he's a real buddy for Eli. The photo below was taken while we were making Sunday dinner. I needed four cups of water to make a rice dish. (Funny side story - the kids like something called "Peas and Shells" which is made with boxed shell pasta in a white sauce with frozen peas added right at the end. On the night when I was making the peas and shells, Reagan was helping and said, "Grandma, are you only making one box?" "Why, yes." "Um, I could eat one box by myself, (although I wouldn't), so maybe you should make two boxes?....or maybe three?" Good point Reggie, good point, I am not cooking for two..... Anyway, in the photo below, Calvin and Vivi are "helping" me measure four cups of water (with Jane supervising). At first I was seriously striving to have them measure exactly four cups of water into a pot. Not surprisingly, it wasn't working out in a way that Julia Child or Ina Garten would approve, and seriously grandma, a 3-year-old measuring water? So I thought, oh what the heck, look how much fun Calvin is having carefully pouring the water into the pot. So I got out a second pot, filled it to the top with water, and those kids poured 1/2 cups of water back and forth from one pot to the other for 15 minutes. I got out a third pot and was about my business with that exact four cups of water thing for my recipe. My cup runneth over with delight.Those bright eyes and curly hair and dimpled elbows (but not Jane's dimpled elbows). Jane is a woman. She did Vivi's hair every day, set out Vivi's clothes each night, picked a cute ribbon for her hair for Valentine's day, and watched the Olympics with me at 8:30 every  night when I was ready to be done.  There is something about Jane that reminds me of my Grandmother Nan, so I have great respect for her and treat her with dignity.

I've learned that it can be kinda stressful to go places when you're in charge of little people. So, on day one of this adventure, I purposely didn't plan a thing. Here are some photos of day one of my "Stay-at-home" grandma experience!~


I love the back of the necks of little guys. Eloise Wilkin illustrations come to life.

I let Calvin direct the rhythm of the morning.After I got him dressed (around 10:00 a.m. :-) we went into his bedroom and he picked the Toy Story book and we read it three times.

 
Then we retired to the upstairs play room/family room (which is where the big screen theater is too!). Sorting his cars by color was actually MY idea. We had heated debates about where to place cars that were equal parts red and green. I am afraid that I won, which is not grandmotherly of me at ALL.  I was actually kinda sad when he lost interest in this. Plus, it meant I had to stand up after sitting on the floor for awhile...look away children, this isn't going to be pretty.........she's almost up, come on grandma, you can do it, unbend that right leg.........

Then Vivi got home from kindergarten and read him The Three Bears. I love her expressions!

In this next photo, Calvin is trying to pick off a hangnail on his big toe. He worked and worked at it, and finally he looked up at me and said "I'll just leave it." It's just fun to hear him learn to express himself. He also busts out singing "Jingle Bells! Jingle Bell! Jingle All the way!" out of the blue. Kind of like his version of making small talk. If things get a little boring, out comes "Jingle Bells!"

One fun thing about moving is you rediscover the dress-up bin! Do little girls come programmed to pose like this?

They had a ball with that box of costumes.

 Calvin is at that age where he still needs a nap, but it ends up he doesn't take one and then falls asleep on the floor at 4:30 pm. Then he's up until 10:30! It got to be 5:00 pm and he was getting pretty whiny but now it was too late for a nap, so I told the kids their job was to make sure he didn't fall asleep. The next photo is the time on the microwave clock when I discovered both Calvin AND Vivi sound asleep in Tony and Cindy's bedroom.

The big girls relaxing after school in Tony and Cindy's bed. I think it's the only picture I got of Lauren. She was gone all one day babysitting, and all day Monday visiting her friend in South Jordan.
 

Eli after being out in the rain.

This is a picture of Reagan and their next-door neighbor Abbey playing their ukeleles! I got to play the piano as they learned the chording to "Reindeer are Better than People" from Frozen. It was so fun.

Family room view into Tony and Cindy's bedroom with a new crop o' kids in the bed.

Okay, this is the most hilarious picture of all. Calvin is still in the process of deciding to be potty trained, so I brought a prize for him, and he was all over it when I asked if he wanted to put on his Toy Story underwear! There is nothing cuter than a slim little bum freed from diaper-dom! We read 10 books, drank a glass of orange juice, chatted a bit, nothing came of it. So I put his pants on him and set the buzzer for 30 minutes. We tried it again, nada. I kinda lost track of time there for awhile, and pretty soon Calvin comes walking into the kitchen bow-legged and looking kinda shocked and announced "I need some wet wipes." That was the end of the potty training experiment. :-)

It was Valentine's Day while I was there. Jane made this all by herself. I thought it looked so professional!

Rats! Grandma is making me do my homework! Isn't that the classic homework pose? I think Tony used to do the very same thing.

I wanted to take a picture of their under-counter lighting, but forgot to turn off my flash on the first one. I thought it was a great picture of the kitchen though!

It was a wonderful week. To go from my usual routine, to running a household of 6 kids is startling! And they're not little kids, they're self-sufficient as all get-out! We only lost three of the six of them during the time we were in charge of them. We found them.

Well, that's my latest adventure. With 16 adorable grandchildren, my cup truly does run over. I love each one of them individually and deeply. But lest you think I am all about my cup being half full (which is usually the case), here is what happened at our house this week: the microwave broke; the disposal broke and dad smashed his finger installing the new one (he says next time he's paying the guy $40 to do it); I was making a lazy turn and mashed the front tire into a median at Walmart and we had to buy a new tire; Dennis and I have had four crowns and a root canal between the two of us; and I have a little carpel tunnel from making name badges, and I don't even BELIEVE in carpel tunnel - see? Here's proof, can you see how carpelly my wrist looks? Oh, and I lost my glasses at Disneyland and replaced them with the world's most unsightly pair of bug-eyed specs ever created, as you can see. (I'm getting them re-done).
Love you all!! Blob

Mini Moments

 
We sure had some wonderful Mini Moments - and Mickey moments too -on our recent trip to Disneyland with Carly and Macy and Jack (oh, and Amy and Dave!).

We started off the way we always do on a road trip, filling up with gas and buying $10 worth of junk at Holiday- and I mean JUNK. I always feel like whispering to the cashier: "Don't tell my parents that you saw me buying this stuff!" And I'm not talking a candy bar and a Coke, I'm also adding salt and vinegar chips, a Red Bull and two hostess snowballs. Actually, we couldn't find the snowballs when we started out the trip (RATS!) but found some on the way home (white, not pink, so not the motherlode, but delish nontheless).  One snowball each. And neither of us ever EVER buy them at any other time - only on road trips.

Dennis loves to drive, and I love to be driven, so we are the perfect traveling duo! When he takes off his shoes, usually somewhere right outside of Utah County, then the real fun begins.

On the ride down we chatted a bit, and at one point I opened the manual for the "Marriage and Family Relations" class that we begin teaching this Sunday, and we read through the table of contents, so that counts for something doesn't it? We listened to Road Trip CD's, we traveled in long, comfortable stretches of silence, I fell asleep, Dennis did not. We stopped in St. George and had Cafe Rio for lunch and looked at the palm trees that may have died during the cold winter, I read three newspapers, did Sudoku and crosswords in each of them (and enjoying reading the entire St. George newspaper tremendously! There is a dramatic difference between how the news is reported in a small community vs. the SL Tribune. I enjoy both styles, but had a blast reading aloud to Dennis all of the local goings-on in St. George. So personal and up close and REAL.


After 10 hours we arrived in L.A. (and I forgot how big the mountains are as you're driving out there!) We began battling that daunting traffic. Well, not WE. Dennis drove like the Parnelli Sweat he has always been, and I sat there in abject terror at the mayhem they call the L.A. freeways. We did get lost once trying to find the Hotel (Dennis thinks the reason is because when the cultured voice on the GPS said "bear left" she meant the road is bearing, and not to take the exit to the left. We were SO close but yet so far, with Disneyland in sniffing distance.But the GPS lady kindly schooled us on how to get back onto the freeway and voila, we were THERE! And Amy and Dave and Jack and Macy and Carly were standing in the parking lot as we pulled in, just walking back to their rooms with Wendy's (oh Wendy's, you were good to all of us on this trip).

It's so fun to run between rooms in a Hotel! Here is one of the first things I asked of the kids: to get in my bed with me and giggle. The reason I like to giggle when I get to the Hotel? I look at the baseboards and I don't have to dust them; that toilet? I don't have to swish it out; the bed? I don't have to make it! The carpet? I don't have to vacuum it! The meals? I don't have to cook them! Oh the heavenly, giggly joy! I brought some games with me (Uncle Wiggley!) and Amy and Dave stocked up on lots and lots of snacks. Macy said "Games are good to have, but food is more important, Grandma.")

Each morning we would hear a little knock on our door around 8:00 am, when the Huish kids would wake us up to go down for the FREE breakfast (what a deal!). The kids were all dressed so cute, with the girl's hair hair fixed so pretty. The kids were literally jumping up and down with energy and rarin' to go. Dennis and I were probably a sight to behold when we cracked opened the door to our room; old-lady and old-man-haired, still under the influence of black-out blinds, and in my case, shaking the cobwebs from my head as a result of the contraption that I bought to help with my "can't sleep AND listen to snoring" disability. I wore a fleece headband with little tiny headphones implanted in it, that I plugged into my ipad and it played white noise all night! (Dennis said I actually woke HIM up with MY snoring at one point - sorry!! I ended up selecting a background of white noise with atonal music (B, B flat, back to B, B flat ad naseum) with the lull of lapping ocean waves behind it. One time in the middle of the night I woke up, and thought the tonal sounds of the music had become all chaotic, but it was my own brain adding extra tones on top of what I was hearing. YIKES! I ripped off the headband and lay there in stunned silence for awhile. It was actually kind of torturous but it did the trick and I slept okay. However, now that we're home, every time I look at that headband sitting on my bedroom nightstand I have a little wave of PTSD wash over me. I need to put it away.
 
I'm not sure who that guy is next to me..........



Oh what FUN we had at Disneyland! It was 70 degrees and so warm. Oh sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy, especially in January!

One of my favorite things was watching the kids meet and interact with the princesses, which I've never been part of before. It touched my heart. The princesses are just born to do that I think (and Peter Pan and Flynn Ryder were born to be them too). But to watch them make that magic happen for Carly and Macy and Jack just melted me. Maybe Disneyland IS the happiest place on earth. And because it was off-season we didn't have to wait in lines for two hours to meet the princesses (although the line to meet the Frozen princesses WAS two hours so we skipped that one. But, hilarious story, we were eating lunch and the two Frozen princesses actually came speed-walking through the restaurant, at a tremendous clip, heads down, no eye contact, on their way to somewhere else, so we SAW them..........and they were shorter than I imagined............It was fun each day to see families catch their "first" glimpse of a princess or a character and to just light up!

And the day we visited the ocean was glorious. The tide was really low and we got to see the tide pools with urchins (sea urchins, not OUR urchins!). I laaahv the ocean so much. My dream would be a huge Hiatt family reunion on the Oregon Coast....................

Here are random pictures. First: The sunset by our beloved Wendy's. The sunsets are so pretty in California! Below that is a picture from google of lilacs because I love lilacs.(It has nothing to do with anything!).

I took a picture of Carly each night as she fell asleep wherever we happened to be when 8:30 hit. Here are a couple of them.

"Carly, Carly, the fireworks are bursting overhead!"

I LOVED watching Macy gaze at the flowers. She just drinks them in. She looks at them like she is mother nature herself, looking over her little creations. It's so cute. (And now I know why I had an urge to download the photo of the lilacs. Because Uncle Steve wrote that Grandmother loved lilacs, and he remembers her "drinking in" their fragranace :-)

Jack just amazed me with how he walked and walked and walked and walked just like Pioneer Children. Oh my gosh, he would break into dance whenever there was spectacular music. This photo was at California Adventure at a Phineas and Ferb show, but it was so fun to watch him just dancing away and walking his little rear end off from one end of Disneyland to the other. And the one below it is my version of "Where's Waldo?" only it's "Where's dad?" Can you find him? It's like he is presiding over all of us, keeping us safe. Pretty cute. And that's all for now!
XO Mom