Relief Society Quilt Square

Our ward Relief Society received a quilt from another ward a while ago. It was a gift from a woman’s mother’s ward Relief Society. Our RS presidency uses it a lot as a decorative piece on the front table during Sunday lessons. In keeping with the idea of “paying it forward” we are assembling a quilt to give to another ward too. Each sister was given a gold square and could pick blue and ivory scraps to accent their own piece.

I decided to use two hands (or parts of them) to symbolize the service that is provided through the Relief Society. There is a gold string of yarn running from one hand to the other symbolizing the unity of purpose our organization has throughout the world. I traced my own hands, ironed them on, and hand stitched the edges. I’ve never done anything like this before, so it was fun. And it turned out almost as good as in my imagination, not bad for the first try.

My Baby Turns 1 Today

Today is Sabrina’s first birthday! She is such a cutie pie. We love our “Brina!!” Hunter already showered her with confetti before he left for school, and Emma made decorations in her bedroom. The real fun won’t really start until they get home from school and we finish the cake. Daddy has specific instructions to get home early! So the kids and I were planning on making a cake in the shape of a number 1, but I think I waited too long to take it out of the pan, and it wouldn’t come out in one piece. So instead we did a Confetti Cake! The kids all helped put on M&Ms and different kinds of sprinkles to make a fantastically decorated birthday cake.

Sabrina had a lot of fun opening presents and eating cake. Special thanks to Nana, Papa, and Aunt Erica for calling her on the phone. Also a big THANK YOU from Sabrina for the Baby Einstein DVD from Aunt Erica, Owen & Davis; and the cute spring outfit from Aunt Jeanette & Uncle Dan!

What? Develop Photos?

I have a whole bunch of film that needs to be developed just sitting in my fridge. There must be 20 rolls. I still used the film camera a lot before I got my new digital one because the pictures were such a nice quality. Now I hardly ever use it, but still have this backlog to get through. I finally took in four rolls to Sam’s Club and got them done. (This first one is with Sabrina and Adrienne, not Hannah)

Two were the disposable cameras I gave to Hunter and Emma when Sabrina was born! They took pictures in the hospital when they would come to visit. I did this same thing when Hannah was born and loved the pictures they took. They would get things like the flowers and the dry erase board the nurse would write on, and the morphine machine. All things that help really bring back the details of the experience and see it from their point of view.

The third roll was from when Matt came home from his mission. This is the last time all of the cousins from my side were together too. The fourth one had pictures from Christmas that Hunter took with the “Cars” camera Emma gave him. I thought I’d post a few of them. I will also post some in the February Folder. Good times!

Welcome to the Family

Congratulations to my baby brother Matt and his new fiancee, Ashley! Matt and Ashley were engaged last night. Matt made her some of her favorite Chinese food, and surprised her with a real “ringer” of a fortune! I’m excited to meet Ashley and look forward to getting to know my future sister-in-law.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

A friend of mine sent me a link to this article called “How Not to Talk to Your Kids – The Inverse Power of Praise” by Po Bronson. It’s pretty long, but worth the time to read it. I’ve cut out a few of the highlights for me:

“For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. But a growing body of research and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it…

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise…

(Baumeister) will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves…

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them…

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort instead of simply giving up is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located the circuit in a part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it’s telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain’s chemical reward for success] on the horizon.” While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit?

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. “The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

This idea is a new one to me, but is makes a lot of sense. In the article he also mentions how we shouldn’t cut out praise all together, but be specific in the praise like saying: “You really blocked that pass well” instead of saying a general, “You played a good game.” or “You must have worked hard on that report,” instead of “You’re so smart!” It seems that specific encouragement when given sincerely has the most impact. I’m going to give it a try and see if I notice a difference.

Plastic or Paper?

You may have noticed from our Valentines breakfast that we were eating on paper plates and drinking from plastic cups. It’s time I confessed- I am addicted to disposable dinnerware. When I was pregnant with Hannah and Rob was doing his summer internship, we lived in a tiny two bedroom house for the summer. It was actually a lot of fun living in close quarters, but Rob was working long days, and I just didn’t want to wash dishes. It is by far the worst household task to me! I hate scraping off the old food and scrubbing the little bits. I don’t know why it’s ok for me to put in my mouth and eat until after it has been cleared from the table. Then it becomes disgusting! Weird.

So, Rob suggested that we go all paper plates and cups. I resisted at first mostly because of the cost, and a little environmentalist guilt. But it was great! We even moved on to paper bowls for cereal and plastic utensils when we can get away with it. I have been using paper and plastic ever since. I still put off doing dishes, and my kitchen sink is never empty for more than an hour, but it would be even worse. I’m not sure when I will go back to real plates especially since I found these paper products that have biblical sayings on them. That will make things more classy right? …ok, so I won’t really buy these, but they’re funny. If only there were disposable pots and pans…