the busy heart

Conference napping, starting young. Every six months, Mormons listen to what we call General Conference , which means, theoretically, all 14 million of us gather and listen to talks by church leadership. There's a physical meeting in Salt Lake, and the rest of us watch it in our chapels and, increasingly, over the Internet on our various devices. It's four 2-hour sessions (with a bonus session for men), and it fills up the weekend. Six months ago, I was literally two days away from having a baby, and let's face it, I slept through most of it, despite my efforts to stay awake. I'd sit down for a moment, pull it up on my iPad, and immediately zonk out. I got some really solid sleep in during those conference sessions, and I don't begrudge my former self a bit of it. Today, with my baby on the outside, I didn't nap, though she got a pretty solid one in (see above). During the first part, I deep-cleaned my bathroom (party!) while she played with her baby do...

Late one night I came downstairs in my pajamas, excited, asking Sam if I could just read him a little bit of something. He was still up, tending his fire, watching a movie that he kindly paused so he could listen. At which point I read him more than a little bit. I read him most of an interview with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich , a woman who is actually a dear friend from my ward in Cambridge. She's famous, in part, for penning the sentence that shows up on bumper stickers and t-shirts all over the place: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." She won a Pultizer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, she teaches a killer Sunday School lesson, and she's my hero. Anyway, I had gone to bed worrying about how I would do everything I wanted to do, how I would do something that mattered to me and also take care of my baby. It was in the thick of my posts about figuring out working and motherhood, and it was such a relief to read her interview, which answered pretty much everythin...