Already. In the womb.

Here’s why. On the day before Thanksgiving (which, incidentally, was our 7-month anniversary…monthiversary?), when we went to have an ultrasound, our little bundle of joy kept his legs crossed for HALF AN HOUR before we found out he was a boy. We either caught him unawares or wore him down like good parents. Either way, we’re glad we kept trying, because the technician thought he was a girl up to that point (serves him right). Little rebel. And don’t try and tell me he was just being modest. I know his father. In fact, when the technician tried for the millionth time to get a glimpse and the baby’s legs were still crossed, I turned to Troy and said, “yup, this is definitely your kid.”

Then, three days later, Troy felt our son move for the first time. In an epic kick to the face. See, I had felt him moving around in there, so Troy pressed his face against my tummy to try and feel/hear something. And all of a sudden, BAM! the strongest kick I had thus far felt, aimed right at daddy’s cheek. Heh heh, mommy’s little angel. Troy reared back and cried, “that little skunk!” He was more pleased and amused than offended.

But I can’t help thinking, if my little stinker already has a sense of humor while he’s still in there, I can’t wait to see what kind of mischief he’ll get up to when he finally comes out. Maybe he’ll burn the house down.

Bring it on.

One of my favorite engagement pictures

Another favorite engagement picture

Can’t remember the painter’s name, but I love this image!

The Road to Emmaus. My grandparents had this in their kitchen when I was a child, and my mother has one too.

My favorite Carl Bloch painting. Also, the best valentine I’ve ever gotten.

Let the Children Come. This small print followed me around on my mission.

Oquirrh Mountain Temple. No Mormon home is complete without a picture of the temple where the husband and wife were sealed!

Am I a little obsessed with paintings of Jesus? Perhaps, but he is the most important man in our life, after all. Our home is small and I wanted to start with my absolute favorites and the things I thought were most important. I of course hope to collect more art prints, things that aren’t as directly religious but still beautiful and bring a nice feeling into our home. Hopefully there will be one or two wedding pictures as well, and of course, as time passes, pictures of children! Troy doesn’t like having pictures of himself on the wall, because he thinks it looks kind of egotistical, but I like looking at him.

But since I hate meta-blogging (that’s blogging about blogging, right? BORING), and my journals are already bursting with entries that begin with “sorry I haven’t written in a while” and “I suck at this journaling thing,” let’s move on.

So, my goals at last entry were to graduate in English with minors in Scandinavian Studies and Editing, and to go to grad school in Comparative Literature. I think I wanted to teach college classes eventually and become a writer. Let’s see what I’ve accomplished since then…

-I dropped the Editing Minor. I liked it, but there simply wasn’t time.

-I took about twice the amount of required Scandinavian Studies classes, because I wanted to. Points for true education!

-I dated people.

-I learned all sorts of things, both inside and outside of class.

-I had awesome roommates, like Megan, Kessia, Carin, and Erin. I learned from each of them.

-I studied Finnish!

-I studied Old Norse!

-I went back to Sweden to visit, and got to go to Finland too.

-I taught Swedish at the Missionary Training Center for a year.

-I ran a half-marathon!

-I took the GRE.

-I made some very difficult decisions.

-I left the MTC and taught first-year Swedish at BYU for two semesters.

-I made awesome friends at work, like Dane, Jackie, Phil, and Laurel.

-I started dating Troy.

-I ran another half-marathon, the Provo Halloween Half. I dressed like a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Because of a new job and a new boyfriend, I didn’t train as much. I ended up with two sprained ankles. It was still awesome.

-I did lots of knitting.

-Troy and I got engaged.

-My dad moved to Abu Dhabi for a three-year work contract.

-I applied to BYU’s Comparative Studies Masters program.

-I got accepted to BYU’s Comparative Studies Masters program.

-I decided not to go to graduate school.

-I graduated from BYU with a bachelor’s in English and a minor in Scandinavian Studies.

-I married Troy in the Oquirrh Mountain, Utah Temple.

-I baked lots of bread and other things.

-Troy and I lived in Seattle for two months so he could do some active duty for the Coast Guard.

-We returned to Provo.

-We found out I was pregnant.

-Troy started fall semester.

-I threw up a lot.

-Troy published a paper on research he’d been doing with a professor and another student.

-We got ultrasound pictures! Like this one:

Baby #1! November 21, 2012

-I made a mini-Thanksgiving dinner with Cornish game hens.

-I decorated for Christmas!

And those are some of my more memorable adventures from the last two years. Thrilling, right? Hopefully there will be more where that came from.

The result: I was no more than halfway to the library and my muscles were already screaming in pain. No good.  I felt really pathetic, especially with all of the duktig (Swedish for talented) cyclists streaming past me from time to time with their perfectly calibrated road bikes and spandex suits, no doubt turning up their noses at my BYU basketball shorts, “it’s just a flesh wound” t-shirt, and ordinary bicycle. Not to mention how slowly I was going with a pained expression on my face. Ouch.

Well, I’ll get back in shape. And it was definitely worth it when I got to the library. I had two books on hold, How to Train your Dragon by Cressida Cowell and the Goose Girl by Shannon Hale (for next month’s book club in my singles ward). I checked them out immediately and went to the library courtyard to read in the sun. It felt so good. It felt like I belonged there. Like I had every right to be sitting on that bench reading in my library. As a missionary I spent a lot of time in libraries, because they’re good, safe, warm public places to teach people. But I never felt like I really belonged there, since I wasn’t supposed to read the thousands of books at my fingertips, and because of all of the obvious staring and glaring at our nametags. We felt like intruders most of the time. I even heard stories of one particular library employee who deliberately sought out the sister missionaries in the middle of teaching investigators and kicked them out for proselyting in a government institution or something (they tried to explain that they already knew the people they were teaching and hadn’t been approaching random strangers, but to no avail). But in this library, here, I felt welcome and normal. People didn’t look at me like I was a freak or a criminal. I had every right to be here. Of course, as a missionary, I had every right to be there too. But the looks on peoples’ faces make that harder and harder to believe over time.

Anyway, it was just another nice reminder that I’m really home.

(In retrospect, that’s a rather negative thought about my mission. I’ll have to write more about my mission in the future to erase any shred of doubt that I had an absolute blast as a missionary in Sweden.)

And what has happened since I’ve been home? I’ve decided I don’t have time to get a job before I head back to BYU at the end of June, so I’m very available for service projects and odd jobs and things like that. I went to the bishop’s storehouse once (and had a blast!). I’ve been going to institute and YSA activities and to the temple. I’ve also been on my first couple of dates–quite an accomplishment for an awkward returned missionary, if I do say so myself.

And, of course, I’ve been reading up a storm. I’ve read some Shojo Manga (Ouran High School Host Club and Lizard Prince), a guilty pleasure, as well as the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows  and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. One of my favorite things to do is just walk through the library and browse the shelves and wait for a book to jump out and grab me. That’s how I found Guernsey. It was on the bestseller shelves and the title intrigued me. It’s about a writer in London who receives a letter from a pig farmer out on Guernsey in the English Channel, who has an old book that used to belong to her and wants to know if she knows anything else by the same author. She starts corresponding with him and other residents of the island, people who also belong to this “literary society,” a group formed during World War II. She becomes enchanted with them and their stories, ultimately goes to visit them, and falls in love with the island itself.  It’s a wonderful story, and one fun thing about it is that it consists entirely of letters between the different characters in the story.  I loved it. Howl’s was also fun, but I think I read it too fast, and there’s a lot of information, especially at the end. I got a little confused. I liked it, though, so I don’t mind reading it again.  I tried reading Twilight for the first time ever but I couldn’t get through it, nor could I finish Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Twilight was interesting and sucked me in, but I found it really disturbing at the same time. Zombies was funny at first, but I got bored with it.

What else? I went up to Arcata with my dad last week, because he had a meeting at Humboldt State University. After his meeting we went up to Redwoods National Forest and went for a hike. That was really nice. I had missed redwood trees so much in Sweden! There is just a feel and a smell to the redwood forests here in California that you can’t get anywhere else. It felt so good to be home.

It really does feel good to be home. I miss many things about Sweden, namely food and people and public transportation :p , but America is my home. We had the elders over for dinner on Sunday, and they asked what I missed about my mission. I said those things–that I missed the people and the food and things like that–and one of the elders asked me if I miss missionary work. I couldn’t really give him a clear answer. I loved my mission; I loved being a missionary and teaching people these truths that are so precious to me, but at the same time, I don’t miss being a missionary. I’m still me. I’m still the same person. I think the things I loved most about being a missionary have come home with me. I just have a new mission now. I will always serve Heavenly Father, but in different ways, and I was happy and excited to move on to new adventures. I don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone else. Thoughts?

People keep asking me how my adjustment back to “normal” life is going. I tell them I’m still “processing.” Like, I’m going through these experiences and memories in my mind and putting them in their proper place, as I continue to live my life and create new experiences and memories. I feel like a lot of these changes have come to me rather naturally since I’ve returned home, but somewhere in the back of my mind there’s a little Haley doing filing work to get all of those papers and things organized. I’m not too worried. Little Haley will catch up.

Sweden was amazing. Sorry it didn’t really work out with the missionary blog. My brother was in charge of that, haha. But hey, he got like all A’s this last quarter, so at least he’s doing something useful with his time!

More later…

So this blog is on a temporary hiatus, until I return from Sweden in a year and a half. However, in about December I will be able to start e-mailing my family every week, and my brother will post some of my e-mails on my special mission blog, Haley’s Mission to Sweden (http://systerhegstrom.wordpress.com).

Check it out. And if you want to write me, my mission address is on the “about” page of both of my blogs.

Vi ses!

That’s my fifth and final of the summer. This is what became of that delicious Inca Cotton yarn (Joseph Galler, Inc.) that I bought at Green Planet Yarn. It took the whole twist, minus a few inches. I’m going to attempt to write a pattern for it at the bottom of this post.

The other thing I wanted to say was that I was originally going to take it with me to Sweden, but then I heard about the Red Scarf Project, and now I’m seriously considering giving my beloved scarf up. The Red Scarf Project takes donated homemade scarves and gives them to foster kids entering college. Did that just break your heart? It did mine. I just wish I’d heard about it a month or two ago, because I could have made an extra scarf just for the project. As it is, this is what I have. And it was fun to make, but I don’t really need it. I’m kind of a scarf addict, so I’ve got plenty. It’s always way more fun to make scarves for other people, anyways.

(p.s. I know my scarf isn’t red, but they accept any gender-neutral color)

The reason I mention the Red Scarf Project at all isn’t to make myself look good (remember, “considering” giving up the scarf means “considering” keeping it, too :p ). But I figure that the more links there are to this amazing organization, the more a few other ambitious knitters out there will find out about it. Even if I don’t give this scarf up, I might inspire some other people to donate to the project this year (The current submission period this year is September 1 through October 31, so you knitters out there better get started!). And now that I know about it, I have some good knittins to look forward to when I come back! Besides my goal to make a sweater.

Okay, here’s my attempt at writing a knitting pattern, so unless you’re really interested, you can stop reading now. :p

Haley’s Cable Scarf

Cast on 38 stitches.

So I started and finished with a little bit of ribbing just to make the ends smooth, so it’s about 6 rows of knit 1, purl 1, on both sides.

Then the cabling starts.

Row 1: Purl 2, knit 6, purl 2, knit 4, purl 2, knit 6, purl 2, knit 4, purl 2, knit 6.

Row 2: Knit 2, purl 6, knit 2, purl 4, knit 2, purl 6, knit 2, purl 4, knit 2, purl 6.

Repeat Rows 1 and 2 one more time each.

Then you do the same stitching for Row 1, except now you do the cable stitch-switching (I’m a great pattern-writer—you can tell I know what I’m talking about! :p ). It looks something like this:

Purl 2, put 3 stitches on cable needle, knit 3, knit the 3 stitches off the cable needle, purl 2, knit 4, purl 2, do the same thing with the cable needle, purl 2, knit 4, purl 2, do the same with the cable needle, purl 2.

Do the next row just like Row 2, then do the same Row 1, Row 2 pattern for 10 rows

When you feel like your scarf is just about long enough (for me it was when I could tell I was running out of yarn), do (I think) only 5 rows (Row 2, Row 1, Row 2, Row 1, Row 2) after the cable switcharoo, then 6 rows of knit 1, purl 1 ribbing.

Bind off.

I’m sorry it’s not more concrete than that, but I was just kind of figuring it out as I went along. You might have to play with it a little to get it to look right. Just remember that you do the cable switcharoos when you’re knitting on the front side and any switching between ribbing and cables is done on the front side. If that makes sense.

Good luck!

Don’t be a fence-sitter. Vote.

I’m just tying up loose ends—like calling Wells Fargo and telling them I’m going to be in Sweden for a year and a half so they shouldn’t worry when purchases start popping up on my card over there—and gathering a few more bits and bobs from my list. I bought towels on Monday, for example. And today I’m going to Costco to order new glasses and contacts—the contacts for the first time ever except for my trial pair, the glasses with a brand new prescription. I think I’m getting emo-type frames so that’ll be fun. I thought my old glasses were cute when I got them, because I thought they looked like little granny glasses (I must have been the only 18-year-old in the world who thought it’d be cute to look like a grandma), but now they’re just kind of blah. Not to mention the right lens keeps popping out in the occasional mad break for freedom.

I also think I’ve more-or-less got the luggage situation figured out. I’ve decided to use my brother’s old suitcases after all. They’re used-looking, but no worse than brand-new ones would look after a few transfers (with an Elder. I think “normal use” by a Sister and “normal use” by an Elder constitute entirely different things). He left his carry-on behind in England, but those are easier to acquire (in my opinion) than a whole big new set. Cheaper too. We have some laying around the house, and I’m not picky about my luggage matching, so I think it’ll be just fine. As long as I don’t go over the weight limit.

You know, and it still hasn’t really sunk in that I’m leaving so soon, and that I’m going to Sweden, of all places. I think that every time I start to feel excited, I squash it down and go back into denial mode. I wonder why that is. Am I worried about being too excited, so I repress the feeling? And why would that worry me? Do I think it’s too good to be true? Or am I getting swallowed up in fears and worries and stress? Stress, in getting everything ready, fears and worries that something will suddenly come up to not let me go, or that I’ll get out there and go back to my lazy habits and fail?

And yet, as I’m typing all of this, I’m completely, totally calm. More emotion-squashing? Who knows. Jitters have always affected me in weird ways.