It's a personal update!

Hi guys! So here are some exciting things that are going on in my life right now:

1) I'm pregnant! Hurrah! We're expecting a baby boy in the next 4 months or so. I'm due on October 1, but with my first three kids I didn't make it to my due date, so I'm kind of expecting a late-September baby.

A friend of mine asked about timing and spacing between my kids: was this baby a surprise? No. Am I worried about having a larger age gap between the youngest and the baby? No. This little guy is coming a couple months later than we would have ideally chosen; he's coming at the start of the semester instead of the start of the summer, and has a college professor for a dad, but hey! We'll take it. And my belief is that siblings can have wonderful relationships with each other regardless of the age difference between them. Relationships are more about shared experiences, positive experiences, and love than they are about how far apart in age two people are.

Related: Here are my two favorite pregnancy books. I've been using them both again this time around!

2) I'm helping out with our church's Young Women's camp. I'm one of the assistant directors of the camp, and it is fun and challenging and thought-provoking and already rewarding to work on the project of putting together a week-long church camp for a lot of teens. I enjoy thinking through events and imagining scenarios that could come up -- planning for the big picture and planning for contingencies.

When people ask me how I'm going to camp while I'm pregnant, I can't help but smile. I am SO not worried. Whereas my experience as a teen was sleeping in a tent and cooking meals on a camp stove, I'll be sleeping on a mattress in a lodge and not cooking so much as a fried egg. There is a flushing toilet in the lodge, and, like, couches and electricity and stuff. I'm gonna be fine. And the vast majority of my work (planning, and preparing) will be done before the camp even starts. I'm looking forward to a week of relaxing in nature, reading my scriptures, and helping campers and leaders solve whatever problems may arise.

3) I'm leading the music for the children at church. This is such a fun way to spend every Sunday! I'm glad I have the chance to do it. Every fall we have a Sunday where the kids sing all their songs and speak parts, so we're busy preparing for that and I'm having fun making it fun for the kids. This last week I had the younger kids create a rainstorm with musical instruments, and I had some of the older kids pretend to be me, including choosing the song, leading the music, and giving the group feedback. They loved it and I did, too. I'm thinking once my turn at being Music Leader is done I might have to start teaching Kindermusik again. I love kids, I love music, it's just good times all around. Speaking of music I'm going to repost an old article I wrote for a friend about making parenting easier with music. I've had several people tell me they remember the article, so I figure it's time for a refresh.

4) I'm volunteering in Levi's classroom. He's in first grade, in a bilingual (English/Spanish) class. This is his teacher's first year, and when I asked her if I could start coming in to help she was super enthusiastic. So I go in once a week right after their lunch and mostly just work with individual kids who need some guidance on the assignment or help staying on task. Sometimes Jubilee is at preschool during this time, and other times I drop her off at a friend's house and we swap childcare.

5) I'm looking forward to going to BookCon in NYC at the end of next week. Loads of authors, tons of books . . . will I see you there?

Ok that's about all I can think of for now. Anything you want to know? How're you?