A Bushel and a Peck

It's been about 5 months since my last post. I'll go ahead and blame it on "pregnancy brain" and sleep deprivation. But I'm back, and I'll do my best to be coherent! So, I had a baby about three months ago. I'm still working on her birth story, which I'll share hopefully soon, but I wanted to share another experience I've had related to her arrival. About two weeks after our little Princess was born, I began to feel increasingly anxious. Up to that point, I'd had another adult with me almost constantly, so I wasn't sure how to handle being alone with both children. I had a couple "anxiety attacks," similar to the ones I've described in a previous post. Thankfully, they happened in the evening when I had Stephen home to help me. Soon, however, I began to have them when I was alone with my children. I wanted to run away, to leave and never come back. There were a couple of moments where I seriously believed that I, and every...

Toward the end of my freshman year of college, I began to experience increased anxiety. I'd always dealt with low-level anxiety, but this was different. I had moments where I lost my ability to function like a "normal" person. I wouldn't call them panic attacks, as I didn't experience the physical symptoms which I understand are typically involved in panic attacks. Rather, I became completely overwhelmed by the fear that I could not handle a single thing at that moment. Occasionally, I couldn't do much more than curl up in a ball and hope everything would stop feeling so...big. During these anxiety attacks, I felt like everything was just too open - something like the opposite of claustrophobia. I needed pressure on my body, especially on my chest. I needed things to just be smaller for a while. That fall, it just got worse. The attacks became more frequent and more intense, and I fell into severe depression as well. I struggled to get out of bed some day...

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." - Mother Teresa There have been a lot of conversations going on lately about controversial topics in the LDS church. I have seen a lot of comments flying around, many of the "you must not really have faith in God/be a follower of Christ/be a worthy member of the church if you believe that " variety. There's a good chance we've all thought things like this at some point. I know I'm guilty of it.  The problem is, if we are busy trying to determine whether we are more "worthy" than other people, we are too busy to love them as Christ loves them. Christ sacrificed everything for every single one of us, "worthy" or not. And really, none of us are actually deserving of that level of love and sacrifice from such a perfect, powerful being. Yet he suffered and died for all of us, even those he knew would fight him at every step, hurt him, and hurt those he loves. He chose to experience ...

Dear Anxiety, I know we've been together a long time. As far back as I can remember, really. However, our relationship has been on the rocks the past few years, and unfortunately, I feel that it's best for both of us if we just go our separate ways. Well, at least best for me.  I used to believe that you were actually helping me out: that, somehow, your ability to convince me to fear everything from aliens to being alone in the dark to possibly dying of a freak accident while doing something completely normal was saving me from something. Perhaps I was grateful to you for opening my eyes to the dangers all around me.  Then there were the times in high school when you promised me that, unless I agonized over every little thing I may have done wrong and went back and tried to make them all right (sometimes more than once), I wasn't really a good person. In some ways, I was grateful to be so aware of my mistakes because at least then I could do something about them.  ...

So, this Friday is Stephen's and my fifth anniversary. I find it interesting that I am both surprised by how much time has passed and almost certain that it's been far longer than five years.  These have been the most challenging, frustrating, magnificent, life-changing years of my life. We have both learned more about ourselves in these past five years than we'd ever been willing to face before. And I am so grateful for this wonderful, beautiful person that I get to be with forever. He truly is the best thing that has ever happened to me. With that, I thought I'd share the story of how we got engaged. I've never shared it publicly before since it was kind of a surprise, even to us, and so we didn't have any kind of elaborate set-up. Nothing was planned out beforehand. We didn't have a ring or even get a picture of us together that day. But it was still a beautiful day. September 5, 2008:  We had made a date to go to the Provo temple to do baptism...

*Warning* - A couple of slightly graphic details are included in this post. Words like "blood" and "cervix" appear once or twice. This is part 2 of 2. Click here for  Part 1 . To answer your question, yes, I did experience pain during labor. And the night after Sweet Boy was born, I did lay awake, feeling a little betrayed and overwhelmed, since I'd been telling myself that I wouldn't feel pain. But the experience of labor was an empowering experience, despite the pain. If I could go back and get the epidural, I wouldn't do it.  The sensation I experienced that I would label "pain" was very much like the discomfort one feels when getting an intense massage. The pressure is necessary, but it hurts. Sometimes it really hurts. The thing about a massage is that you get pressure in one or two small spots at a time. Not to mention, you can tell the therapist, "Okay, back off for a second." When you're in labor, your own body is pu...

This is part 1 of 2. Click here for Part 2 . As some of you know, I chose to do Hypnobirthing with my first baby. If you're like I was, you're probably thinking, "Hypnobirthing? That sounds...really weird." It's not as weird as it sounds, I promise. The basic idea is that, when a woman in labor is able to relax, let go of her fears, and trust her body, her pain and discomfort is decreased (sometimes nonexistent), and the labor goes more smoothly and quickly. One of the ways this is achieved is through self-hypnosis, where one goes into a deep state of relaxation and/or creates detailed scenes in one's mind that help guide the body through the different stages of labor. For example, one of the things that helped me during labor was the "rose script," in which Stephen talked me through imagining a rose slowly opening over and over. This exercise is intended to encourage the cervix to open. I feel that it definitely helped me. Anyway, I'm getting ...

I came across a quote about happiness (or loving yourself, which I feel is directly connected) today that I love. I love it because it so perfectly describes what I've been doing for so long and why I've been unhappy doing it. And as I recognize what I'm doing wrong, I can change and start to do things right. Or at least better. "If you water yourself down to please people or to fit in or to not offend anyone, you lose the power, the passion, the freedom and the joy of being uniquely you. It’s much easier to love yourself when you are being yourself." — Dan Coppersmith I grew up with the idea that the recipe for happiness included at least small amounts of three things: the approval of others, the admiration (and sometimes its more potent form - jealousy) of others, and the appeasement of everyone. If everyone loved me, I was guaranteed to love myself, right? Unfortunately, it took until my college years for me to realize that such a recipe almost always resu...

32 weeks with Sweet Boy and 32 weeks with Baby Girl Growing up, I was very thin - I knew it, and I was glad. One less thing for me to feel awkward about, I guess. A couple of years ago, I started to gain weight and I didn't like it. Then I gained 50 pounds with my first pregnancy, and "failed" to lose the last 20 pounds. At the beginning of this (second) pregnancy, I weighed 40 pounds more than I did in high school. I may be 6'3", but a 40-pound weight gain makes even a tall girl look different. I started running last summer in an attempt to lose some weight. I ended up quitting due to some breastfeeding issues that were causing me some discomfort, but I felt frustrated that I'd lost less than 10 pounds. I should have been proud of myself for getting to a point where I could run 5K's, but I let my disappointment eat away at my pride in myself. Around that time, Kate Middleton had her baby, and people started freaking out about her "post-b...

So, while I have a million things tumbling around in my mind that I'd like to write about someday, I'm not always sure I'm ready to write about them. And I'd love to know what you guys want to hear about. So let me know in the comments (blog or Facebook comments), and I'll see what I can do! Also, please check out the rest of the blog - the tabs at the top or the two posts I've already written. They're all intended to give you (and me, ha!) a bit of an idea of who I am and what this blog is about.

Since many of you may not know me very well, I thought a little introduction of myself was in order. I have to admit, this is another daunting step for me. I have a tendency to clam up  around people whose opinions I'm not very sure of. I suppose my logic is best summed up by the saying "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." I'd rather be thought shy or foolish than open my mouth and let people hate me for who I really am (or find out just how  foolish I am).  One of my goals in starting this blog (aside from improving my writing) is to overcome my fear of putting myself out there. I need to freely be myself and let people judge me, whether they're willing to be fair and open-minded or not. I'm currently taking baby steps, but I plan to get to the point where I refuse to let my fear of what others think dictate whether I can be myself.  So who am I?  I am Kara. My reflex is to give my height next, as it has ...

First off, I am no writer. I am incredibly intimidated by trying to write down my thoughts and feelings in general, much less with the idea that someone may one day read them. When I do write, I spend so much of my time editing and re-editing before I even finish the first paragraph that I give up out of sheer mental exhaustion. So why on earth would I start a(nother) blog?  Secondly, this will be the third blog I've tried to start. The first was born my sophomore year of college and was intended to be more of a journal that my then-fianc é  could read while we were across the country from each other. I may have flattered myself that someone other than him would be interested in what I had to say, but it really was a very short-lived endeavor. The second blog was an attempt to keep family members updated on our little family (aka: cute new baby boy), but I quickly became overwhelmed by the idea of trying to summarize entire months of my son's life in a reasonably-lengthed (h...