To My Friend Monica Who Recently Started Reading This Blog and Who Isn't Certain If She Wants Kids: You Should Stop Reading Now

In LDS Church culture we have a saying: "the ox is in the mire." Typically, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints refrain from a lot of activities on Sunday. Most obviously, we don't work and we try to help other people not work, so we don't shop. Of course, there are times when it seems imperative to shop on Sunday, and when that happens, we comfort ourselves with a question from the New Testament: "Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?" Are you going to let that ox die just because it's Sunday? Nope, you pull that sucker right out of the mire.

Tyler has coined a slightly less well known but far more permissive adage. When we were first married I got sick. You should be aware that when I get sick, I feel more sick than the rest of the world (and don't try to convince me otherwise). I get very very sick. I had spent that Sunday planning my very lovely funeral (Maquel, you will sing Climb Every Mountain) due to my death by sinus infection. Tyler decided to take me to Instacare after I exploded when he invited our friends to bring us dinner and I screeched "They're coming over?!?!" in a whiny voice that could rival most toddlers and went and cried in the bathtub. On the way to the doctor's Tyler suggested we go to Carl's Jr. I told him the ox was stuck in the Instacare mire, not the Carl's Jr mire and he retorted, "Laura, the Sabbath is like a stick. Once it's broken, it's broken."

This past Sunday the ox was in the mire. The mire was Talmage and the Hiroshima sized disaster that was our drive home from Moab. The ox was my very tenuous grip on sanity. At one point I pulled a David Paulsen and left my toddler on the side of the road (with his father--I'm not THAT abusive) just outside of Helper, Utah and told him he could walk home. Later, Talmage needed to go to the bathroom. Now Talmage is mostly potty-trained. One of the functions he can do %100 in the potty, while the other he prefers to do in a diaper underneath the dining room table (I leave the specifics to your imagination). Now we had a diaper, but just past Soldier's Summit on the side of the highway there were no dining room tables to be found. When he channeled the demonic male voice from The Exorcist and said, "I'm gonna break your car," I decided it was time to pull my sanity out of the toddler's surprisingly firm and grumpy grasp.

We stopped at the gas station and bought treats. A lot of them. I yoked my sanity to a couple of chocolate milks, some donettes, and a Gatorade and yanked. Monsters Inc helped as well.

But the whole trip wasn't such a disaster. We had a lovely time climbing to see Delicate Arch (I told Talmage the Tale of the Legendary Love of Alonzo Tyler and Laura Melissa at the spot where we got engaged) and accomplished a new feat of motherhood when I climbed through the Fiery Furnance by scaling down a sandstone wall with a newborn strapped to my chest. But my personal favorite moments were my D list celebrity sightings:

Wasatch Jr. High band teacher Paul Watson whose image is missing from the world wide web.

And this guy:


A bit actor whose scene was deleted from The Office Season 4 Episode 17. Steve Carell tried to recruit him to work at Dunder Mifflin. Steve Carell, people! I ate a continental breakfast in the same Holiday Inn Express lobby area as someone who was in a deleted Steve Carell scene.

I'm available to sign autographs.