April Love List

• homemade cookies
• baseball (it's just so American)
• school
• phone calls
• stake conference
• sunny days
• books
• the David O. McKay library
• meeting new people
• getting to know people
  
• my mom
• Alison's spring mixes
• mornings
• organic yogurt
• feeling lucky
• pictures of my niece
• making plans
• sitting on the front porch
• Sunday naps
• yoga
• kites
• sidewalk chalk
• the Reading Center
• mountains

I'm a bit late this month... sorry.

each year inside the next one

From "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros:

What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell Mama when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe she's feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That's how being eleven years old is.

You don't feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don't feel smart eleven, not until you're almost twelve. That's the way it is.

That's the way it is with twenty-one, too.

hello there

The following is the result of excellent people who know languages other than English that were willing to help me out with a Geography project tonight:

LANGUAGE- WORD FOR "HELLO"
Spanish- Hola
French- Bonjour
German- Guten tag
Mandarin- Ni Hao
Italian - Buongiorno
Arabic - Salam Alaikum
Portuguese- Ola`
Tagolag - Kumusta Kayo
Sabuano - Kumusta Ka
Japanese - Konnichiwa
Taiwanese- Li Ho
Cantonese - Lei Hao
Thai - Sawa Dee Kaa
Hawaiian- Aloha
Samoan - Malo
Tongan- Talofa
Hindi - Namaskar
Russian- Drasvuytsey
Albanian- C'kemi
Swedish- Hej
Dutch - Hoi
Norwegian- Hei
Greek - Geia Sou
Icelandic- Hallo
Slovenian- Zivjo
Turkish- Merhaba


I'm not sure if these are all correct (or spelled correctly...) but it sort of puts the world in perspective, right?