Do you think I should be blogging?

when it's 9pm and I just finished the dinner dishes from last night (no time during the day to unload the clean ones from the dishwasher) and when I have 29 ice cream cone cupcakes to frost for Mister's class birthday treat for tomorrow, 6 loads of laundry to finish folding, and one 200-page dissertation to finish editing before Friday? (not my dissertation, thank heavens, but a little side job I took on that is taking over my free time). And to think that on the stair master at 6:00 this morning, I actually thought I might have 30 minutes to scrapbook one of Mister's past birthday's before his next birthday. (You know, it's kind of a lofty goal I have: scrapbook one past birthday before the next birthday. So Mister's scrapbook right now contains pictures of his birth, his third birthday, and his fourth birthday. Think I'll catch up anytime soon?!)

But I am in a pensive mood tonight. Maybe because it's the eve of my first child's eighth birthday, and I have been thinking about his birth because my little sister just gave birth to her first baby, also a boy. Wasn't it just 2 or 3 years ago that Mister was born? How did this 8-year-old thing happen? (And just for the record, I think we ought to revisit the accountable-at-age-eight principle because I look at my sweet, naive, obedient boy and I do not want him to be accountable yet--I don't think that he is ready. And I don't think that I have prepared him enough.)

A few months ago a friend asked me if my life so far has turned out as I expected it would. I didn't answer her right away. Outwardly, yes, my life looks much like I anticipated it would: I always thought I would get a graduate degree, although I thought I would stop at a master's, I always thought I would be married and would have children, I always thought we would own our own home, cars, etc. I always knew I would stay active in the LDS church. But I could never have expected the inner happenings of my life: I did not know that I would ache so badly to have a child before being able to have one. I did not know that I would love motherhood as much as I do, and I did not know that motherhood would be as hard as it has been and is. I didn't expect post-partum depression or occasional feelings of being stifled by motherhood. In other words, I don't know how I possibly could have anticipated both the highs and the lows.

Same thing for marriage: J and I just celebrated our eleventh anniversary on Friday (at Benihanas, hence the pic).

The five-year-old girl in this picture

and the almost 25-year-old girl in this picture

had no idea how many moments of pure joy and togetherness I would feel during the next 11 years or how much fun marriage would be. But she also could never have expected how much work it is and how angry she could get at her husband or how lonely she might sometimes feel, even in the midst of a good marriage, or how very, very hard it is to be truly unselfish and to let things go rather than hold on and let them fester.

So, there you go, random thoughts for tonight. Too random to rap up nicely (and too much effort to do so when the cupcakes and the dissertation editing await). If you want to view something a little lighter, go check out Sweetie's and Mister's entries in the Frost Family Peeps contest, a la the Washington Post's famous Peeps contest. Sweetie's is the last entry in the slide show and Mister's is the second-to-last entry.