H. I. P.

Look how cute my Derek is! P.S., I’m so curious how BYU got the official photo, since I haven’t seen any other photos yet.

Also, who wants to hear about the fun time I had in the ER yesterday? Noone? Ah well. I guess I’ll just sum up with a few choice words. Kiki is fine. She will have a pinky that matches my own deformed one. She was shutting the bathroom door yesterday, with her finger in the crack, and (skipping the gore) we were delivered to the hospital by my wonderful neighbor/friend/awesome babysitter, and 3 1/2 hours later returned home with a stitched up girl with a splint over her fractured pinky bone. She’ll forever be a cripple, just like me. Unless, of course, the bone continues to grow correctly and she never notices anything. I hope she at least gets a weather predictor out of it. Mine doesn’t even do that.

The day after Thanksgiving, my family usually does some fun, quirky activity. Like, one year, we made plaster casts of our faces, so my aunt Patty could put them on her wall. One year, we learned how to make soap. This year, we drove to the Fair Oaks Dairy Farm and watched a calf being born. At the farm, there is a calf being born about every half hour, all year round. It’s a big farm.

Needless to say, this experience was pretty incredible. The cow was a heifer, and her calf ended up weighing 80 pounds. She needed assistance, which is rare. After we’d watched her labor for a half hour or so, the vet came out and did a little tugging. He used leather straps, tied around the calf’s hind legs, and cinched them with metal clips so the straps wouldn’t slip out of his hands. My cousin Mike took a video.

Watch at your own risk!