My Amazing Wife

Christine has been asked to speak at a stake Relief Society meeting this Saturday (I just read her talk--it's really good), and a member of the stake Relief Society presidency contacted me to get some introductory material. She asked for a few quick facts. I went a bit overboard. :)

But anyway, I thought it was worth sharing... cuz Christine is truly an amazing person. As further evidence of how cool she is, this is Lizzy's lunch bag from the other day. When Lizzy forgets to bring her lunch box home, Christine uses a brown paper bag. But it's not just a brown paper bag. She always decorates the bag with these fun crayon drawings. Sometimes it's Lizzy's name in fun writing. Sometimes it's music notations. Sometimes it's flowers or fish or cats or a sunrise. She's cool.

Christine's best friend (second best, perhaps, after me--but that's a close call) is her twin sister. She is the third of six children and grew up in Northern California (Bay Area--east bay, near Walnut Creek). She ran track in high school and played on the basketball and tennis teams. She and her family shared a boat with another family in their ward and loved to go water skiing.

She loves hiking and being in the outdoors (in warm weather). The beach and the mountains are two of her favorite places; during the summer we take lots of picnics up the canyon. She loves to run up the canyon trail when she can. She also is an avid reader and loves participating in the ward's book group as well as a book group of friends from our previous ward.

She served a mission in Venezuela and speaks Spanish fluently.

She is an amazing pianist and minored in music at BYU. At her BYU graduation--where she was honored as the valedictorian of her department--she performed a piano piece by Chopin (in the Marriott Center). She also has perfect pitch (so does her twin). She enjoys various styles of music, especially performed live.

Her father was diagnosed with cancer during her last year of her undergraduate studies at BYU; he died a few weeks after her graduation.

She got a master's degree in sociology at BYU and conducted sociological research in Bolivia and Colombia during her graduate program. She was accepted to PhD sociology programs at Princeton, UCLA, and a few other schools (most of whom were willing to pay her way for four years of study and research) when we got engaged. We prayed a lot about what to do and considered moving to New Jersey for a few years, but in the end she decided she didn't want sociology to be the focus of her life, and as much of a rush as it was to have Princeton begging her to come to school there, she wasn't really all that excited about getting a PhD after all. So we stayed in Utah, and she did sociological research for the Church until we had our first child.

Our oldest daughter, Lizzy, has inherited her mother's brilliant mind, love of reading, and musical talent. She is a sweet girl who is developing a strong testimony in her youth. She also inherited her father's distractability and deals with mild ADHD issues (sometimes less mild than others).

Christine's second pregnancy went smoothly and we were eagerly anticipating another daughter, about 20 months behind Lizzy. On her due date, however, Christine felt we should go to the doctor to have things checked out. She hadn't felt Caroline move much in the last day or so, and she thought we needed to check on things.

We went to the hospital, and they did a stress test. The baby's heart rate seemed fine, and they said they'd just watch things for a little while. After we'd been there for 15 minutes or so, they suddenly lost Caroline's heart rate; at first they moved the machine around thinking they just didn't have it situated right; then they realized her heart rate had plummeted.

Christine was rushed into emergency c-section surgery; when she came out Caroline was not breathing and her heart was barely beating. She had lost a lot of blood. They revived her, began blood transfusions, and sent her to Primary Children's. We are still not sure exactly what caused this trauma, but somehow Caroline lost a lot of blood before birth--possibly even a day or two before birth--and then something significant happened while we were there in the hospital to cause her heart rate to suddenly drop. Doctors have said if we were not in the hospital at that precise moment, we would have lost her. I will be ever grateful that Christine was in tune enough to know we needed to go to the doctor that morning.

Caroline spent a couple of weeks in intensive care in Primary Children's. Her loss of blood resulted in a lack of oxygen being carried to her brain. That, of course, led to severe brain injury. The results of her brain injury have been severe cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Caroline today is almost six years old; she functions physically--and mentally, as much as we can tell--on about a three-month-old level. She cannot talk and she is not mobile. She has frequent seizures and is fed by a tube. But she often smiles and laughs (she actually laughs through most of her seizures) and she appears to recognize our voices. She loves it when Christine plays the piano or when we move her arms around, and she smiles and laughs when her sister hugs and kisses her. Christine spends endless hours caring for Caroline. When Caroline is sick and sad (as she is frequently), this often means holding and comforting her for much of the day.

I am grateful to be married to a woman who is brilliant enough and reliable enough and on-top-of-it enough to manage doctors and medications and schools and to navigate our family's way through the complexities of life; a woman who is talented enough to fill our home with beautiful music (and teach our oldest daughter to do the same); a woman who has a strong enough testimony to sustain me in callings that require me to frequently leave her at home with the girls; a woman who is practical enough and clever enough to manage our finances and keep us fiscally afloat; a woman who is faithful enough and strong enough to weather the challenges that come our way and to help the rest of us do likewise; a woman who is patient enough to deal with a sad girl and a crazy girl and a perpetually late husband; and a woman who is strategic enough to beat me in Ticket to Ride nine out of 10 times (ok, I'm only sort of grateful for that part).