Mountain Mama

Writing on my blog

2010-09-29T09:40:00.003-04:00

You might have noticed that I haven't in a while. I feel kind of sad when I realize how long it's been, and how much of my kids' lives I have failed to chronicle here in the meantime. I blame my expanding participation in Facebook, partly-- it used to be, when my kid said something funny, I would create a (hopefully witty) essay about it, but now, I tend to just quote her on my status update and leave it at that. Maybe because I'm feeling like a mediocre writer, or maybe because I figure that the status-update-length version is enough, and my musings on the matter aren't as interesting to anybody else anyway.

But, no: I'm not feeling like a mediocre writer, which is great news. And it's the other reason I haven't been blogging this summer and fall, because I have an actual, legit, paying writing gig for the first time in my life. It's a pretty miniscule job, writing a "Farmer of the Week" feature in the Agriculture section of my local paper.

One story a week is about all I can manage these days, logistically. As previously discussed, I am an easily frazzled person who does not do well "serving two masters" and splitting my attention, even a little bit, between parenting my kids and fulfilling outside obligations. For example, I agreed in February to serve on the board of our homeowners association, a responsibility that demands approximately one hour of my time per month, and I AM SO STRESSED OUT by this. It hangs over my head all month, even though, every month, when I actually sit down to record everybody's payments of dues, it's easy and no problem at all. But yeah. Just thinking about this kind of thing makes me anxious. Clearly, I have a problem with anxiety.

But back to the writing. It's nothing super-creative or hard-hitting. It's just me going to farmers markets and talking to people about their goats or their tomatoes or their eggs or whatever, and writing a quick feature about them and their market. It's nice. And now, it's (hopefully) transitioning into a little bit of work that will continue after farmers market season is over. The umbrella organization that manages the grant that pays me to do Farmer of the Week is called Appalachian Sustainable Development, and it looks like they might continue to send a few writing projects my way (so far, a press release) when they come up. Again, it's not demanding much creativity from me, and it's not a huge amount of work by any means.

What it is-- and I hear myself saying this a lot-- is something to hang my hat on. It's something that gives me an identity outside of raising my kids. It's writing! It's related to my college degree! And most importantly, I'm good at it. It comes easily to me. I never wrote a press release before yesterday, but I found myself, nonetheless, entirely confident and easygoing when I met with ASD's director to get the information I needed.

This is not like me. Normally, I'm a little bit of a basketcase when I do something new, and I spend more time scrambling for validation than I do actually trying to improve my skills in whatever it is. I hover self-consciously around new bosses. I get stuck with a bizarre paralysis over really basic decisions. And when confronted with challenges, I throw up my hands and tread water (there's a mixed metaphor with a pretty dire literal meaning!) and find ways to justify being content with merely preventing disaster. (I'm looking at you, Habitat Philly. Sorry about that.)

Maybe I should be embarrassed to know that the more professionally-driven among my readers are probably thinking, "She's proud of being confident in writing a press release?" And I am embarrassed, a little, or at least kind of sheepish. But I'm going to be honest and say that never having work in my own field until now has taken a toll on my mental health. Being exceptionally successful in school and then really lousy at a series of low-level jobs has made me feel pretty crappy about myself. So I'll hang my hat on whatever I can. I'll hang it on a press release, for now anyway. And for the first time, I can envision myself carving out a freelance writing career of sorts. It will be hard work, but it's work that I leap to do, with no hesitation, no questioning my ability to do it right. It's the kind of work that I begin and the time just flies. It's what I need to be doing.

Who knows if it will lead to anything, but that's not important right now. What's important is that I remember, now, what it's like to feel capable, and that's going a long way to helping me feel like a well-rounded, healthy person. It's making me a better parent, too-- because now, the other master I'm serving (my kids being the the main one, still) is me. And not because the work is on a freelance basis and I do most of it in my pajamas, but because I am driven to do the work by my own aptitude for writing, my own ability to know when I've done the job well-- not my fear of letting somebody down. That's an enormous difference.

Life is good. I am so lucky that my skillset and my education and my geographic location and my good fortune in having a friend looking out for me have converged in this way and given me this chance to call myself a writer, for real. To see the folder marked "ASD" in My Documents. It makes everything else-- the still-awful sleeping habits of my youngest, for starters-- so much more bearable. I will never minimize the value of the time I have spent (and still do, for all practical purposes) as a full-time parent; childcare is important work, drastically important work, and my hat goes off to the women and men who take it on, for six weeks or several decades. But I'm learning that I do it better when I have a chance to use a different part of my brain from time to time, too. I just do better, in general.

So, apologies to the internet for being such a bad blogger lately. Maybe when my kids are a little bigger, I'll have space in my brain for caring for them AND writing to establish a professional identity AND writing for creative satisfaction, too. I'll keep you posted.

.

Stroller Lady, Wednesday Morning

2010-06-02T09:40:00.009-04:00

This morning, I made three deposits at the Sinking Spring Presbyterian Church preschool. The first was Lea, three-and-a-half years old, who dashed up the stairs to the big-kid class, solo, when given the choice to do that or come along while I made the second: Susanna, the baby, sixteen months. Her first day in the infant-and-toddler room, where she will spend three hours with her peers and the phenomenal Miss Glenda.

It felt strange to leave my youngest for the first time, even smiling and entranced, as she was. And naturally, I know I'm not the first person to turn from that Dutch door with a lump in my throat; it's not even the first time I've done it myself, in fact. But now, on my couch with coffee and my computer, I have no mixed feelings about having sent my little buddy out into that one small bit of the world to give myself a break a day or two each week. This part is welcome, and feels right.

The third deposit is the one that left me reeling. I tucked it behind a rack of choir robes in the church foyer and walked out the front door face-first, like a normal person, instead of pushing my butt against the door to prop it open while I wiggled out backwards. I walked out onto Main Street without a stroller.

How long have I been holding a pregnant belly, a sleeping newborn, a flirtatious toddler, or a huge double stroller in front of me like a shield? Has it been the entire time? I've been transporting a baby in one form or another since February of 2006-- essentially my entire adult life when you consider the aimless, clueless amble through days and weeks that characterized my immediate post-college years, years that skidded to a bewildering halt when I found out Lea was on her way and I'd better get my act together.

Since then, I've gone about the work of defining myself primarily through raising my children. Wait, no: entirely so. And I have come to life in ways I never could have anticipated, and I have loved the task set before me, and tackled it strategically like I tend to do with a task. The loving and the tackling have both been ferocious. My life's work has been my life's everything. I feel that I am thriving, I do. But the collateral damage is certainly there-- my ability to sleep, for one thing, and the never-quite-there career goals further derailed by that still-growing resume gap. But mostly this: when I have a child in my presence, in my arms, I have a purpose that is visible to anyone, and I feel like a complete person whose worth on this planet is plain to see. I am a mother. Just look. This child is my responsibility, and there is no questioning that I have a function.

We walk a lot, my girls and I. We parade around this town with that big blue stroller every chance we can get, partly because we all like being outdoors, and partly because my day goes better if at least part of it is spent with my children physically restrained (I'm serious about that). People wave to us, and smile enormously. There are certain ever-present characters that spend a lot of time outdoors in this town, among them the Humorless Bicyclist and the Very Fast Dog Walkers. I have a feeling that I am Stroller Lady to the people who pass us day after day when we walk to school. And Lea is Front Seat Blondie and Susanna is Back Seat Cherub. After dropping Lea off, Susanna moves up front, leading our ship back up and down hills, toward home.

But with Blondie and Cherub both at school now, and their stroller parked in the lobby-- who am I? I am just a woman walking down Main Street, alone, at 9:30 in the morning. I imagine that the people are wondering: what's her story? Is that Stroller Lady? Can't be.

I don't even know how to hold my body. I try to walk extremely upright, something that I never do when pushing the stroller, or ever, really. I remember my eighth-grade lacrosse teammates teasing me that when I walked through the halls I leaned so far forward and walked so purposefully, nose down, it looked like I was always about a half-step away from tipping over. I find myself thinking about this, there on Main Street, with no one to hold. They were right, too-- I notice my body tilting strangely forward in my every reflection in every storefront. You might assume that now, as in eighth grade, each of my steps is motivated by some purpose: then, to make it from gym to French in under three minutes, but now-- what?

I have things to do, certainly. I have bathrooms that haven't been cleaned this calendar year, and I do have a part-part-part-time job of sorts, to write one short weekly feature in our local paper. But I have nothing in particular to hurry for, and certainly no real function that would be visible to my neighbors. This, then, is what grips me as I walk. This is what makes me tug nervously at the hem of my t-shirt, feeling conspicuous, feeling like an alien in my own body. My body has been my children's for so long now, pregnant, nursing, or both for over four years. How can I stand alone? How do I reckon with a version of myself that is no longer wrapped, visibly, in the existence of my children?

Last summer, Brian and I were invited to a gathering to celebrate a local political victory at the home of the Very Famous Author that lives a few miles from here. My mom was in town, and more than happy to babysit, but I spent the whole day leading up to the party panicking at the prospect of meeting new people, impressive people, with no child present to shield me from the small talk, the sizing-up, the inevitable: "And what is it that you do?" Because with my babies near me, the answer is plain, the question goes unasked, and I feel whole, and I know that I radiate fulfillment. That night, I tiptoed around the perimeter of the patio more self-conscious than I had been since eighth-grade lacrosse. So unnerved by my empty hands, I held a dry cup for hours.

I am fulfilled by my children, and that will not change even as they, and I, gradually shed the physical links. But soon enough, I will never again be able to mark myself as Needed by holding them out in front of me. I have worn my children for protection, sometimes literally. This is something I will have to unlearn, I suppose.

I will walk back to the preschool upright, dig the stroller out from among the choir robes, and strap my children back in for the walk home. I will be Stroller Lady, and I will push us forward, Blondie, Cherub, and me-- toward home, yes, but also toward every successive little nugget of independence, for each of us. That is the task ahead of me-- not to discard this lovely, heavy cloak that I have knit them into, but to keep walking and allow it to unravel, stitch by painstaking stitch, the way I created it.

Auto-correct

2010-04-11T21:28:00.003-04:00

Even though Lea's speech has progressed to the point where almost anybody, I think, should be able to have a pretty normal conversation with her, there are still a few quirks that remind me what a fascinating process language development really is.

She has a few of the typical toddlerisms: "brung" for brought, "gots" for has. And she has the funny habit of somehow recognizing when an irregular past tense is appropriate, but rather than using the actual form, creates her own by stringing together at least two "-ed" sounds to the root-- "runded (fastly)," "wakeded (up)," "draweded (a picture)."

She's also really actively working on her vocabulary. Just today she asked us what "politics" and "stability" mean, and at one point she gestured out her car window, gasping "I just saw a skyscraper!" This being Abingdon, um, no she didn't. I asked her, "what's a skyscraper?" and she said, "Well, it's just the thing from a plane." The white line? "Yeah, the white line from a plane."

But the part that I'm really loving right now is her response to the fact that sometimes people pronounce certain words with an "ing" sound at the end, and some other times, those same words get pronounced with an "in" sound at the end. "I'm going to the store" and "I'm goin' to the store" both show up, probably with equal frequency. Somehow (probably because we are liberal elites who listen to NPR a lot), Lea has figured out that the "ing" version is the right one. And she overextends the principle. "It's broking!" is a frequent lamentation.

This morning, I was getting her dressed for a ride in the bike trailer, and she insisted on putting on her zip-up sweatshirt herself. Struggling to get the zipper started, she was sighing heavily and making all kinds of (familiar to me) noises of frustration. "What's the matter, kiddo?" I asked her. "Can I help you?"

"No! It's just! Ugggghhh! Why is it stubbering?"

"Stubbering?"

"It's just so stubbering!! It won't work!"

"Stubborn?"

She looked a little confused, but then nodded. "Yeah, stubberin."

She let me help her with the zipper, a good thing, too, as it put me in perfect position to gobble her up, which is what I wanted to do more than anything, ever. These years are the best of my life.

*

Except, when they're not. We're still really struggling with Susanna's food/sleep issues, which may or may not be at least partly the same issue. (Someday, when it's all figured out, I'll find a way to put a Venn diagram up here.) The period of bedtime Thursday until 9:00am Friday was without question my lowest point of parenting ever. It was a horrible night. And actually, it didn't seem to have much to do with any digestive trouble for Susanna at all, just the cumulative awfulness and bad habits resulting from being woken by it so much in the past, I guess. And then, the real kicker is that MY sleep habits have changed over the last year or so too; my body seems to forget how to get back to sleep quickly once awakened at night, maybe because so often each wake-up has turned into a marathon of soothing, trying to soothe, trying trying trying anything to soothe, having to be ON instead of just semiconsciously nursing and depositing her back in the crib, which is what I always expected to happen.

So, less than 3 hours of sleep for me later, it was 6am and I was up, in the kitchen, baby wrapped around my calves, which is how I spent an hour trying to plan out how to feed this child according to the new plan advised by the pediatric gastroenterologist, and then the whole morning routine and the loudness and the neediness from both kids, and my body was just hating me, and then it was 9 and Susanna was showing signs of being ready for her morning nap, which she then decided to not take, when all I wanted in all the world was for her to TAKE A DAMN NAP so I could at least shut my eyes for 25 minutes while Lea watched Super Why.

And, I told her so. Or rather, I screamed myself hoarse. I don't need to go into detail about how counterproductive this was, and the domino rally of ugly events that followed. It was my worst Mom moment ever.

But, it's over. And we do have a plan, so that's good. The specialist agreed that all signs point toward an intolerance to fructose, but recommended trying a small amount of a new lower-fructose option each day to figure out what she can handle, at least in little bits. So far, grapefruit is a huge hit. Kid looooooooves her grapefruit. And it doesn't seem to hate her. About a tablespoon of blueberries seems ok too. Shredded spinach was less of a fan favorite, but didn't cause her any trouble. So we're getting somewhere.

We're also going to be testing for celiac disease, because sometimes fructose malabsorption shows up as a secondary problem caused by the damage done to the intestinal lining due to celiac. If that's the case, it tends to resolve itself very quickly once the celiac diet is observed. So right now we're in the "gluten trial"; two servings of gluten per day for three weeks, in order to make sure the blood test we do at the end of that period is accurate. We'd been avoiding a lot of wheat products because of the fructans, so this is the main change to her diet. Wheat all over the place. Little cheese crackers enjoy a similar reception to grapefruit chunks.

I don't even know what I'm hoping for. If her fructose problems are pretty significant and don't go away, that's a lifetime of having to figure out how to have a balanced diet with very little plant life involved. There's also a lot of research being done about highly increased rates of depression among the fructose-malabsorbant (it has something to do with tryptophan). But, otherwise, there's at least a little wiggle room; messing up the diet or accidentally having a few bites of a "bad" food isn't likely to cause anything worse than a bad bellyache. Celiac disease involves a much stricter diet, with all-or-nothing implications; even a contaminated utensil can make you really sick. But it seems to me that if you manage to be totally gluten-free, you can have a very healthy, colorful, varied diet. And I'd venture to guess that staying gluten-free is getting easier all the time, with so many new celiac-friendly foods on the grocery shelves every time I look.

Getting ahead of myself, of course. What else is new? Let me stick with today: today we rode our bikes to the Creeper trail, where Brian took the girls (in the bike trailer) on a long ride while I went to the Abingdon Friends meeting. It was lovely, and I feel like I belong there. We had a smiley lunch, a quick afternoon nap, time at the only tree-shaded playground we can find, and a relatively painless bedtime. I'm trying to let the rightness of my time with the Friends get me through these tough days-- I will seek peace wherever and whenever I can. And as a parent, I will make it a priority to reflect as much peace onto my kids' lives as possible. I have a wee bit of an anger problem, I guess, so this is a real task for me. Wish me luck.

.

A meat-and-potatoes kind of girl

2010-03-18T21:08:00.003-04:00

The other night, for pretty much the first time in months, Susanna got through the night with absolutely no sign of a bellyache. No being startled awake and alternately stretching out and drawing in her knees, no shouting in discomfort, desperate to get herself back to sleep, no gas.

It was lovely. And it was simultaneously exciting and very daunting, because we think we figured out what we need to do: we need to feed her no fruits or vegetables, ever. It seems that she has a lot of trouble with fructose, which is in a lot of pretty prevalent foods: all fruits, most vegetables, table sugar, honey. Then there are these things called fructans, which are long chains of fructose, chemically speaking, and some people (including my little person) have trouble with those too. Foods containing fructans include wheat, brown rice, legumes, and lots of other vegetables.

Here's a little science lesson that I've cobbled together for myself over the last three and a half days of frantic research: none of us can actually digest fructose, in the truest sense of the word "digest." In other words, there is no digestive enzyme that breaks fructose down, the way lactase breaks down lactose. There's no such thing as fructase, as far as I know. A certain amount of fructose can be absorbed by most people's small intestines, which is important because if it gets to your large intestine, the bacteria there have a bit of a feeding frenzy. Except they're feeding themselves, not you. And that's a bad thing, and it can make you very uncomfortable, and it can make you startle awake and alternately stretch out and draw in your knees to relieve the acute gas pain, if you're a little baby named Susanna.

At least, that's what we think is happening. We think she's, at least for now, unable to tolerate much fructose at all. The other day, when I was hot on the trail of this fructose business, we tried a no-fructose day for her, and that night was the lovely one. It was a dramatic difference. I can't attribute it to anything but the diet.

So I'm relieved, for the short term, to have a plan to keep her comfortable (meat, potatoes, eggs, white rice, and breastmilk). But my long-range brain is frantic, because there's a wide range of conditions that we could be dealing with. And of course because I am this child's mother, I fixate on the most severe one, which is something called Hereditary Fructose Intolerance. This is a serious disease which involves a lot more than gastrointestinal discomfort. It involves the possibility of liver failure if a strict diet is not followed (and even sometimes when it is). It usually shows up as soon as solid foods are introduced to a child's diet (eek! that's how it happened for us!), and it usually means extreme reactions to sugar of any kind (not the case for us, whew), and extreme aversion to sweet tastes (doesn't look like that's the case for us).

The next possibility is known as Fructose Malabsorption, which is a long-term problem requiring major diet modifications, but can't actually make you acutely ill. You just have to to figure out the severity of your problem-- how much fructose your small intestine is able to absorb-- and avoid foods containing fructose and fructans to the extent that you need to. Some people report that they do ok with citrus fruits, for example, and others can handle berries. The trick for most people seems to be to make sure the balance of fructose and glucose is in check. If you have more fructose than glucose, that's bad. Apples and pears have bad ratios. Grapefruit is better. Apparently, if there's enough glucose present, the fructose can chemically bind to it before it becomes a problem, and be whisked away without ever getting the opportunity to wreak havoc in the large intestine. In fact, some sufferers will even carry around a little bag of glucose powder to sprinkle on foods that they suspect may be overly fructose-ified. Or eat Smarties. Smarties are 100% glucose. (Ericka Samuels Nicol, are you reading? One testimonial I read was about a guy who craved Smarties all the time and literally wore away the enamel on his teeth because of all the citric acid. Later he found out his IBS was actually undiagnosed Fructose Malabsorption. His hunch was that his glucose-craving was an instinctive measure of self-protection.)

Anyway, it's probably neither of those things. There's also something called "toddler's diarrhea," which is just this weird, chronic diarrhea full of undigested food, that can last for weeks or months or even a couple of years in an otherwise-thriving kid. Almost everything you find if you Google it says that nobody really knows what causes it, that it eventually goes away, and oh by the way you should probably steer clear of apple and pear juice, because that seems to make it worse. Hmmm, apple and pear juice, you say? My mama-detective brain saw that and flashed "fructose!" So I dug a little more and found one study that postulated that fructose malabsorption is probably responsible for most cases of ongoing toddler's diarrhea. The problem that usually goes away before anybody's able to pin down exactly what's causing it.

It wasn't a conclusive study, and that's not exactly the problem Susanna has. "Diarrhea" wouldn't be my first descriptor of what's been plaguing her, "acute gas pain" would. ("Chunks of apple in her poop" would be the second.) But I'm certain it's all related, and I'm optimistic that what we're dealing with here is just a digestive system that is developing more slowly than we might expect. I keep saying to myself: newborns can't digest anything but milk-- adults can usually digest almost everything-- the process of getting from point A to point B can't possibly be the same in every person, and even though Lea was happily slurping down applesauce and mainlining green peas by this age doesn't mean that every child is ready to do that. I've even seen it theorized that a lot of pureed baby foods are probably passing straight through a lot of babies' guts without actually being absorbed at all, but nobody notices because let's face it, a lot of baby food looks something like baby poop in the first place. It seems to me that the ability to absorb fructose is one that perhaps develops a bit more slowly in some of us, but if we don't recognize that and keep pushing produce, ouch.

So, for now, we're going fructose-free, as much as we can. I've been doing some wheat-free baking and forcing myself to rethink my notions of what's a "healthy diet." As much as I'd like to institute good veggie-eating habits starting today, vegetables are not, at least for the moment, healthy for my particular child. We'll try to give fructose- and fructan-containing foods another shot, one at a time, every month or so and see if there's any change. In the meantime, we have an appointment with a pediatric GI specialist in a few weeks, who will be able to shed a whole lot more light on the situation and maybe administer some tests to see if we're on the right track (and hopefully rule out the much more serious HFI).

So that's where we're at. Susanna hates to be left out of the fun at mealtime, and we've got to supplement the (still mercifully easy for me) breastfeeding with a fair amount of table food. That means lots of scrambled eggs, meatballs, ground turkey, plain potatoes, oatmeal, and samples of the various wheat-free breads I'm experimenting with. Dairy seems to be ok, though she's never had much of it, so we'll go slow with introducing that as well.

Poor little girl has just been in so much pain for too much of her life so far. All I want to do is fix that. I want these screamy nights to be a thing of the past, and so far, switching up her diet is at the very least, a step in the right direction. I really hope that this problem, whatever it is, resolves itself soon, and you get a sheepish "Um, nevermind" post from me sooner than it usually takes for me to update this blog. I hope my little girl can eat apples some day. I hope she's not grinding up Smarties in her spaghetti sauce. But if she is, I know someone who just got a brand new flat-top stove that will be more than happy to help her come up with the perfect recipe.

Little baby girl

2010-01-21T20:58:00.002-05:00

This is insane. It's hard for me to understand how it is possible that the little tiny wrinkled bug-eyed beautiful baby we named Susanna is about to be a year old. I know that there's nothing more predictable for a parent to say than "I can't believe it's been a year" when this happens. I know, I know, I'm nothing new here. But I guess what is really getting to me is just how different Susanna's first year has felt than Lea's did. Lea's first year, as I tell people all the time, felt like a lifetime, in good and bad ways, and it actually makes perfect sense when I think about it, because it WAS my entire mothering lifetime. This time, it's all pretty familiar (again, in good and bad ways). That doesn't mean it's all been easy, of course.

What has been easier than I expected:
-Sibling adjustment issues, months 0-9. Really, during that time, there was exactly one epic tantrum that I could trace directly to Lea's totally animal-like jealousy of her sister. They had both fallen asleep in the car, and when we got home, it became clear that Susanna needed to nurse immediately. But Lea was also uncharacteristically cuddly, and asked, forcefully, for me to hold her like a baby. I just couldn't. Susanna was tiny and she was starving, and Lea lost her freaking mind. It was like nothing I've ever seen from her, before or since. But that was it. One time. The rest of those early months were pretty smooth sailing. Whenever anyone asked about it, my honest answer was that Lea was doing GREAT with having a new baby around.
-Incorporating baby into everyday activities. Two things: I had a better sense of what kinds of activities were worth attempting with a baby in tow (not, for instance, volunteering at the ASP office in Johnson City). Also, Susanna loves her some lap time. She would happily just sit with me and watch the world go by, sometimes for 45 minutes or more, at a coffee shop or friend's house. How about that.
-Nursing. We had exactly the same problems I had early on with Lea-- oversupply, super-fast overactive letdown, just way too much milk way too fast. I know, of course, that this is a good problem to have, as supply-related problems go-- provided you know that that's what the problem is. If not (as it was for me the first time around, when nobody could figure out what the deal was), it can be mystifying. Why is she acting so hungry? Her belly's full! Why is she pulling off the second she latches on? She's starving! I know that if external conditions had been somewhat different with Lea, I would have strongly considered giving up. This time, the problem was solved so quickly, and since then it's been smooth sailing. No mastitis, no thrush, good steady supply.
-Feeling confident. Maybe this is obvious, but I did pleasantly surprise myself many times throughout this year, when it has occurred to me that I just did not give a crap about what some other person, parent or not, thought of the way I was parenting. I've stopped visiting a number of online parenting communities that had been bringing me small amounts of camaraderie in exchange for a lot of zealotry, and in turn a lot of self-doubt for me. And I've stopped not because I felt like I needed to cut myself off, but I just wasn't interested anymore. (Having in-person friends helps, certainly.)

What has been harder than I expected:
-Sibling adjustment issues, months 9-12. As soon as Susanna grew interested enough in Lea's toys, and mobile enough to get to them, bad bad bad things ensued. Oh man. We're turning the corner, I think, but I think the most uttered sentence in our household for a while now has been "Susanna's getting into my STUFF!" (Um, ok, no, probably the most uttered sentence has been "My God I'm tired.") We've also put the girls into a shared bedroom, which has proved complicated, and even though Lea seems to sleep through Susanna's frequent nighttime screamfests, I do worry that her quality of sleep is suffering. Ugh.
-Sleep. But I'm just going to leave it at that, because I'm annoying myself with how much I go on and on about how bad it is. It will get better.
-Food. Susanna seems to have a much more sensitive system than Lea, so when we introduce new solid foods, she often has pretty significant digestive issues (which I've long suspected contribute to the sleep woes). There are times when I start to relate more than I ever expected to the exclusively-nurse-for-as-long-as-possible crowd (see online zealotry, above). As recently as last week, I've found myself wondering if she might be better off if her diet was still 95% breastmilk and just a few other very bland foods. Poor belly. Poor baby.
-Feeling at peace with the passage of time. Oh, lord. This is hitting me hard. I admit to being a tad smug when Lea's first birthday approached and I thought, "WTF do all those other mothers freak out about? It's a birthday! It's a happy thing!" Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Lea was already so ambitious about doing new things, doing things on her own, so the new chapters were pretty much exclusively a relief. All sweet, very little bitter. Susanna, my lap buddy, wears BABY pretty comfortably. And of course, I'm pretty comfortable with that too. It's gratifying, I'll admit. She still really needs me and I feel so good to be able to meet her (still pretty baby-like) needs. I do look forward to her increased independence in some ways-- mostly in the ways that will make it easier, someday, for her and Lea to play together at a similar level. But mostly, yes, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this first huge good-bye to her babyhood.

Good-bye, zero-year-old. See you soon, sweet gap-toothed, thumb-sucking, about-to-walk, belly-laughing one-year-old. Sleep well.

Self-care

2009-11-18T20:30:00.002-05:00

Anyone who is in even semi-regular contact with me knows this: Susanna is a terrible sleeper. In fact, that's my number one chit-chat-with-strangers line of small talk, after they (inevitably) say "Look at that smile," (because she is not at all shy about doling out the friendliest grin you've ever seen): "Yep," I'll say, "she's such a happy baby, but she doesn't sleep!"

I'm not sure why I always share that-- maybe because chances are good the next question is going to be "Does she sleep through the night?" anyway. Or maybe it's because I feel like I need to excuse my beyond-exhausted face. I don't know. But people nod sympathetically and then go back to flirting with my kid. And friends hear me gripe about it and nod sympathetically too. And I'm a broken record on the phone with my mother, who has heard all about the not-at-all-fun game of musical beds that goes on in my house (the newest option is a futon mattress on the floor of the girls' room, which gets a lot of use).

Nobody is sleeping well in my house. And, in all honesty, the last month has been really ugly as a result. I haven't been proud of the way I've handled my temper, and the lack of patience with which I've been responding to Lea being the very young child she is. I have been No Fun at best, and probably a little bit scary at my worst. Worse yet, I think there have been times when Lea has even started to worry about me, which she should not have to be doing. Period.

I borrowed a really good, helpful discipline book from a friend, and more than anything, it's helped me adjust my expectations of Lea, and really slammed home for me that no, she is not actually TRYING to be a jerk. She's just trying to cope with the world, and with her ideas being greater than her fine motor skills, and with her sister getting to the age where she can actively ruin a game. That's a lot to contend with, and she's going to behave in ways that annoy the crap out of me as a result. But the best thing I can do, I think, is just try try try to understand her-- and that doesn't just mean saying "I understand," but really wanting to actually understand, even if I can't do anything about it.

The other thing I've been resolving to do is recognize when the absolute most I can ask of myself is to simply not yell. When I have to throw every discipline system or process or technique aside, and not strive for teachable moments or even consistent consequences, but just: stay. as. calm. as. possible. And that's it. And on the days when that's difficult, I should be able to congratulate myself for achieving it, because it takes more strength of wills than I, honestly, have ever had to muster in my life.

This is part of a larger picture of self-care that I've been trying to pay more attention to. I think the main reason it's easy for me to give up on that is because really, if I had it my way, self-care would mean one thing, and that's more sleep. Since that's just not possible most of the time, I kind of throw up my hands and say, screw it, and grit my teeth through most days. But, that's dumb. And on Saturday morning when it was 4:45 and I had a restless baby in my arms, and I realized that I was so stressed by the sleeplessness that my heart and thoughts were racing to the extent that I couldn't even fall asleep if I wanted to, even if the child passed out right that second, I started to think-- and I don't know why this is-- about a quotation about prayer, which had been a favorite of ASP staffers and often ended up on the walls of summer centers.

"To say prayer changes things," says Oswald Chambers, "is not as close to the truth as saying prayer changes me, and then I change things."

I always liked that, but never had such an appropriate moment to put it into action. I knew that I felt foolish praying for Susanna to go to sleep, or for me to be able to sleep. It just never felt like the right kind of thing to be praying about, I don't know. So I thought to myself-- why do I want to go to sleep so bad? And the answer was, because I want to feel good in the morning. OK, fine, came the answer. Do something right now that might help you have a better morning. Take action.

I took a shower. Susanna usually plays happily on the bathroom floor for as long as it takes me to do that, and this time, I took an even longer, hotter one than usual. I washed my hair and shaved my legs and did some deep stretching, willing my body to feel more ready for the day. I got dressed, made the bed, folded clothes that had been in a heap, dried my hair, put on lip gloss, and went downstairs.

Yeah, I was still exhausted by the end of the day. I'm not going to pretend that I felt so rejuvenated I bounded through my activities and forgot all about how far in the red I really am when it comes to physical rest. But I would've been exhausted anyway, and at least I had shiny hair and lips. And it made me realize that I can take care of myself in non-sleep ways way better than I've been doing.

One of those ways is to cut myself some slack if the highest parenting standard I can attain is merely to not scream at my kid.

It's to be a little less of a tightwad, and realize that a few bucks spent frivolously on something that makes me feel good today is not going to make or break our financial security. (Hello, James Taylor at Christmas! You have already put many smiles on my face!)

It's to quit it with the weighing myself, at least for a while. I'm eating as healthfully as I can figure out how to, and no, I'm not exercising, but really. That's not what I need to freaking worry about right now.

It's to investigate a computer of my own, a NEW computer, even if it's a sub-$300 netbook, as a Christmas gift to myself. And to use it to write, and to blog even when I'm foggy-headed (as now?), and to put stuff out there even if it's not up to my normal standards.

It's to try to have some perspective about the fact that treasuring Susanna is not going to scar Lea forever, or, if it is, it's a scar she will share with countless other firstborn kids, so tough. And to TREASURE this baby because she is an AMAZING baby and OH MY GOD I LOVE HER TO PIECES. She is so snuggly, and so affectionate, and so peaceful (mostly, in daylight), and such a total joy. Really. She is an AMAZING baby and I am so lucky to get to hang out with her all the time. She is pulling up on furniture, scooting around all over the place, still sucks her thumb-- and sometimes tries to keep sucking it while smiling, which is hard to do and unbearably cute, says Dada (even when she means me), loves to splash in the tub, and lights up like a Christmas tree when her sister decides to play with her. Apart from the sleeping, she is pretty much 100% happy. So-- I need to allow myself to enjoy that, no guilt attached.

Since I am indeed foggy-headed, I have no suitable ending for this blog, but that's ok, right? Right.

Threesday

2009-09-29T09:56:00.002-04:00

Lea loves school. She has loved school for over two full years now, ever since we started sending her one morning a week, then two, to the infant/toddler room at her preschool. She has made so many friends (as have we) through this school, that even if it weren't for the excellent teachers, perfect schedule, and short (and lovely) walk from our house, I'd still consider it a great part of all of our lives. It's just been awesome.

I was talking to my friend Lindsay (mother of Rylan, Lea's best buddy, met at school), as I have many times before, about how much my mental health was suffering during the summer of 2007, when Lea was 7-9 months old and we knew NOBODY in town and a two-minute chat with a barista every now and then was all that was passing for my social life. I say that flippantly, but really: I was in some serious trouble that summer.

And then, I took a leap and invited myself to lunch with an acquaintance of Brian's who had young kids, whom I'd met once for about 15 seconds. She graciously fed me vegetable orzo and handed me a flier for the preschool open house that evening. She also gave me the phone number of the preschool director. I could not wait until that evening. I could not even wait to get home to place a phone call; I actually drove straight from Marybell's house to the church, where I frantically introduced myself and my need NEED NEED for this preschool to the first person I found (who turned out to be the spouse of a custodian, but she pointed me in the right direction). Within 15 minutes, the deposit was paid and Lea was signed up for school.

Since then, Lea's school time each week has increased. She first started going four mornings a week when I had just gotten pregnant with Susanna and was dealing with round-the-clock sickness. She still goes four days, plus now she has the option to stay for lunch, which she does once or twice a week. She gets so excited about "lunch bunch," and I get to do that age-old Mom think where I write her name with a little heart or a flower on her little Tupperware lunch container. Overall, it makes her seem about six and a half years old and it's almost too much to bear. The kid really is growing up.

Except, she's still only two. Two! I cannot believe sometimes that this child who talks in paragraphs and has favorite songs and picks out her own library books is still only two years old. Which brings me to the title of this post.

The preschool director decided to be a stickler this year, and so, even though every single other member of her class from last year has moved up to the three-year-old class, Lea is still down with her old teacher from last year with the current crop of two year olds. She does great there, actually-- I'm so proud of her. There's always somebody screaming and crying, and there's lots of pacifiers and non-verbalness but she gets right in there and plays with them and helps her teachers and it's wonderful. But on Tuesdays, oh, glorious Tuesdays, the three-year-old class is small, so the teachers arranged for Lea and two other 2006-born kids to spend the morning upstairs. The big kid class.

Every morning, Lea asks if it's Tuesday. She loooooves Tuesdays. She gets to see her best buddies, and do very grown-up things like carry her own paint and learn a new song every week and make crafts all-by-herself. She still loves school every day, but on Tuesday she comes home with a twinkle in her eye.

And I start to feel the wheels turning in my head, fast-forwarding to kindergarten and grade school and wondering: will she be challenged enough? Will she get to do things that excite her, that make her proud to be growing up? And this isn't even an age-related worry, although I do kind of wish we'd at least have the option of sending her to kindergarten at almost-5 instead of almost-6. I think it's just the first time I've really been faced with the concept of my children's academic lives, and how much control I will really want or be able to exert on them. And it starts a whole slew of other lines of thinking about the public schools in this region (not too great) and in Virginia in general (way too ruled by state Standards of Learning, as far as I can tell). I know people who homeschool for that reason, and I know people who just go with the flow and hope for the best, and I also know people who choose public school but very intentionally supplement that education with family reading projects and educational trips and real-world learning in the form of planning and planting gardens, or building things, or extra art classes.

It's a lot to figure out, but it's three years away, so I know that the best thing to do right now is just nurture Lea's love of learning whether it's a Threesday or a Twosday or not a school day at all. And soon enough, Susanna will start to go to school too (although she's ten times more stranger-phobic and cling-to-parent than Lea ever was, so we'll see how that goes). I hope very much that I can send them off to school with confidence, and that they both come home most days with twinkles in their eyes.

*

While I'm here, I should also mention that Susanna is crawling all over the place, pulling up on furniture, eating some solid food, babbling away ("Dada" might be intentional-- it's hard to tell), but still not sleeping any better than when she was about 5 days old. We switched our bedrooms around so all the girls furniture, and theoretically both girls, are up in the big room on the top floor, and Brian and I in the smaller room that used to be Lea's. It's working out really well in terms of space usage and storage, and it looks GREAT, if I do say so myself. And Susanna does start the night out in the top room, and typically has one early wake-up that can be dealt with quickly, allowing a swift returning to the crib in that room, but. Invariably, there is a freak-out sometime between 1 and 4am during which the child is so enraged and so unbelievable loud, we're way too afraid to try to deal with it in the room where Lea is still sleeping. So, down to our room Susanna comes, where she snuggles in contentedly and drifts off, clearly very satisfied with herself for getting exactly what she wanted all along. Not sure how to deal with that.

She's wonderful, though. I love this stage of babyhood, the way she's soaking up everything and interacting more and generally being very happy and bubbly. I will miss it when she's big. But there's a lot to look forward to there, too, as I see glimpses of what it will be like to have two kids (rather than a kid and a baby) who can actually play together and have similar experiences and enjoy each others company instead of just regarding one another with amused tolerance.

And now Susanna is awake from her nap and I didn't do any of the things I meant to get done during that (short) kid-free time. Oh well. Maybe I'll post again before a month passes.

Fame!

2009-09-06T20:39:00.002-04:00

Life updates

2009-08-05T09:00:00.002-04:00

Since this blog is serving as my only (lame) attempt at a babybook-type chronicle of the first years of my kids' lives, I know I'll really regret it if I look back in a few years and see it trail off to nothing, so I'm resolving to pick up the pace a little bit, even if it's just totally un-literary lists of what's going on.

Susanna is 6 months old. She has seemed about 5 seconds away from crawling for about a month now; she does the downward facing dog back-and-forth rocking that I can remember Lea doing just before she crawled. She honestly seems puzzled as to why that motion doesn't get her anywhere. The key is to figure out the pairing of the right hand with the left leg, and vice versa, moving together. Once that clicks, she'll be all over the place.

On a related note, I keep hoping that what I hear about impending developmental milestones interfering with sleep is true, because otherwise I have no explanation for the fact that Susanna is such a bad nighttime sleeper. Last week I would've told you that she just gets lonely, but for the last 3 nights, she just moans and fusses whether she's in her crib, in one of our arms, in the bed between us, anywhere. It's exhausting. She's not sick, and in the daytime hours she is perfectly pleasant and content, and even a very reliable napper. It's weird. Especially because she is just so, so different from her sister. By 5 months, Lea was on a rock-solid and totally predictable schedule: bed at 7. Nurse at 11 and go right back to sleep. Nurse at 3 and go right back to sleep. Awake at 7. Period. I think that Susanna's longest stretches of sleep these days are about 2.5 hours. Just writing that makes me deliriously tired.

What's funny, though, is that I'm actually handling the tiredness so much better than I did when Lea was a baby. I napped when Lea did almost every day until Susanna was born. Now, it's not possible to nap at all because Lea doesn't take one anymore-- but it's actually FINE, and I almost never feel like I'm about to crumble to the floor with exhaustion, which is how I felt for most of Lea's first year.

Part of it, I think, is that when it was just Lea, I was kind of socially exhausted, if that makes sense. Because with a young baby, you give and give and give from your social-energy reserves, and get almost nothing back the way you do when you have a conversation with an adult or even an older child. Which is why I have told myself so many times, and told so many other struggling new parents, that I think being alone with a baby can be lonelier than being alone. You can't just get lost in your own thoughts-- you have to direct your mental and emotional and social and physical EVERYTHING at this other person, and let's be honest-- the payoff, at least in terms of recharging yourself, is kind of minimal for most of the first year.

But this time around, even though Susanna is in that stage, Lea is around too, and she is social. We have conversations, and she's funny. She's infuriating at times, and every day she tests me, and yes, still, it's sometimes pretty lonely to be on my own with the girls. But it's so different. I am in such a better mental-health situation than I was two years ago. And I thank God for this time with my kids, hard as it may be on a day-to-day basis. I look at Susanna and I KNOW this time how fast it goes, because I have evidence of how fast it goes-- Lea, the not-at-all-a-baby-anymore-- right there in the room with me.

Of course, the other big difference is that they are different kids. Obviously. But I still find myself surprised and amused when Susanna shows signs of having a very different personality than Lea does. From day one, Lea was Miss Independent, and didn't much like to be held, slept best on her own, wanted to be down on the floor or next to you, but never in your lap. I remember going to a breastfeeding group meeting in Bryn Mawr when she was a newborn, and noticing with some sadness that when other babies cried, their mothers' first response was to pick them up and hold them close, but that I had already learned to do the opposite. When Lea cried, it meant she wanted to be put down.

Depending on my mood, I describe Susanna as alternately very snuggly or very clingy. She loves to be held, and she always cries out if I leave her line of sight. Overall, it's pretty easy to keep her happy during her wakeful hours; just hold her in a lap and let her observe the world. I do suspect that her snuggly/clingy nature has at least something to do with her lack of consistent nighttime sleep though, so that's definitely the downside to an otherwise pretty mellow personality.

I find myself thinking about birth order a lot too. It suddenly makes all kinds of sense that there would be some pretty consistent and pretty fundamental differences between oldest children and everybody else. Of course the stimuli a baby with a toddler in her house is exposed to will be vastly different than those of a firstborn. I have no idea exactly what that does to a little developing psyche, but I'm sure it's something. Susanna's routine, and what she sees and hears and does all day long, are so different from Lea's. It will be interesting to see how their personalities develop from here on out.

My girls are also physically very different. I think I've said on here before that at birth, they looked like different species. Such different faces. And also, Susanna was so skinny in comparison, which is hilarious because as of yesterday, she weighs more than Lea did at 13 months. She also has bigger legs-- they wear the same size diaper, and it fits snugger on Susanna than on Lea. Strangers routinely come up to comment on her ankle rolls. She's a chunk. I love it.

Life is pretty good right now. Abingdon is the perfect place for our family at this point, except for the fact that it's so far away from family, which is a drag. But in all other ways, I can see us staying here forever. We've made some wonderful friends, and fill our days with low-key activities that I feel so good about shaping a child's life around: walks on a trail, rocks thrown in creek, horses observed from the roadside, vegetable gardens tended and explored, bluegrass on the radio, good friends and a circle of acquaintances ranging from authors and artists to activist ex-nuns. Very cool.

In other news, I take the first step in my should-I-be-a-midwife journey this fall: Anatomy and Physiology I, one of three prerequisites to nursing school. If it goes well and feels right, I'll take the other two (A&P II and Microbiology) in the spring, and begin the official nursing program the following fall. Which makes me an RN by Spring 2012 and a midwife two years later at the absolute earliest. Whew. It's still a huge question mark in my mind, but I figure the only way to really evaluate if this is a path I'd like to travel is to take the first concrete step instead of just wondering. Besides, it will be fun to use that part of my brain again, and for the couple hundred bucks of community college tuition, there's really no downside.

So. The summer's been a blur of travelling, first to PA/NJ and then most recently to the Smokies. Brian has had a really busy time with work, working on issues that have resulted in one big victory on the local level (keeping a truck stop from being built right next door to an elementary school) and a long, drawn-out fight on the national level (fighting for health care reform). Both issues have drawn some pretty ugly attacks. It's no fun to be harrassed at the farmer's market by a guy you thought you were friends with.

But. Our sidewalk is being built and a mountain autumn is just around the corner. My kids are healthy and gorgeous and make each other laugh. No complaints here.

The babymoon ends

2009-06-12T10:40:00.003-04:00

I'll start by sharing something that's a bit difficult to admit, though I suspect I'm not at all alone in my feelings.

Susanna's birth was emotionally very complicated for me, and very, very different from Lea's birth in terms of the psychological journey it took me on. Here's the most truthful truth I can muster: one of the first things that popped into my head when I saw her was "Who is this impostor? I already have a baby!"

Yep. That's what I thought. Luckily, I am a self-examiner by nature, and I had already considered the possibility that I'd have some weird stuff happen in the brain department at that moment, so my reaction to my own thought was not horror and fling-myself-out-the-window guilt, as I imagine it might be for some. I was able to kind of roll my eyes at myself, recognize the thought for what it was-- a totally human response to the sudden shake-up in my mothering world-- take another look at the wriggling slippery mess on my chest, and see, my god, how beautiful she was and how much I really did already love her.

And I have loved her, and loved her, and loved her ever since. But. It's been such a different bonding process, and it seems that every moment of falling in love with her is matched with a corresponding pang of torment that I've abandoned Lea. And that I miss my first baby sometimes, so, so much. So that's hard. Really hard. Especially in the earliest days, when Susanna's needs were so impossible to anticipate, and all I could really do was be physically available to her, we'd often find ourselves doing the old divide-and-conquer trick, with Brian taking over almost all of Lea's care, and me nursing and nursing and nursing and that's about it. As much as I love to cuddle a tiny baby, I could hear Lea's laughter and hilarious two-year-old way of talking (and occasionally, her confused and sober inquiries as to where Mama was), and it would kill me that I could not un-latch the baby and go scoop up my firstborn and blow raspberries on her belly and make her smile, and just be with her. And then, on the other hand, when I was on my own with both girls, I'd find myself in situations where I was trying to tend to Susanna, and Lea would be her typical toddler self and just get in my way, and get in her sister's face, and be noisy and disrupt feedings and whine and make a mess and I would resent her. I'd resent her on behalf of me, and on behalf of the brand-new baby who didn't deserve such chaos. I'd think about how peaceful Lea's world was as a newborn, and how unfair it was that Susanna didn't get to have the universe revolve around her, even for just a little bit.

Which brings me to today, Lea's last day of school before it closes for the summer. First of all, I cannot say enough good things about how this school has improved our lives in general. (Among other things, it's how we've met literally all of our friends. Somehow, a whole bunch of very like-minded parents ended up with kids in the same class. Awesome.) But I honestly cannot say where I would be now, in terms of mental health, if I had not had four mornings per week with just my baby, for nearly the first five months of her life. Oh, lordy. There has been nothing sweeter than those three hours, taking our time getting going for the day, making googly eyes at one another for long stretches before even getting dressed. Listening to her perfect baby laugh. Letting her nurse for luxuriously long stretches with absolutely no interruptions. It's been beautiful.

And now, it's ok that it's coming to an end, because we're right on the brink where I can tell Susanna is not going to tolerate lounging in bed for much longer. She is crazy ambitious about wanting to crawl, and she sort of demands entertainment in a way that she didn't use to, so it will be fine to switch up our routine and have more active mornings. I think she's ready for that, and I'm ready for it too. I feel so fortunate to have had this chance to focus exclusively on her, to learn all the things that make her who she is, already quite different from her big sister, and already very charming on her own. Not that I wouldn't know her if Lea wasn't in school, but I really do feel like for me and my needs and style as a parent, this has been critical. So I will never feel bad about sending Lea out into the world each morning, young as she is. She loves school, anyway; she's so social and confident, it slays me, so I don't have any doubts that school is a fun and comfortable place for her to be.

I'm lucky, by all accounts. It's going so fast this time around, so I'm trying my best to soak it up and not wish away the hard parts, because even they will be a sweet memory not too far down the road. So as much as my self-examining ways can be a hindrance in certain areas, here's another where they're useful:

"This." I say to myself, every day. "This is worth imprinting on my soul. Memorize it. Now."

Lea, 2.5 today; Susanna, four months tomorrow

2009-05-21T22:35:00.004-04:00

Trail days, and a visit from Auntie

2009-05-21T22:29:00.002-04:00

Springtime!

2009-04-29T21:42:00.001-04:00

Another Harry Kalas blog

2009-04-14T14:09:00.002-04:00

For a very convoluted reason, listening to Harry Kalas call Phillies games often reminded me of my grandmother, my Mom-mom, who died in the spring of 1993. Here's how it goes:

Once, in college-- it must have been Labor Day weekend because I was doing ASP staff in the summers-- I left a Phillies game with my family a little early. We got in the car to head to the shore, and, as always, turned the radio to 1210AM to hear the final inning or so and the post-game. One thing about sports broadcasting that I really love is when the announcers will actually read ads themselves. It's such a throwback, so unselfconsciously corny. I can remember Richie Ashburn doing the same MAB Paints spot for years. But that particular night, the ad the struck me was for a cancer research non-profit that was doing a benefit of some kind. I don't remember the details at all, but I can still conjure up the sound of Harry's voice saying "the fight against cancer continues."

The fight against cancer continues. It sounded so odd to me, and in such contrast to the light-hearted and often celebratory things said at the close of a game. And right then, I thought about how those words might sting so bad for somebody who had just lost someone to cancer. Like we had lost Mom-mom, to a brain tumor. I'm not sure why my mind leaped to her like that. Maybe because we were going to the shore, and because I had and will always have a perfectly preserved emotional memory (not a cognitive memory, really-- not one precise event) that links these things together: summertime. The shore house. Baseball. Listening to baseball games on a clock radio in the back bedroom at the shore house. My Mom-mom. Her voice. Harry's voice. The sound of occcasional amateur fireworks, way off in the distance every night from July 1st to the 6th or so. Walking barefoot in the alley. My family. Coming in from the ocean and seeing the horseshoe of beach chairs where my family sat, and Mom-mom always, always, always there. Summertime- my childhood- Mom-mom is laughing. It's warm, and everybody is talking about the Phillies.

That's the connection, and today I'm so sad, because I know how much I am going to miss the way Harry K's voice took me back to that place. Since moving to Abingdon, I haven't been as totally removed from Phillies baseball as I thought, because weirdly, I can still get 1210AM out of Philadelphia at nighttime, all the way down the Blue Ridge, 500 miles away. Last summer, my little personal ritual was to listen on the way home from Wednesday night choir practice. I would be alone, and I would let the sounds coming from the radio-- including the particular flavor of AM static-- transport me to childhood, to the shore, with the Phillies, with my family.

It's not a secret that I don't have the steel-trap focus on baseball itself that my brother does. I never pretended to. What I've been thinking a lot over the last 24 hours is that I'm mostly a fan of baseball season, and the way it brings a city together, and the way baseball sounds and smells and feels. I don't remember a lot of specific calls Harry Kalas made, and I didn't even realize until last night that the phrasing of "this ball is OUTTA HERE" was Harry's thing. I just thought that's how everybody called homeruns. And, for real: I'm just as sentimental about the way he said the words "station identification" and "Tastycake" as anything actually related to baseball.

But, my god. I'm going to miss him.

More language development

2009-03-29T21:45:00.002-04:00

I've been struck lately at Lea's newfound ability to put words together on her own to convey her own concepts, instead of just repeating phrases she has heard (of course she still does quite a lot of that, too). Sometimes it comes out so fluently, I forget she's two, but other times, the results are amusing.

For instance:

Lea has a little squirt bottle that she plays with in the bathtub, and one night she was trying to get the lid screwed on, but couldn't. "It's stuck!" she said, which is how she often describes the state of something not happening the way she wants it to. I put the lid on the bottle as Lea watched, and then she commented with a nod, "It's not mama stuck. It's just Lea stuck." Which really, is a totally logical way for her to have processed the situation.

Another time recently, she was eating her breakfast and I asked her if she was finished with her yogurt. "No," she said. "I have still left of it."

She also has been drinking a lot of V8. The very first time she saw it, she proclaimed it "soup juice" (she's a fan of tomato soup, so you can see where she was coming from).

So it's cool, really, to see how she figures out her own way to explain things using her own sense of how the language works. Every day, I wish I could go back and take more college linguistics classes because this process is just so fascinating to me.

Other stuff is more in the adorable category. Today, Lea's been randomly saying "Let's play team!" When we ask her how you play team, she says, "Like this: TEEEEEEAAM!!!!" and starts running back and forth from our front door to the back corner of our kitchen, pretty much the longest straight line it's possible to run in our house. This has come out of the blue, and this afternoon while watching basketball, as we've been doing a lot of for the last weeks, it occurred to me that maybe that's what she's imitating. Who knows? In any case, it's hilarious.

Susanna's language development lately consists of "Ohhhhh" and "Hoooohhhhh" and "Gooooo." Which, still, thrills me. The first non-crying vocalizations are so welcome.

My girls, six weeks later

2009-03-08T21:07:00.001-04:00

Susanna's Birth Story, Part V

2009-01-26T17:44:00.000-05:00

“Oh, Paige!” I heard Brian say. “Oh Paige, it’s a girl!” and this tiny purple mess of limbs was placed flailing in all her sliminess on my chest. “You’re here!” I wept. “You came, you came just when I needed you to!” Donna put a warm towel over the baby and me, and then a heating pad behind that, as I rubbed the towel and patted the baby’s back, staring at her face while she gurgled and sputtered, all squinty-shut eyes and wide, wide open mouth. Her gurgles slowly changed to a lusty cry and she turned from purple to pink, her limbs slowing to occasional jerks, settling, calming. We kept her at my chest for a long time, as she became aware of my nipple and gradually figured out what to do with it. When she finally latched on, we rested, and told her her name—Susanna.

Soon after that, I delivered the placenta—no big deal—and Donna realized that the baby had passed a huge amount of meconium all over me and our bed. This was the first of quite a few indications that even though she was only two days “late,” Susanna showed evidence of some degree of postmaturity. Besides the meconium, she also had very dry, wrinkled skin (particularly her feet, which had deep cracks), long fingernails, and the appearance that she had sort of shrunken back in her own skin. Still, everything appeared to be perfectly fine, and after she had been latched on for a while, we got up so that I could shower, cleanup could begin, and the baby could be given a more thorough examination.

Once showered, I climbed back into my freshly made bed and held Susanna so that her big sister (who had slept through the entire delivery and only recently woke up) could meet her. We had prepared Lea as much as possible, and although she seemed somewhat bewildered by the whole thing, she greeted Susanna with a smile and a kiss on the head. Then she got to help give Susanna a bath while I sipped juice, listening to my sweet daughters get to know each other. “She needs fishies,” Lea offered, pointing out her collection of bath toys. When Donna told her that Susanna wasn’t quite ready for bath toys, Lea said, “Oh. Next time, she takes a bath with me!”

Lea also helped get Susanna dressed, and after Susanna was weighed and measured (8lbs 1oz, 20.5 inches long), we all climbed into bed for a family picture. I consider it to be a very good sign that Lea quickly got bored, acting more interested in the bottle of lotion next to my bed than either me or the baby. Since then, the pattern has held: alternating fascination with the baby and preference for doing her own thing. She’s an amazing big sister. I love watching them together, and I love our new family of four.

I am so grateful to my husband, who read extensively about being a good birth partner, and to my caregivers, who never missed a beat—who encouraged me with their kindness and confidence, and who instilled confidence in me through their professionalism and expertise. I could not have asked for better care, from anyone. I am proud of myself, too, but mostly I consider myself very blessed that Susanna’s entrance into the world was so peaceful, an act of creation, an act of life—uncomplicated, but beyond any words I can muster.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part IV

2009-01-26T17:41:00.000-05:00

By 3am I was 9cm and starting to lose my cool. Mostly, I was scared, scared, scared of the actual delivery, but even so, I remember commenting that the fact I could even conceive of a tangible emotion like “fear” represented a big difference from my first labor. I had so far refrained from making much noise, which would have been an absolute impossibility with Lea.

I started to sing a descending 5-note scale in as low an octave as I possibly could. The idea behind that one is that singing low prevents you from basically screeching, which is a huge waste of air and energy. I was getting tired, and tired of laboring. I wanted to be done. DeEtte recommends only pushing when you have an urge; in other words, 10cm does not magically mean it’s time to push, and she doesn’t typically direct her patients to push to a certain count or anything else. In her experience, pushing works best when you absolutely can’t help it. But I was getting impatient, and I told DeEtte—“I need to move on, I just want to be at the point where I can push.”

She checked me again—9cm still, no! I think I pouted a little, and a huge contraction hit me like a brick while I was still lying down. This was the first big one I’d experienced while reclined, and felt so grateful that I’d been encouraged to labor upright all this time. Contracting while horizontal was NOT a good recipe for me. This is when I started to get loud, but DeEtte convinced me to let her check me during a contraction to see if I got to 10 in the midst of one. I did, with the exception of a lip of cervix that remained. She suggested that she try to move it away during the next contraction. This was excruciating, and the beginning of the screaming. I’m not proud of the amount of screaming, actually. I wish I was one of those people who could surrender control, but I am not. It was bad.

But, DeEtte was able to massage that lip of cervix away, and said that if I wanted to, I could start to try to push, urge or no. So yes, I would push. I wanted to be in charge. (At this point, it was about 3:45 and I felt very strongly that we should call Lindsay because I felt so sure I was going to wake up Lea. Brian called her and she arrived, waiting downstairs in our living room, ready to respond if Lea awoke.)

I tried to push on a birthing chair (a c-shaped stool that some people actually deliver while sitting on), but it felt all wrong. I remembered that with Lea, pushing felt automatic. I didn’t have an urge then either, but pushing brought great relief and felt enormously productive. I loved it. This was different. Something about bearing down felt like the opposite of what my body wanted to do, and for the first time in the whole labor, I went completely tense and practically refused to let myself even breathe or move during a contraction. It was, needless to say, not a productive way to approach the situation.

DeEtte wanted to check me one more time to make sure the lip of cervix was totally gone, because she thought that might be what was feeling so off. She confirmed that it was gone, and decided that it would be best at that point to break my water, because even though no cervix remained, it seemed like the baby’s head would not descend any further. Very little water even came out, but I found myself remembering stories of second labors in which the baby is out within literally seconds of the bag of waters breaking. I decided to continue pushing right there on the bed.

Like I said, with Lea, I suffered through the labor but thrived while I pushed. This would prove to be the opposite. With the beginning of every contraction, I tried to push. I wanted to push, and in some ways, my body really was giving me the signal to push. But each push brought an extra jolt of pain, grinding, mind-erasing pain. (I found out later that the baby would be born with hand pressed to face, which is probably what caused this mixed signal, as the descending head encouraged the pushing instinct, but the totally-in-the-way hand encouraged the freakout instinct.) I refused to push at all a few times. Other times, I could only muster up the strength to push for 2 or 3 seconds. “I can’t do this!” I kept saying. Brian and Donna and DeEtte were firm: “You ARE doing it.” “NO!” I yelled. “Something is WRONG, something is DIFFERENT, this is not WORKING.” DeEtte insisted, “it IS working, Paige, you’re bringing the baby down, it’s hard work but it’s happening.” I shook my head. “No. I just need to FIGURE OUT a way to PUSH in a way that WORKS!” Anyone who has been through a birth knows that this is not the optimal time for “figuring out” anything. It’s not like you’re at your most logical. But, that’s me. I needed to figure it all out.

In the end, I didn’t. I had what I think of as an Exorcist-style contraction because I think I actually spit on the bed and spoke in tongues, and when it was over, something happened. In fact, I remember saying “something is happening,” and as the tail end of the contraction faded, I felt the most primal, animal NEED (not urge) to push, and I pushed and I pushed through two more contractions, the first of which DeEtte announced that the baby was crowning, and the second of which the head actually emerged. In between those two was what I now know is the infamous “ring of fire,” which I never experienced when I pushed Lea out. This is when the fullest part of the baby’s head fills the cervix, and women report feeling like their entire body is going to tear in half. I felt my eyes roll back and I heard myself half groan/ half scream until the next contraction hit, when it changed to all scream and I finally felt the head emerge. DeEtte firmly reminded me to keep pushing, and I felt her helping the baby rotate as I puuuuuuuuushed and then pop! Out came the rest of the body, and a huge gush of fluid, and a sweeping sense of relief and ecstasy.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part III

2009-01-26T17:40:00.000-05:00

Here’s the other thing—I was coping. I was getting through the contractions without suffering, and this was new to me. I attribute this mostly to the fact that my first labor took place entirely without the cushioning of an intact bag of waters, as my membranes had ruptured at the start, leaving nothing between Lea’s skull and everything it was pressing against. This time, the pain was there and it was real but it wasn’t mind-altering. I was not the crazed beast of a creature I had become the last time. I could keep a conscious thought in my head. I wasn’t screaming my face off. Instead, I was very methodically creating rhythmic rituals for myself, draping my chest over the big blue exercise ball at the foot of my bed and slowly, slowly slowly lowering into a squat during each contraction. I found that if I started doing this the very second I felt a contraction coming, I could keep on top of things and generally do ok. I would also signal to Brian: “HIPS!”, which meant I wanted him to stand behind me and push inward on the bony part of each of my hips. I don’t know why, but this brought considerable relief, and he did it every time.

More good news: DeEtte was about to call her assistant, whose primary job was to help with the actual delivery and the baby itself. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m only 5 centimeters.” It had been just 45 minutes since she arrived, but DeEtte smiled and said, “Oh, I’m sure you’re more than that by now. These are really good contractions, I can tell by what you’re doing to get through them.” I think I actually shrugged my shoulders as this expert who’d delivered over 1500 babies dialed her assistant, and said to me while the phone rang, “Paige, I really don’t think she’s going to be here long.” I wanted, in some ways, to cover my ears and shut my eyes and say “LALALALA,” because I didn’t want to jinx it, and I didn’t want to labor with the assumption that things were moving along quickly, only to find out otherwise and be devastated.

We also talked about Lea. So far, she was sleeping soundly. We had a local friend expecting to be called if we needed her for childcare, and we debated whether to call her or just keep laboring as long as possible. It was 1:30 am, and I decided that if we got to 4am with Lea still sleeping, that would be ideal because she would’ve gotten enough sleep that there would be no expectation on Lindsay to try to get her to sleep more. In all her jinxiness, DeEtte said firmly, “I think we’ll be done by then.” No way.

Assistant Donna arrived, and DeEtte checked me again at just after 2am: 7 cm. OK. I started to believe that I was making very good progress, which seemed to turn a switch in my head that said I was now allowed to suffer a little more. I switched up my routine, climbing onto my knees in the bed (still draping over the ball), and just rocking around in circles, trying to breathe deeply. I also remembered a technique I’d read, to exhale “horse lips” style, allowing my lips to blow raspberries. The theory is that if you relax your mouth, you kind of can’t help but relax everything else. It really did work—I was amazed at how well.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part II

2009-01-26T17:39:00.002-05:00

I went ten days past my due date with Lea, but I tried not to panic this time when my due date came with no sign of progress anytime soon. I knew statistics were on my side, as second babies tend to cook a little less, and I tried to focus on enjoying my last few days as a mother of one (and my last few days of sufficient sleep for a while). Sure enough, just two days later I found myself unexpectedly awake at 4:45am with real, unmistakable labor contractions radiating from front to back. These went on for two hours, and although I tried my hardest to get back in bed to ride out early labor as restfully as possible, I found my heart racing, thinking that I would certainly have a baby before the end of the day.

I didn’t. My contractions petered out and the day was a normal one. Remembering that it’s not unusual for labor to start and stop several times, especially after the first pregnancy, I figured the best thing to do would be to return to my regular routine and expect nothing. I forced myself to take a nap that afternoon, and slept surprisingly soundly. This turned out to be a very good thing.

That night was the season premiere of LOST. If you’re reading this, you know me well enough to know the significance of this, so you’ll appreciate the fact that I started having contractions again at 7:30, just a half hour before the 3-hour extravaganza was to begin. But again, I reminded myself—this might not be it. Besides, there was LOST to watch, so I distracted myself as much as possible and tried to focus on the many intricacies of the Dharma Initiative and the Oceanic Six and the Widmore/Linus connection. But by the time Hurley got arrested, I’d been in quite a lot of pain for a while and knew that it was time to call DeEtte.

I gave her the stats: I was having contractions ranging from 3 to 6 minutes apart, and even though they were only lasting 15-35 seconds (much shorter than the full minute generally considered a good rule of thumb for active labor), they were intense enough that I had to stop everything I was doing, drop down to all fours and rock from side to side to get through them. DeEtte was confused by the short length of the contractions, but said she could tell by the sound of my voice that labor was moving quickly, so she said she’d pack up and be here in ninety minutes or so.

In the meantime, between contractions I reverted to the nervous people pleaser I can be, and worried that I’d look like a fool, that she’d get here and proclaim me to be Not in Labor At All, shake her head and drive home. Except, during contractions, it hurt. A lot. And I was SO glad that she would be there soon.

It was close to 1am when DeEtte arrived, and a quick check found that I was dilated 5 centimeters and “stretchy.” My relief at this news was only compounded when she asked me if I’d be ok for a few minutes while she enlisted Brian to help her bring her oxygen tank and other heavy equipment up from her car. Equipment? I thought. That’s so official—I’m actually going to have a baby and SOON. I was excited.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part I

2009-01-26T17:39:00.001-05:00

Susanna’s birth story really begins with Lea’s birth, when a kind and fiercely talented midwife with a long grey braid delivered my first baby in a quiet green room at a birth center near Philadelphia. It would be hard to overstate the transformative nature of that experience, and not only because it brought me my beautiful daughter and made me a mother; Lea’s birth also transformed my sense of what is possible when it comes to maternity care, as I enjoyed one-on-one attention and guidance from midwives with exactly the kind of expertise and demeanor I needed. Simply put, I fell in love with midwifery, and with the concept that until conditions indicate otherwise, pregnancy and birth are normal events, not medical ones.

Of course, I wanted medical expertise in the event that something did prove more complicated than normal, and that’s what I found from the Certified Nurse-Midwives on staff at the birth center. And that’s what I was looking for when I got pregnant again, this time 500 miles away in rural Virginia.

The options for maternity care are quite limited here in Appalachia, so the beginning of my pregnancy was spent searching for midwives while getting early prenatal care from an OB practice, one that came highly recommended but still felt hugely anonymous and would approach my pregnancy and birth in ways far removed from what I was used to and preferred. Still, they were perfectly nice, delivered high quality care, and would have been a fine option for me if my search had ended there.

I hadn’t really considered a homebirth until I heard about DeEtte, a CNM from Tennessee (about an hour away) who maintained a homebirth practice. She answered all my (many, many) questions about how she handled various complications and emergencies, and further reassured me as she ran through her resume: many years in a hospital setting as an obstetric nurse, and then working in a NICU; running a free-standing birth center of her own—much like the one where I’d had Lea—in another state, delivering 900 babies there before changes at her backup hospital forced her to close down; and finally, beginning her homebirth practice with the goal of operating like a traveling birth center, which meant maintaining solid, consistent working relationships with nearby backup physicians at all the local hospitals. As a CNM, she could prescribe and administer drugs if necessary, and traveled with all the medical equipment that had been available at the birth center. She and her assistant, an RN, had worked together at homebirths for 16 years.

Toward the end of our initial phone call, DeEtte promised me, upon my urging, that if I ever changed my mind or felt like a homebirth wasn’t a good fit for me, she could swiftly transfer my care to her backup and it would be fine. I told her that I needed to know that, that I needed an “out” if I panicked, that I planned to spend the rest of my pregnancy educating myself as much as possible about the risks presented in any setting, and that homebirth was a new concept for me that I needed to wrap my head around. “That’s good,” she said. “You absolutely need to do that. But you also need to know how confident I am. I know, that I know, that I know, that this works.” After all the medical technicalities and statistics we had discussed, that one statement made the biggest impression on me, and I realized what an experienced and professional caregiver I was dealing with. I ended the call feeling like I wouldn’t find a more qualified birth attendant anywhere.

A few more...

2009-01-25T14:51:00.004-05:00

Susanna is here!

2009-01-24T21:25:00.013-05:00

I'm working on a full birth story, but for now:

Susanna Campbell Johns arrived at 4:36am on Thursday, January 22nd. At 8lbs 1oz, she's nearly a pound and a half lighter than her sister was, so she looks miniscule to us. (Before Thursday, 100% of my baby experience was Lea, so I'd never even held a baby that "small".) Labor and delivery were simple and straightforward; everything went as well as it possibly could have, and we're all doing great. Lea is adjusting well for the most part, a few psych-textbook moments notwithstanding ("Mama, hold me, like THIS, like a baby, because I'm Susanna!").

Thanks for all the well-wishes! It's a happy and hectic time and, with the exception of a frantic run to an appliance store today upon the long-expected demise of our washing machine, we're pretty hunkered down and removed from the rest of the world for a while, which is nice.

Some pictures:

Lea right now

2009-01-11T20:58:00.007-05:00

Every now and then, I startle myself by realizing that on some level, I go through each day with Lea as though assuming that her personality and her way of communicating today will be permanent. I think it's because she is communicating so well; she is able to express her needs pretty clearly, and we have conversations, so I no longer spend much time thinking "if only she could ____," the way I did before her leap in vocabulary, when we'd both be brought to tears at times by the frustration of not understanding each other. So we're at a sweet spot right now, and because of that, I often forget that it's temporary, that she'll progress even more with her language skills, and her personality will evolve and she will grow up. Wow.

In particular, I find myself smiling at the Lea-related memories of just about every second of this past Christmas, because over the month of December she caught on to enough about the season to get really, really excited, but still bewildered in some ways, which was insanely cute. For instance, she started to become familiar with Christmas songs, and developed her favorites: "Rudolph the Reindeer" (and now she calls every deer a reindeer), "Confern-en-joy song", "Crib for Bed," "Now you dear old man song." She would request these at bedtime and freak the heck out when she heard them on the all-Christmas radio station or at church.

A couple of times recently, she'll start to sing one of these songs out of the blue, weeks past Christmas, and screw up her forehead trying to remember the words. In the car the other day, she kept repeating, "Christmas eve is coming soon, now you dear old maaaaan." After about 5 repetitions of that line, she paused, and asked, "What's the next one, mama?" When I started to sing "Whisper what you'll-", she cut me off. "No mama, I sing." And then, memory jogged, continued: "Whisper what you'll bring to me, tell me if you caaaaaan."

We took her to the Bristol Motor Speedway light show. Twice. She would literally gasp with excitement, saying "Look at thaaaaat!" in a breathy, awed voice. "And look at thaaaaat! See? See, look! It's a snowmaaaaaaan. It's a-- It's a-- It's a penguin!!! Look at thaaaaaat!"

We also geared our bedtime stories to the season, flipping to the nativity stories in the little kids' Bible storybook we got for her a long time ago. Through this, I'm assuming, she got the idea that all babies could be identified as "Baby Jesus," and has since pointed out a little Willow Tree figurine of a mother, father, and baby, saying, "And there's Daddy, and there's Mama, and there's the Baby Jesus!" Those stories have also introduced words like "manger" and "stable" into her vocabulary, and she's been using them both to mean any sort of small space. I found her recently putting all her beloved stuffed animals in the bottom of the little Ikea wardrobe in her room. When I asked her what she was doing, she said, "Shhhh. Everybody's sleeeeeping. In the manger."

By the time we got a few days past Christmas, the Bible storybook had moved on to grown-up Jesus, and the little follow-up question to one of the stories (I forget which) was something like, "If you could spend the day with Jesus, what would you ask him?" Usually these questions are totally rhetorical, because Lea's just at the beginning of understanding open-ended questions like that, but she actually answered, and with feeling: "Hi Jesus. How are you doing? Are you feeling ok? OK!" We laughed, and Brian followed up: "That's a great thing to ask Jesus. What do you think he would ask you?" Again, we didn't expect a coherent answer, but: "He would ask... for a potato." By this point, I was really laughing. "Wow! Anything else?" Lea answered matter-of-factly. "A banana." Of course.

She also has started to compose her own bedtime prayers. Nine times out of ten, the result is, "Dear God. Jesus. Was born. In a stable. Amen."

(Coming back a day later, I remembered something else I wanted to add. Christmastime also coincided with a period of heightened confusion regarding subjects and objects when piecing together sentences. This resulted, most notably, in the often-repeated insistence that "A fire truck was on top of Santa, and he fwo chid-a-wen to the candy.")

As usual, I'm having a tough time letting go of the Christmas season, which, even though I don't get that sense of magic I did as a kid and young teenager, still gives me a very warm feeling that I tend to grieve for the rest of the winter. But Lea still sings Christmas carols on occasion, which is fun, not to mention a whole host of other songs. She asks frequently for "Hills lar-alive song" (the Sound of Music), and actually knows most of the words. Sometimes, when we've put her to bed for the night, we can hear her quietly singing to her animals "... for the thousand yeeeeeeears...."

Actually, listening to her over the monitor is often hilarious. Last night, she spent about 10 minutes taking body-part inventory: "What do you have, Caw? Do you have toes? Oh, you do have toes! OK! What do you have, Rufus? Do you have eyes? Oh, you do have eyes! OK! What do you have, Froggy? Do you have arms? Oh, you do have arms! OK!"

Those three animals-- Caw (so named because although he is apparently a duck, we thought he was a seagull and would have him go "Caw! Caw!"), Rufus (the little stuffed dog that we got as a shower gift and has been Lea's favorite animal since about 6 months old), Froggy (who came from my cousin Glen, weirdly enough, via my dad, when they ran into each other at a trade show and Glen had won this little frog at some booth with carnival games, and didn't know what to do with it), plus a stuffed owl known as "Owl Baby," comprise the A-team that Lea sleeps with every night and refers to as "Everybody." They are small enough that she can, when she's feeling particularly somber it seems, gather all four into her arms and clutch them to her chest to keep with her at all times.

You need to know this to understand another funny moment. You also need to know that her first McDonald's happy meal toy is a plastic Shrek that she, for some reason, started calling "Guy," and is very keen on at the moment.

The other day we were talking about having good friends, and I heard myself saying how some friends are extra-special. Feeling stupidly self-conscious about this, and wanting to make sure she is friendly with everyone, I said to Lea, "Everybody is special, you know." She paused, and added very soberly, "And Guy is special, too."

She has animated, and very brief, pretend phone conversations, using our old XM Radio remote as a prop. "Hi Uncle Eric, what are you doooooing? You feeling OK? OK! Bye Bye!" Pause. "Beep beep beep." Another pause. "Hi Aunt Megan, what are you doooooing? You feeling OK? OK! Bye Bye!" And then on down the list of relatives.

She calls credit cards "messages," fishing through our wallets with urgency, insisting, "I have to get my messages!" No idea where that came from. She also plays occasionally with the gigantic plastic orange wristwatch that Brian purchased at Rite-Aid to time contractions the first night I thought I might be in labor with Lea. She calls this "my match," and will frantically push all the buttons on it, announcing with a slightly panicked voice, "It's not working!" I'm not sure what she expects it to do. ("It's not working" is her go-to phrase when she's frustrated with something. Can't get her pants on? "It's not working!" Keeps dropping peas off her spoon? "It's not working!")

And oh, I was mistaken when I said that she calls all deer "reindeer." There's apparently one exception. When she and Brian were flipping through a coffee-table book about Smoky Mountain wildlife, they came across a picture of a bobcat. Evidently, that term really struck Lea's fancy, because when they turned the page and Brian pointed out a deer, then came the logical correction: "No, it's a bobdeer." Come to think of it, I rather like the sound of that, too.

I hope this all gives a glimpse, for those of you who are far away and haven't gotten a chance to see these developments in action, of the very entertaining phase we're in. I'm sure half of it is my aforementioned wistfulness about the ever-shortening "just Lea" time, but so far I have very few complaints about the so-called terrible twos. I know life is about to get crazy, crazy, crazy, and it will be perfectly understandable if our frustrating times ramp back up as we sort out how to continue to meet Lea's needs as best as we possibly can. Above all, I know it's going to suddenly become immensely more difficult to remember these times, so it is with some urgency that I try to record it all here. (I never did keep an official baby book, but every now and then it strikes me as something like an emergency that I create a textual snapshot of who my daughter is.)

I also, in the interest of full disclosure, remember something I was told when I crept further and further past my due date with Lea. I went for my first acupuncture treatment, which was designed not to induce contractions, but simply to help me get rid of tension. The practitioner said it would be helpful if I could spend time during the treatment thinking about ways in which I might be internalizing stress about the transition to parenthood, which could be counterproductive in terms of my ability to relax enough for the treatment to work (and ultimately, go into labor on my own). I've been thinking a lot about what's stressful about the upcoming transition from one child to two, and the main thing I fixate on is this: have I adequately celebrated and cherished the child I already have, the parenting I've already done? Will I remember this time as a mother to one? As a writer of sorts, or at least a writerly person, my compulsion is to sort through those worries by describing life the way it is, right now, so it doesn't slip away forever during the upcoming post-partum haze and subsequent ramping-up of stress.

I don't have an acupuncturist here, so my blog will have to do. So there, mind-body connection: I've written it all down, I've responded to my worry about losing the specialness of this time, I've preserved the pre-baby memories as best as I can. I'm free to go into labor now, correct?

Christmastime!

2009-01-06T20:35:00.003-05:00

I'm having this problem where, when I upload pictures to my blog on my Mac, I can't change the order in which the pictures show up (I can still do this on the PC, though). Because I am fundamentally lazy and would never get around to sharing any pictures, ever, if I had to deal with two computers to do one simple task, I am just going to put them up out of order and leave it at that. Enjoy!

High-fivin' the belly

2009-01-03T19:44:00.002-05:00

Almost every night, I go through a terribly emotional hour. Giving Lea her bath, dressing her in her pj's, reading a story, singing songs, and putting her to bed with "everybody" (her four most prized stuffed animals) is a special tradition that we've been doing ever since we started trying to enforce a regular bedtime, 20 or so months ago. She welcomes bedtime for the most part; she is sweet-natured and sleepy and happily requests the songs she wants to sing. Sometimes she will pull one of our faces very close to hers for the duration of a song, and then give a little squeeze before letting go. She is at her most adorable and easy to cherish at those moments. So lately, of course, I find myself feeling more than a little bit sentimental about the way her life is about to change, and the fact that many of our traditions, and nearly all the totally-Lea-focused time, is going to have to slip to the back burner for a while.

But then there's the rest of the hour. Once Lea's in bed and I immediately collapse on the couch, trying to will myself to do yoga before drifting towards comatose, I tend to suddenly think: hey, I'm way pregnant here. Wow. So much of the day finds me terribly distracted by life and unable to fixate on pregnancy the way I did when Lea was about to arrive. But the thing is, I freaking love this part of pregnancy, and have almost no complaints about it. In fact, there are times when I think I could happily spend the rest of my life about 37 weeks along. (Those inclined to hate me for that, please contrast this with the first half, when I am puking many many times a day.) I have a few physical discomforts, but for the most part I find the wiggling baby, the intense Braxton Hicks contractions, even the hugeness of my belly to be more exhilarating than anything. There are times when I feel the baby moving, and I could swear that I have never not been pregnant and will always be pregnant; it feels so normal, so natural, so much a part of my existence-- how could it be temporary?

But it is, of course. And although we both have times when we could see doing this again, there are a million practical reasons to stop at two, and in all likelihood, this will be the last pregnancy for me. Reminding myself of this fact was actually a source of huge relief all last summer, I have to remember. But right now, it's kind of devastating. Maybe it's way too biologically-deterministic of me to think this way, and maybe someday I'll roll my eyes at the fact that I ever even entertained the thought, but I just feel so complete when I'm in child-bearing mode-- preparing to birth and nurse and nurture a baby-- it's hard to imagine anything ever being so personally fulfilling.

Maybe-- no, certainly-- that's why I want to be a midwife. (Note to self: get career counseling. Find out if a career in health care is even close to a good match for my aptitudes.)

Anyway, that's what makes the second half of the hour so fraught with a million different emotions. I want to celebrate this pregnancy and relish every moment of what makes having an on-the-brink-of-birth little person grooving around in there so beautiful. But that's hard to do, and I'm so notoriously bad about documenting things (exhibit A: this blog), I can virtually guarantee that on some hormonal post-partum day in the near future I'm going to be wailing about how I have no pregnancy journal and not enough pictures of me pregnant, and I didn't let myself enjoy it enough, and I'll never get to do it again, and and and.

I had moments like that after Lea was born, and I have to remember the wise words of a friend of mine who gently reminded me that having little in the way of documentation of that short chapter of my transition to motherhood did not mean that it hadn't happened, that it hadn't mattered or been just as special as if I'd made a whole leather-bound book about it. It was precious to me and it is again, and if the best I can do is one blog entry and a few photos, that doesn't matter, because I know I'll remember this, and I'll remember my firstborn kissing my belly and poking on my "baby button" to try to get her little sibling to come out. I probably won't always remember the physical sensation of a Braxton Hicks (like getting the wind knocked out of me, kind of, but in a good way, if that makes any sense), or what it feels like when the baby has hiccups (well, it feels like my cervix has hiccups, I guess), but that's ok too. By the time those memories have faded entirely, I'll have two kids on the "outside" doing way more fun and funny and impressive things, things that I won't be the only one to get to celebrate. I can get excited about that.

A guessing game, anyone?

2008-12-10T13:27:00.005-05:00

ExpectNet is a fun little online tool where you can set up a baby-prediction guessing game. Go here and enter "BabyCJ2" under Invited Guests (at the left) to post your guesses about the baby's date and time of arrival, sex, weight, and length.

Some helpful hints: Lea arrived 10 days past her due date at 12:37pm, with no indication of any progress until a check-up the day before, when I was slightly dilated. (It's also possible-- but there's no way to know for sure-- that labor was encouraged by some acupuncture that day. My gut tells me it helped get things started.) She weighed 9lbs 7oz and was 21.5 inches long.

This time: I'm due 1/20/09. I've gained about the same amount of weight as I had at this point in my first pregnancy. We haven't and don't intend to find out the sex in advance. Baby is definitely head down but still feels very high. If you're into old wives' tales: baby's heartrate is typically in the mid-140's. I feel like I'm carrying all out front and all belly. I usually crave salty things. (I mean, I love sweets too, but when I get a super-intense craving, it's usually for garlic bread or mozzarella sticks or, um, Buffalo Wing flavored Snyders' Pretzel Pieces.)

This is what two years old looks like

2008-12-07T12:36:00.004-05:00

Scene: the car, as we pull into our parking space at home

Lea: (begins singing, unprompted) Baa baa baa baa have you sheep? Yes sir yes sir yes sir yeah.

(Car comes to a stop.)

Lea: (suddenly crying real tears) NO! I don't WANT to sing songs!!

Lea is 2!

2008-11-23T20:12:00.006-05:00

Someone must've been dreaming of a white second birthday, because we woke up to about 4 inches of snow, somewhat unexpectedly. (They'd been calling for a dusting.) Lea was thrilled. "It's snowy outside! See? See? See it's snowy outside!"

It was freezing, so we didn't last long outside before coming in for Lea's first hot chocolate. Also a big hit.

Most of the rest of the day was spent preparing for her party. We'd gone back and forth about whether we felt like throwing a party; I was afraid that our unusual house layout would be a challenge for families with little kids, but in the end we decided to just go for and make it as simple as possible. This meant simple food-- pizza from Bella's and cupcakes made from the box-- but preparing the house was still complicated, because we had to move tons of stuff around just to make sure there was a place for people to sit. I really only got pictures of the kids' section (we used our gigantic coffee table for the little ones, with milk crates to sit on.)

We had 11 kids under 6 and 11 adults. Not too bad. It was noisy and messy and chaotic, but totally worth doing. We realize that we actually have a nice core group of similarly-minded parents, who don't expect a children's birthday party to necessarily involve favor bags and organized activities; it's perfectly fine (preferable, actually) to just socialize and let the kids run around and wear each other out. Not bad at all.

Fun with complete sentences

2008-11-20T20:44:00.002-05:00

In addition to learning some real conversation-stoppers like "I don't want to!", Lea has come out with a few pretty interesting and/or impressive and/or entertaining full sentences lately. A sampling:

"I have to wear a jacket 'cause it's cold outside."

"I go to the doctor and a-lookin' at my leg." (Sadly, yes, she's got a MRSA abscess on her thigh. Boo.)

"Daddy's work-en-ing in the little truck!"

"Miss Sharie read a story with a grandma's house."

"I have poop right there in my bum." (Also, "I'm stinky, Daddy. I need to be changed.")

"I saw Derek Jeter!" (OK, that's probably not what she was intending to convey. I can't figure out what she's going for that's sounding to me like "Derek Jeter." She's said it quite a few times. Hmm.)

Upon stepping outside first thing in the morning: "It's nice out here!" or "It's a nice morning!"

The other funny stuff has to do with her ability to answer questions. Example:

Lea: I want my cup!

Me: Hmm, kiddo, I don't know, I can't remember where it is.

Lea: It's upstairs! In the bed!

And it is. Amazing.

Me: What did you do at school today?

Lea: I had a snack at school today!

Me: Ok...

Lea: I had... goldfishies!

Me: What else did you do today?

Lea: I had... apple slices!

Me: Did you read any books?

Lea: I read a book with Cameron. I read a book with Raynna!

Me: Was that fun?

Lea: I do!

So, the syntax is not 100% there, but it still catches me off guard how well she's able to express herself. Of course, she's officially TWO tomorrow and it's showing in all the not-fun ways. She throws tantrums and outright refuses to pay attention. She tries to run away in parking lots and occasionally squirms away from me when I'm attempting to buckle her in her seatbelt. Worst of all, she is being awful, awful, awful to the cats. Pulling their tails, etc. It's very hard to get her to understand that this is a BAD thing. (I start to realize that she doesn't comprehend our anger. This feels like a mixed blessing, you know?)

Still-- I realize that I'm more suited in my parenting to a chattering child, despite all the extra stress that brings, than to a tiny infant. With every new skill she acquires, particularly the verbal/expressive ones, I can see a little bit of the light at the end of the tunnel of this most labor-intensive phase of being a mother.

Ahhh, she's two. Two years ago I was watching Studio 60 waiting for something, anything to happen.... filled halfway with delight and halfway with foreboding. Tomorrow, we throw a party for 33 people in a very small space. Similar emotional state.

About politics

2008-10-24T20:03:00.003-04:00

I have reined myself in so far, and have done my best to not get too crazed over the minutiae of this election. That has included not blogging about it (I admit that my efforts to read anything other than political blogs have been less successful). But, okay. I am too incensed about this to keep my mouth shut.

Let me be clear; I'm voting Obama because of Obama. It never mattered to me who the Republican candidate was going to be, really, and my admiration for Obama's career and campaign has been enthusiastic and pretty dang consistent (well, I'm not wild about the forgoing of public financing, but other than that...). So for the most part, any scrutiny by me on the McCain camp would be a needless change in focus, and not just a little bit redundant.

That said:

A McCain campaign worker, a Muslim man named Daniel Zubairi, did something admirable at a Virginia McCain rally that turned ugly. He stood up to an attendee's xenophobic anti-Islam ranting, and told the man that the McCain campaign does not endorse his message. Nice work, Zubairi: stay calm, stand firm and tell the haters to cool it.

Points for the McCain folks, right? A welcome antidote to the fear-mongering associated with some nutjob supporters we've all been hearing about, right? Not so. CNN's Rick Sanchez has been trying to get Zubairi on his show for an interview, to talk us all through what happened at that rally. Zubairi wants to come. In fact, they've scheduled an interview several times, but each time, before Zubairi is set to go on the air, somebody higher up than him in the campaign has pulled him. Until today, we could only speculate as to why, but Zubairi's email to Sanchez today clears it up pretty well, explaining that he has been muzzled by the campaign because his story does not fit with "the tone" the campaign wants to be setting right now.

Um, WTF?

Meanwhile...

You've all heard about this one: a 20-year-old phonebanking staffer for the McCain campaign, named Ashley Todd, called the Pittsburgh police to report that she had been mugged at an ATM, and that the mugger, a tall dark-skinned black man (dressed in black!), upon seeing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, attacked her again and told her she had to support Obama, going so far as to "carve the letter B on her face" (B for Barack, so we presumed).

You know this too: she made it all up. Local police noticed some pretty bizarre irregularities in her story, and continued to question her until it became very clear and she ultimately confessed to fabricating the entire story. She wasn't even at the ATM in question, and the B scratched on her face is backwards, as though created while Todd was looking in the mirror. Oops. It's pretty clear what her intent was-- to try to turn the media narrative, and ultimately Pennsylvania voters, towards a sense that the Obama campaign is the dangerous, violent one.

But that's not what's significant. What matters to me is that the McCain campaign itself, pretty much as soon as the young woman's (not-yet-debunked) story broke, was pushing it as a news item. According to Talking Points Memo, the campaign got involved pretty directly:

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

So let me get this straight. When it comes to isolated incidents involving low-level McCain staffers, the campaign says that the story of a young Muslim supporter doing his job well (and doing his civic duty as a responsible citizen pretty damn well too) is not in keeping with the tone they want to set. Because....? Because their priority right now is to seize upon the support of people like the older white dude in the video, rather than the younger ethnic-looking dude (and anyone who might be proud of him)? But their tone remains unruffled by pushing a fishy story about a young white female supporter getting attacked by a black Obama supporter-- including helpfully supplying some direct quotes from the alleged attacker? They're cool with pouncing on a story that will thrust a (supposed) victim of a violent crime into the spotlight? What's more, they are so frantic for good (?) press as to associate themselves with a story that looked suspicious from the start, before the police could even confirm the woman's story?

What is wrong with these people? I'm not going to hold the campaign accountable for the anti-Islamic guy or the wacko self-mutilating race-baiting girl. I'm really not. (Well, maybe someday I will. It's hard to say right now with any objectivity whether or not the tone of the campaign is encouraging the crazies or if the crazies are just gravitating toward the campaign out of desperation). What I am saying is that the McCain folks are idiots this week, and that their decisions regarding the racial/religious/nationalistic undertones of many of their supporters have been baffling and hugely disappointing. At the very least, they are complicit in the "culture war" nonsense that has been poisoning political discourse for far, far too long.

In any case, it seems pretty clear to me: Ashley Todd needs to be prosecuted. And Daniel Zubairi needs to jump this particular ship. C'mon, Daniel-- the water's fine. We'll take ya.

I know its hard to believe...

2008-10-16T21:43:00.019-04:00

...but even our beautiful daughter Lea is showing signs of partaking in the terrible twos. Before going farther, I should let you know this is Brian, making my first post on our blog. The last couple of weeks have moved me to post some pictures from our recent adventures, and more importantly, to give some much due credit to my amazing wife...
We saved up our money and combined a work trip with some vacation time to take a trip out West to Montana and Wyoming. We spent a day in Yellowstone and a few days at a dude ranch (it was a little wild and a little strange making our home out on the range).
Artists Point (above) and Bison Jam in Yellowstone and HF Dude Ranch in WY below:Anyway, back to my reason for posting. Lea was an absolute rock star during all of our travels, but since returning from our trip Lea has been having a slightly rough transition. She is a little bit testy (although it should be noted she also has a slight cold too) and she has started to really test us on a number of things. One of those is her willingness/ability to go to sleep. She has almost completely stopped taking naps and she resists going to sleep at bedtime now too. You can imagine that this is especially difficult for Paige, who most directly feels the brunt of the napping (and I must also add that Paige got up with Lea at 5am this morning).

Knowing this, fast forward to tonight. We sing our customary 4 bedtime songs and begin to leave the room. This is when the crying has been beginning recently. As I try to shuffle quickly out of the room, I hear the little angelic voice of my daughter say "Momma..." My first thought is to get out of the room quickly so that she might forget/not realize we're there. Even though she's been on duty since 5am with Lea, Paige's response is to say "what sweetheart?" Lea then asks, "Momma be right outside?" To which Paige answers: "Of course Lea, Momma is right outside the door. I'm always here for you."

I think about how lucky I am often, but tonight this struck me more than normal. Paige is so committed to being an incredible mother, and you can absolutely see the results as she and Lea's bond gets stronger and stronger. To steal/paraphrase from Lou Gehrig, I truly feel like one of the luckiest men on the face of the planet. Here's some more proof...

Trike-a-thon 2009 at Lea's preschool (below):

Hiking on a beautiful SW VA Fall Day with her good friend Rylan (below):

Ending a day after a bath with her momma (below):

sweet moments in the wee hours

2008-09-09T10:50:00.006-04:00

Lea starts to cry at about 11pm, which is really unusual lately. Her sleep is not quite as reliable as it was for a while, but the disturbances have tended to come in the 4-6am range, not the late night. So it's surprising to hear from her as we are getting ready for bed. She quiets herself down after a minute or so, and I fall asleep, only to hear the same kind of pitiful crying at midnight. And then again at nearly one. At this point, I leap out of bed because the wheels have started turning, and I associate discomfort-occurring-at-regular-intervals with one thing: a stomach bug. When Lea has gotten them in the past, they've gone exactly like that-- a cycle of barfing with an hour break at first, then shorter and shorter until she passes out (actually, that's kind of how they go for me too).

So I'm really surprised to find no puddle of vomit in Lea's crib when I get down there. Just a sad little girl with a very snotty nose. "This bed!" she commands, pointing to the full-size bed right next to her crib. ("This bed!" means she wants one of us to crawl into the bed, and bring her along.) I'm happy to oblige, especially because I am so relieved to not have to deal with changing all her clothes and sheets.

"Sing a song?" she asks. "ABCs?" But she's snoring before I get to LMNOP.

It's fitful sleep, though. She is stuffed-up and not able to breathe easily. So I pick her up and stand and sway, hoping that being vertical will help her nose situation. It seems to, but that's not what feels so wonderful; it's that she's sleeping on my shoulder, which never, ever, ever happens, hasn't happened much since she was a newborn, and hardly even then. She always preferred to be on her own. Not much of a snuggler, especially when she's serious about wanting to sleep.

After a while she seems to have fallen into a very deep sleep, and I'm about to collapse so I put her back in her crib and hope hope hope she doesn't wake up.

She wakes up, but she doesn't cry. "Mama this bed? Lea... Lea's bed." She's ready to be sleeping but she doesn't want to be alone, so I crawl back into this bed and Lea stays happily in Lea's bed.

"Sing a song? Knee-en-toes?"

"Head, shoulders," I begin, but I'm so tired I just hum the rest. Very faintly, I hear Lea singing along, getting about every fourth syllable approximately right. "Eye uh eena mouf... nose. Heh... sola knee-en-toes."

It's quiet for a long time but I can tell she's not totally asleep. Sure enough, when my allergies (and aversion to dusting) give me a very badly-timed sneezing fit, Lea seems unfazed.

"Bless you, mama."

Already taken care of, kid.

.

I have learned...

2008-07-24T19:52:00.003-04:00

...that May-July is a very much worse time to be in your first trimester of pregnancy than February-April is.

In 2006, aside from being bowled over by shock (and ok, terrified and sometimes, if I'm being honest, devastated at the prospect of life changing so much so quickly, so unexpectedly), early pregnancy was not too bad. I had morning sickness, but it stayed true to its definition and usually faded by 10am. I gained weight quickly, but not terribly so. I had extreme (to the point of tears and angry cussing at Brian) late-night hunger, but only for about a week. It was late winter, early spring. I worked at a very casual job where it was perfectly ok to take breaks, to eat snacks, to go easy on myself.

This time, my "morning" sickness has been so bad it has required medication, and I'm still having occasional days of all-day sickness at nearly 15 weeks. I've gained an astonishing amount of weight-- really-- it's crazy. (How does that happen when one is throwing up all the time?) My crying, cussing, midnight hunger-fest went on for nearly a month and I still get it from time to time. It is HOT. Disgustingly hot sometimes. My job, while casual, does not afford many breaks. And when I try to eat a snack, there tends to be a little 20-month-old trying to climb me like a tree saying "Try it? Try it? Eat some?" Nevermind that she won't eat anything I actually suggest. But if I'm dipping a slice of bell pepper in some hummus, here she comes, begging for some like it's FunDip.

But, I am optimistic. I am firmly in the second trimester, and it's all starting to seem more like a pregnancy than a hangover. The little heartbeat is thumpthumpthumping at 160ish beats a minute pretty consistently. Lea is in a wonderfully charming and funny stage, and I can actually envision her becoming a big sister (it's weird to imagine that at the age Lea is now, my brother was only 8 weeks or so away from becoming a big brother to me-- I admit I'm glad to get another four months of her maturation process). I think we're on the verge of figuring out a way to have the baby at a birth center, which is like a dream come true. It's fun to think about all the uniqueness of pregnancy-- I never minded attention from strangers, and in particular treasure the memory of being at the movie theater and an old man saying, "Whoa! When are you due?" It gave me great pleasure to smile and say, "Tomorrow!" and watch him inwardly freak out. I loved not finding out the sex of the baby, and just wondering. I loved going to prenatal appointments toward the end, when it all felt so real, and doing prenatal yoga.

I love the thought of becoming a family of four. Nevermind the fact that it's all happening probably 5 years before we expected it to. I'll figure out the rest of my life when it gets here. For now, I am loving being a mama and a mama-to-be, and very grateful for all the support I'm getting along the way.

By the way, the due date is approximately 1.20.09. Inauguration day. I hope to be having a LOT to celebrate that day.

xkcd.com/386

2008-06-02T20:00:00.004-04:00

Smokies

2008-05-20T20:55:00.006-04:00

We took a little 24-hour jaunt down to the Smoky Mountains. Since it was just one night, we decided to live it up and stay in a really fun hotel with an indoor pool, which Lea went a little crazy for.

Unfortunately, the weather was a bit nasty, so our hiking was limited (although we did make it to one waterfall and one cool trail with overlooks, for a total of maybe 5-6 miles of hiking, some of it wet).

The best part of the hike was having a picnic lunch, complete with Lea's first time eating a sandwich that hadn't been cut into tiny pieces. She's so big!

Did I mention that our camera broke?

2008-05-20T20:43:00.003-04:00

Well, now it's replaced, so it's time to catch up.

First of all, I took these pictures with the old camera, but couldn't even get them loaded onto the computer (the camera wouldn't even turn on). So, for all who have been dying to hear about Barack Obama's visit to my hometown, you're in luck! Luckily enough, he chose Downingtown as part of his whistle-stop tour through Pennsylvania, which just happened to coincide with a weekend we were up visiting. We got there a few minutes late and couldn't find parking, so we essentially missed most of the stump speech, but Jenn and I heard the end of it and it was awesome to just be there among the crowd. It was such a diverse group of people, I about wept. There was something really powerful about standing there among people from the community where I grew up (and recognizing many of them), and seeing pretty much every face intently focused on this message of unity and progress. Very cool. We stuck around to see the train off (and, helpfully I'm sure, pointed out that they were actually heading back towards Philly when they pulled away, despite the plan to travel to Harrisburg next. Of course, they were just backing up so they could switch to a different track, but we still felt like we had contributed).

Just in time for the coming oil apocolypse

2008-04-25T21:13:00.004-04:00

I just found out from my neighbor who knows these things that the town planning commission approved a half-mile long sidewalk extension, which will span from the nursing home at Gray Drive all the way to White's Mill Road (where the "Historic District", and therefore the continuous sidewalk-connecting-everything, begins). I do not know when this will happen, but it is FABULOUS news. We walk all the time anyway (starting from our home on Henderson Court), but it's freaking stressful because drivers in this town do not seem too used to pedestrians. So certain busy times of the day are just really unpleasant, borderline scary, to be walking. Once this project is complete, though, it will be a breeze to get basically anywhere in town, and that's awesome. It's especially awesome because for now, our strategy is to get to Main Street as quickly as possible (involving cutting through a funeral home parking lot), since the other main drag, Valley Street, is the one with big chunks lacking a sidewalk or even a shoulder. But that part of Main Street is not pretty. Valley Street, on the other hand: very pretty. Phenomenally pretty. Pretty houses, pretty gardens, pretty trees. Shade. We will have no excuse not to take walks. And then, of course, there's all the useful places we can get: grocery store, post office, drug store, coffee/bookshop, library, doctor's office, wildly overpriced boutiques (just for looking). I love this small town living.

Springtime activites

2008-04-12T23:15:00.003-04:00

Reading.

Shooting hoops with Dad (Lea shot this one, left-handed).

Learning to eat with a fork.

Helping in the garden (pants-free, naturally).

Dining al fresco at our favorite lunch spot, the Wildflour.

Of course, now that we're all into springtime mode, we are expected to get an inch or two of snow tomorrow night and Monday morning. Last year, on April 14th, it also snowed after weeks of warm weather. Very weird. I love snow- LOVE it. But this is creepy.

Anyway, happy spring!

This is what happens when children sleep through the night

2008-04-07T15:28:00.002-04:00

Today, I:

-woke up just because. Not because I heard Lea crying. Just because my body was ready to wake up.

-had time to wash my face and brush my teeth before having to be on duty.

-felt like a human being when I took Lea to school (on time!) and chatted with some friends there.

-got a watermelon tea instead of the emergency fill-my-body-with-caffeine large coffee I normally go for on Monday mornings.

-was enormously productive in finishing a draft of a big essay I've been working on. I had brain power. I felt like a writer.

-worked in my garden with great pleasure. Finished the first stage of completely redoing it for summer.

-kept my cool during the usual grouch-fest that is lunch. Got Lea down for a nap.

-had no reason to stagger to my own bed while she slept, which is what I've done for a year now. Instead, I came downstairs and did the lunch dishes.

-did 30-minute yoga! Hello, Rodney Yee. It's been such a long time!

Wow! I know that might look like absolutely nothing to most grown-ups in the universe, but I've seriously been running on fumes for way too long. Even though Lea's wakeups were always very brief, and even though most nights, I was getting 8 total hours of sleep, those 8 hours were split into 2- and 3-hour chunks. Every. Night. I really didn't have a stretch of sleep longer than 4 hours for over a year, I'm pretty sure. This takes a toll. Sleep is about literally repairing your body, and it just doesn't work real well if you're never getting a long enough stretch.

I was seriously at the end of my rope last month, so on the advice of my friend Lindsay, Brian and I read up on the Dr. Jay Gordon method of nightweaning. It's geared toward families who co-sleep, which we don't do, so we had to amend it a bit, but holy moly. It pretty much immediately worked. I think she slept 10 hours on the third night.

But here's the thing: I'm not saying I wish we'd tried earlier. In a way, we did try, in January when I couldn't nurse overnight for 10 days because of medication. We thought that would be the logical end to night nursing, no turning back. We even gave it an extra week after I was off the meds. No luck. Lea was still frantic and freaked out and impossible to console during most wake-ups. She just wasn't ready. So we went back to the old patterns.

What made it different this time? Well, first of all, Lea's daytime eating habits improved hugely. Her diet is much better, and her food intake much greater, than it was then. Secondly, and I think almost more importantly, is that her receptive language skills are much more developed, meaning that when we come into her room and say, "You're ok, sweetie, I'm here, you're safe, do you want a cup of water?" It means something to her. We have a greater array of ways to soothe her, and she gets it.

Anyway, I can safely say that Lea is nightweaned and sleeping through almost every night. Hallelujah. And guess what else? She's still napping, almost three hours later. She stirred once, started chirping a little bit, and put herself back to sleep. She never did this before. Obviously developing that skill overnight has translated beautifully into naptime (at least today).

Sweet Valley What?

2008-03-29T15:28:00.003-04:00

Random House Children's Books is re-releasing the Sweet Valley High series, with a few changes. Most notably? The twins, described as being "a perfect size six" in 1983, are now "a perfect size four." Random House is so proud of this update, they are publicizing it in a letter to media outlets. Awesome.

Right, because that's what most needed rethinking about those flakes.

Coal is not clean

2008-03-26T14:56:00.003-04:00

I am smitten with the history and culture of the coal-mining region of central Appalachia where I live. I can't even describe how much I delight in seeing old mines, conveyers stretching out over winding, unnamed county roads, and the rows of coal camp houses that still characterize so many Appalachian towns. I don't know why; it's certainly not rational, because the old mines are usually leaching nasty stuff into creekbeds, the conveyers are just sitting there doing nothing because most mining nowadays is achieved by literally removing mountaintops rather than digging, and the camp houses were built cheaply 80 years ago and tend to signify that a community is impoverished. Not good news, any of it.

Anyway, although I know that my love affair with coal culture is probably going to stick around, coal itself is pretty firmly in the doghouse as far as I'm concerned. It's among the least, if not the very least, sustainable fuel out there, and it's not just the mining of it that's screwing up the environment (by, among other things, removing mountaintops and basically dumping them in crucial streams)-- coal-fired power plants pollute like none other, despite claims made by proponents of "clean coal," who usually cite figures based on best-case scenario implementation of every conceivable cleaning-up-the-coal measure, even ones they have no intention of actually using because they're not cost effective. And this particular coal-fired power plant, if it gets final approval from the state, is going to be just 30 miles from us. Prevailing winds will bring most of the air pollution our way.

Anyone who thinks they might want to come visit us someday: better make it soon. Construction could start next month.

Sari Weston, where have you been all my life?

2008-03-24T10:34:00.003-04:00

I have been gearing myself up for weeks now to write a really thoughtful, really complete post about issues surrounding childhood vaccines.

In fact, last night I tuned out the world and sat for five hours typing an eight-page essay on the subject: what my experience has been, how I understand the perspective of people I know who don't vaccinate, why I think it's so effing complicated, etc.

This morning, while searching online for a particular statistic I wanted to include, I found this essay, and realized that if I ever tried to publish my own, I would be accused of plagiarism (and not particularly well-executed plagiarism-- it's been a while since I've written anything formal). Seriously, this is just a five-times-better version of everything I wrote last night, complete with the opening anecdote about the makeup-free doctor, the quotes she's included (some of them identical!), even the conclusion she's come to.

Anyway, this goes a long way to explain what I think is a crucial, and way too often absent, element of this whole discussion: why it's confusing for parents. Smart parents, good, well-intentioned parents. Maybe eventually I'll clean up my own essay (and shorten it, I swear), and post it, but for now, I will tip my hat to Sari Weston for pulling together a very articulate and sensible discussion of the matter. Finally.

Oh well

2008-03-23T21:13:00.002-04:00

I had Georgetown winning it all.

BUT, this is fun. Lea now says:

-bubble
-baby
-tree
-no (ugh)
-mine (really ugh)
-cold
-hot (sounds like ha)
-Mimi (what Lea calls my mom. When Mimi was visiting, she had-- probably still has-- a bad cold. So even though Mimi left a few days ago, the sound of anyone coughing still elicits a concerned "Mimi?!" from Lea)
-chair
-bye-bye
-hello (sounds like hwoah?)
-tickle (sounds like tigatigatiga!)
-teeth
-nose

Hooray for the beginning of the language explosion!

Snowy days and fun with friends

2008-03-03T20:26:00.003-05:00

We finally got (a very small amount of) measurable snow. I had been griping pretty much all winter that we never had pretty winter weather. A few flakes in the air from time to time, but nothing would stick. Finally last week we had a couple of inches. It actually snowed for two whole days, but it was bizarre-- snow would melt on the ground even as more continued to fall in the air, with temperatures in the 20's. So we'd get an inch, then it would melt. Then another coating, and it would melt. Then another inch, and it would melt.

Lea contemplates the weirdness of this.

It was sad to see the snow melt away, but it didn't matter too much because we were headed out of town anyway, to see our friends Mandy and Seth and their little 13-month-old cutie pie Myles. Myles is another 100% ASP baby, with two parents who were both on summer staff, as were Brian and me. In fact, Brian and Mandy were on staff together Brian's first year. It was a lot of fun to hear them reminisce about that summer in particular, and for all of us to share funny memories of staff life in general. ASP staff is probably the closest-knit network of people I've ever been affiliated with, borderline-cultlike in its ability to define almost every aspect of your life while you're involved, and sometimes for years after. (This is a good thing, by the way.) Anyway, there's just something so incredible about reconnecting with other people who've been through it, even if you don't know them real well. It's like finding someone in a faraway land who speaks the same native language you do.

Anyway. Lea raids Myles' kitchen.

And checks out his sippy cup.

And flirts with his dog.

(This is when Lea would stretch her hands out for Juniper to lick, then pull them back squealing when she did, and promptly stick them right back in her face. Thrilling!)

Recoiling to Seth's lap for safety.

Waiting for Juniper to notice her again.

Finally, this is what happens when you take something away from Lea that she wants (a camera, in this case):

Playing with friends

2008-02-15T20:12:00.004-05:00

First priority (like most gatherings with friends): eating.

OK, now let's go play.

Playing outside

2008-02-15T19:57:00.003-05:00

Not much of a front yard, but we're at the cul-de-sac end of a very quiet street, so I'll take it.

And some lovely green space out back.

But the best outdoor spot is the lovely Virginia Creeper trail.

"Stroller? No way dudes, I'm walking."

A stop at the great little playground down the road.

Lea-speak glossary

2008-02-13T12:57:00.002-05:00

Words she pronounces consistently and obviously knows the meaning of:
Kitty
Duck
Uh-Oh

Words she pronounces consistently, but sometimes in the totally wrong context:
Mama
Dada

A word she created:
Chedduh! (said with emphasis, to mean "I want that!")

Words she doesn't pronounce quite right, but we think we know what she's getting at:
Tatchoo (for "Thank you," although she says it whether she is giving or receiving something, so she might think it just means, "A transaction is taking place.")
Taaaaaaa-ee (for "Tired," in perfect imitation of the drawn-out way we often say, "Oh, Lea, you're tiiiiiiiiired! Let's go have a nap.)
Eeeeeeee-yah, or EeYAH!EeYAH! (for "Lea")

Then there are the times where she babbles what sounds like a perfectly logical sentence. For instance, one time she was throwing food, and I said, "Please don't do that." Her response? "Daddy said I could." Well, no, not really, but it sounded so much like that, I was just dumbstruck. Another time, when she was extra-cranky, I said, exasperated, "Lea, you need to find a way to calm down." She responded with something that sounded very, very much like, "I already did my yoga." Can't argue with that.

(Oh yeah, and she can also point to her nose if you ask her where it is. So cute.)

My new best friend?

2008-02-12T13:34:00.000-05:00

Four days ago, I signed up at the Hillary Clinton campaign website to get more information about Bill Clinton's trip to Abingdon that afternoon.

Today, I got an e-mail from Hillary Clinton which opened as follows: "Dear Paige, You and I have taken a remarkable journey together through this entire campaign. Through all the ups and downs, you have been there when I needed you most." Really? Wow!

We only saw a few minutes of Bill Clinton's speech, so I can't say much about the content, but here's something that really bugged me: Clinton referred to Obama as "Hillary's challenger." Maybe I'm being overly nitpicky here, but to me, a two-person race either consists of (a) an incumbent and a challenger or (b) two opponents. This choice of language struck me as one of those sly little ways we are made to feel like Hillary Clinton IS the incumbent, which of course, she is not. Bill also said that he was "so proud of Hillary when she kept fighting even after Senator Kennedy came out against us." Boo, again. Endorsing a candidate, as Ted Kennedy has done, is not about sticking it to another candidate. This primary, in particular, is not about voting against somebody; something like 85% of likely Democratic voters said they'd be content to vote for either Clinton or Obama in November. So really, especially now, the climate is not about who we strike down, but who we choose.

Anyway, last time I heard the whole "if you're not with us, you're against us," bit, George Bush was changing the cafeteria menu at the capitol to "Freedom Fries" because France hadn't committed to send troops to Iraq.

If you haven't seen Lea in pigtails...

2008-02-11T20:01:00.000-05:00

Here you go!

The end of the babyfood era

2008-02-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

Yeah, this just stopped being fun.

Attention

2008-01-26T21:26:00.000-05:00

Not only did Obama get twice as many votes as Clinton in South Carolina today, and not only does he manage to respond with grace and wit and brains every time somebody says something bad about him, and not only is he turning the Democratic party into something intensely exciting...

but get this: at barackobama.com, the "Republicans for Obama" stickers are on back order.

I can't help myself. I have a ridiculous crush on this man. So do a lot of people, apparently.

MRSA

2008-01-20T11:13:00.000-05:00

I thought I would end up with a huge scar on my face.

So I almost didn't keep the appointment with Dr. Armstrong, a surgeon who my main care provider, a nurse practitioner named Angela, had said would probably want to lance and drain the small lump on my cheek, just to be on the safe side. Angela had also prescribed an antibiotic, because she was pretty sure the lump was the result of a staph infection. My facial-scar-fearing self was hedging my bets: I could skip out on the blade-wielding Dr. Armstrong for now, and just take the antibiotic. It would probably work, the infection would clear, and I would escape the scar.

But then the lump got bigger-- within just a few hours-- and I remembered the other thing Angela had said, about MRSA: methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a strain of staph that does not respond to many antibiotics. It had rung a bell, a huge one, because I'd been hearing reports over the last few months about MRSA getting into people's blood and killing them swiftly. But, she'd assured me, it's not always a big deal, not even close, not if you catch it early.

Dr. Armstrong poked at it for a while but wielded no blade, which seemed like a good sign, and sent me home with a second antibiotic to take. This was Tuesday afternoon.

It was the wee hours of Wednesday morning when something started to seem really drastically wrong. Lea woke up crying at about 4:15, so I went down to tend to her. I was in no pain, but while she nursed away, I started to notice that my face felt weird. Fat. I touched my cheek and promptly had a panic attack. The whole right side of my face had ballooned. Now, I don't swell easily. Nothing swelled during pregnancy, or when I had my wisdom teeth out. My one serious food allergy causes no swelling. So this is unusual for me, and therefore very scary.

I drove myself to the ER, and there again, they kept mentioning MRSA. They took blood and took a culture of the oozy stuff hanging out in the tiny opening of the lump. "We have to admit you," the doctor there said immediately. "We're putting you in isolation." Well, shit.

The next notable thing was when the nurse brought forms for me to sign, indicating my consent to be put under general anesthesia, receive a blood transfusion, be resuscitated, etc. And yet: nobody was acting like it was an emergency. "They're going to take you down to surgery to lance it," Lisa, the nurse, said, "probably today." Huh? How could it possibly be any day other than today? How can you admit me at five in the morning and say MRSA and not do something immediately??

I kept asking questions. I got a lot of sympathetic smiles, but nobody said much except "No food or drink-- you're pre-op."

I started to reason with myself: if they're not rushing around, it's not an emergency. I am not in imminent danger of this bacteria getting into my blood and making me suddenly and gravely ill. Still-- nobody could tell me so.

"I'm really scared that this is going to get bad," I kept saying to Lisa.
"Well, they're just gonna find out what it is, and then we'll see," was her response.

Finally Dr. Armstrong came in. He said what everyone else had said: it's almost definitely staph, very probably MRSA, and they're going to cut it, drain it, and keep me on strong antibiotics until it's gone.

"I'm really scared that this is going to get bad," I tried again. "Is there a risk that this is going to spread throughout my body?"

"Hmmm," he said thoughtfully. "Is there a risk? Well, sure, there's a risk that if a lot of unlucky things happened simultaneously, this could make you pretty sick. Similarly, there's also a risk you could get hit by lightning. We're doing what we need to do to prevent this from getting bad."

Whew, OK. Now we're getting somewhere. My mood improved drastically, even though the IV antibiotic I was on was teaming up with my empty belly to make me miserably nauseated.

Meanwhile, Brian had scrambled to piece together round-the-clock childcare for Lea. She had school all morning, and would go home with our friend Lindsay until Brian's mom arrived late in the afternoon. This way, Brian could be with me. My mom was on her way, too.

The procedure got delayed, of course, and by the time they wheeled me down to surgery I was frantic. I got into a fight with the nurse-anesthetist (more on that later), so instead of counting backwards from ten, I heard myself going on a little bit of a tirade. Everyone's words sounded buzzy. I fell asleep.

Brian got word about a half an hour later that everything had gone fine, that they'd been able to remove a whole lot of infected fluid from my cheek without having to make much of an incision at all. What I remember is waking up, thinking for a split second, "I feel great! It must've gone ok!" and then thinking, one second later, "Wait, no, I feel horrible! I'm going to puke." And I puked.

They took me upstairs and I puked some more. Then I started shaking, and hyperventilating, and no matter what they did I just kept vomiting. The nurse pumped my IV full of one anti-nausea medicine, then another, then another. Apparently the second one can cause mental confusion and disorientation, which is a relief because otherwise I would have no explanation for the fact that at one point, I was pretty sure that there were raccoons in my room. Another time, it turns out, I told Brian "she's getting too heavy, you'll have to take her, I can't hold her anymore" while holding my empty arms in a cradling position.

Eventually, after several hours of dry-heaving that involved noises Brian described as "like Gozer from Ghostbusters," I fell asleep.

Things got better. My mom arrived, my swelling started to go down, my nausea eased away, and I could finally eat something. Still: it sucks to be in the hospital. I mean, it's just the most rotten place to be. Everyone had to put on gloves before coming into my room, which freaked me right out. I felt like I had the plague. I smelled bad, and I got reprimanded for taking a shower when I wasn't supposed to. I had to keep a hot-water compress on my face, and twice, a clamp came loose, the compress burst, and warm water soaked my whole bed. The IV kept jabbing into my flesh every time I bent my arm, which made using a breast pump excruciatingly painful. (Seriously, that was the most painful part of the whole experience. More on that later.)

Sometime on Thursday I got a visit from the hospital's infectious-disease specialist. She confirmed that all the tests had come back indicating MRSA. She said we'd basically have to scrub our entire house down with bleach and disinfect every cut or scrape, but that otherwise, we shouldn't be alarmed, because MRSA is everywhere. So wait. We shouldn't be alarmed? I'm just now coming to the certainty that, no, we don't need to be alarmed as long as we are careful. As long as we wash our hands frequently and pay attention to any broken skin, life can go on as usual. I don't like knowing that there's a strain of bacteria out there that can spread so fast and laugh in the face of so many otherwise-powerful drugs, but I'm calming down. Fear of germs is no way to live.

Here's the other thing. MRSA exists most likely because of overuse of antibiotics and possibly even antibacterial hand sanitizers. The bugs are outsmarting the bugspray, in a sense. The infectious-disease specialist told me this as she was slathering Purell on her hands, while my body was being pumped full of antibiotics. I remarked on the irony, and she nodded and acknowledged that yes, it can be a vicious cycle, and that's one of the things that's scary about this stuff. (Although, to be as accurate as possible, my understanding is that using antibiotics to treat bacterial infections was never the problem; the problem has been many people's insistence on taking them-- and some doctors' willingness in prescribing them-- for viral infections, for which they are essentially useless anyway.)

They kept me in the hospital until mid-morning on Friday. By then, the swelling had gone away entirely but there was still-- and IS still, as I type on Monday afternoon-- a spot on my cheek that is firm and well-defined and very obviously still full of fluid. This is disconcerting, though I am told it's normal when they drain something out of your flesh for something else (harmless fluids) to fill it back up and take a while to dissipate. I go back on Friday for a follow-up. I am ready for this to be done.

OK, so the other story, which might invoke some eyerolls from people who are sick of hearing me talk about it, but: I am a nursing mother. This is a fact. This is a part of the biology of my body right now. We'll leave aside for the moment Lea's diet, because I knew she wouldn't starve, and the wrenching emotions of having to stop nursing suddenly, because I would have had them being separated from my kid under any circumstances. Let's consider just the effects on my body, and it's still more than enough to make me absolutely livid about the way it was handled. Please, pretty please, oh health care professionals of Abingdon: understand that I am lactating. The fact that you don't think I need to be at this point does not make a difference. Here's what I expect from you:

(1) I expect you not to badger me about the reasons my 14-month-old is still nursing.
(2) I expect you to look for a nursing-friendly medication whenever possible. [NOTE: I did NOT say that I expect that one will always exist. I also do not expect you to advise that it's ok to nurse unless you're really sure it is. I'm not a fool. I know I need treatment, and I know sometimes that means no nursing. But let's start with a little creative problem solving and see if there's an alternative, ya know? Let's make that a priority.]
(3) I expect you to understand that stopping abruptly is not only incredibly painful, but puts me at a pretty high risk for a breast infection, which, I dunno, doesn't sound like something we want to mess with in my current state, so I'm going to need to pump. A lot.
(4) I expect you to find someone who can offer guidance on using a pump around the clock, since this is a matter of necessity, and I've never had to do it before.
(5) Seriously, I expect you to KNOW that this is a matter of necessity, that the milk needs to be dealt with somehow, that I'm not just being a stubborn hippie.
(6) And especially you, nurse-anesthetist, I expect you not to shake your head and say "You just gotta get over this nursing thing, honey, the time has come. This will be a good way to break her of it, since you're separated anyway. You know she's just gonna get more and more attached and spoiled, so this is a good thing." Right. I wish I hadn't been slipping under sedation. My tirade could have been a lot snappier, I bet.

In sum:

LEAVE YOUR PIMPLES THE HELL ALONE. YM magazine was right, girls: don't pop them. It's not just about scarring. If it bursts the wrong direction, or the skin breaks, and you happen to have been exposed to MRSA (which remember, is everywhere), you could be in trouble in a hurry. Last Sunday, I had a pimple. I don't remember intentionally popping it, but I was scrutinizing and messing around with all the little blemishes that had sprung up over the weekend. Monday, I had a pimple that felt a little funky. A little firm. Tuesday, I had a marble-sized lump. Wednesday, I was in the ER, and then in an isolation room, and then in surgery, and then barfing my brains out and seeing raccoons and swollen with poisonous milk and scared out of my mind.

So just don't do it. If you absolutely must intervene on the pimple life cycle, wash your face and hands beforehand AND afterwards. Dab on a little Neosporin for good measure.

Carry hand sanitizer with you. Don't use it all the live-long day; just use it after you've touched something like a towel at the gym or pool, or anything else that is likely to have come in contact with someone else's body fluids.

Above all, just pay attention to any broken skin. If it starts to seem weird, get it checked out. Keep your appointment with Dr. Armstrong. Don't mess around.

Oh yeah, Christmas

2008-01-14T19:50:00.000-05:00

In true Abingdon fashion, Christmas began the Friday before Thanksgiving, when the town's Christmas parade was held. It didn't stop for us until we took our tree down three days ago. So we got nearly two months of Christmassy goodness, which in my mind, has no downside. You can not have too much Christmas. That's final.

Highlights:

Driving through the light display at Bristol Motor Speedway, which actually involved driving on the track! Whoa! Even in my anti-Nascar little world, this was pretty cool. That curve was crazy steep! Besides, all this time, I've actually been a devoted consumer of the Official Cheese-Filled Snack of Nascar, so I guess it was just a matter of time before I caved and went to visit the place.

These were the best pictures I could get:

While we're at it, here's some more blurry twinkly-light pictures, from Richmond:

And a house in Brian's hometown with way more lights than any of its neighbors that still managed to look very classy:

Also in Richmond, we took a really nice hike in a nearby state park. We forgot to bring a carrier, but looked like the trail was paved the whole way.

It wasn't. Lea ended up getting carried Cleopatra-style in her stroller for a good portion of the two mile loop.

We saw something cool, especially considering we were hiking on the Beaver Dam Lake Trail:

We stayed in Virginia through Christmas day, celebrating that morning with the Johns family until we headed north to spend some time with Clan Campbell. Unfortunately, something went terribly wrong with my camera either that day or the next, and almost every picture came out looking foggy, so our documentation of actual Christmas is pretty limited. But, I'll leave you with these, and hope the cuteness comes through despite the weird haze:

Contemplating the meaninglessness of the last game of the season...

Books!

2008-01-11T19:46:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged by the lovely Liz, and it's a topic dear to my heart so I will happily play along.

One book that changed your life: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I started reading this knowing that it was considered a Great and Important Book. It was the first such book that made me realize that Great and Important Books don't have to be stiff, inaccessible, overly cerebral, or depressing. "But," you will say, "Catcher in the Rye IS depressing!" And I will say, no. It is fundamentally sad, but not depressing. It is beautifully sad. It doesn't wrench my heart now the same way it did when I was seventeen (and I've heard it theorized that if you don't read it when you're seventeen, it never packs the same punch), but it reminds me that at its best, fiction writing reflects the rawness of being alive in a way that non-fiction, somewhat ironically, just can't.

One book you have read more than once: Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum. I first read this as part of a fabulous sociology course in college, and it was the most honest and striking discussion of race issues that I had ever encountered. (If you're reading this and you've ever used the phrase "reverse racism" or remarked, wide-eyed, that "white people are going to be the new minority before we know it!" please read the book. Pretty please.) I read it again recently after a conversation with a friend reminded me that when you're a parent it's not enough to be "not racist"; the really important example is to be actively anti-racist.

One book you would want on a desert island: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Oh Bill Bryson, how I love thee (more on that later). Bryson does what I want to do: he writes about science, sometimes highly complex science, in a journalistic, fun, but still very brainy style. This book covers everything from the Big Bang to animal and plant diversity to the dawn of human society. It is delicious, but I've never read it from cover to cover in order; I just keep it by my bed and read snippets whenever I feel like it, and no matter where I start, it grabs me and makes me marvel at the beautiful intricacies of the universe.

One book that made you laugh: The Truth (with Jokes) by Al Franken. Franken actually makes me laugh out loud. Very very loud. I want to memorize snippets of his books and recite them to every person I meet.

One book that made you cry: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. When you read this book, you have to know what's coming, but it doesn't matter. I cried like a baby, and I didn't mind. I think I read it all again right away just to have such a pure and unabashed cry-fest.

One book you wish you had written: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Seriously, every single time I read one sentence of this book, the first thing I think is, "Man, I so wish I had written this book!" First of all, the process began by going to Georgia to start hiking the Appalachian trail. I could stop there and still have a jealous fire in my soul for Bryson. But then, he got to spend months researching the history of the trail and the region (hello, my most favorite place on earth!). And finally, he got to write it all up fueled by the genius and wit that is Bill Bryson's brain. Which is where the real jealousy comes in.

One book you are currently reading: Babycatcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy Vincent. I haven't gotten to the part where she becomes a midwife just yet (she's still an L&D nurse and Lamaze instructor at a huge hospital), but so far, so good. Vincent has a medical background and a decidedly non-crunchy perspective on birthing, which is really refreshing and intriguing, as much of the midwifery literature I've come across is pretty unscientific (on purpose, and that's fine, but I know from my experience at the Birth Center that there is another side to the midwifery coin, and I think this book will come pretty close to that perspective).

One book you are meaning to read: The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. Eric got me this for Christmas a year ago, and I know it will be good, and I want to read it, and as soon as I get over the fact that it's long, I will.

Because I know she will enjoy this homework assignment, and because she needs to blog more, I tag my dear mother. (Anyone else is free to answer, but I'm only going to pester my mom.)

Goings on

2008-01-10T19:57:00.000-05:00

One of these days I'll share some Christmas pictures, but until I get around to that, I want to make sure I don't totally fall out of the blogging habit. Originally I was just going to whine and vent about the fact that this week, Lea's eating and sleeping habits have gone totally down the tubes, but that wouldn't have made anything better, so we'll leave it alone. Eventually she will start sleeping longer than one-hour stretches at night again, right? Her molars will come in, right? She will eat more than two tiny morsels of squash, right? Please?

Anyway...

Politics: I heard a speech by John Kerry today that was more moving than any speech he made while campaigning for himself. Probably because he was talking about Barack Obama, for whom he announced his endorsement. The internets are a-buzzing with speculation that Kerry's endorsement adds up to a "death sentence" for Obama, which is stupid and perplexing. Anyway, here's part of what Kerry said:

Some have suggested in this campaign that Barack is guilty of raising false hopes. So I ask you, I ask you, was it a false hope when Thomas Jefferson said that the United States should make available to every child in our nation a free public education? Was it a false hope when Franklin Roosevelt said that half of our senior citizens no longer had to live in poverty? Was it a false hope when Harry Truman said that every veteran of World War II was gonna go to college on the G.I. bill? Was it a false hope when John Kennedy said we're gonna go to the moon in a decade? My friends, the only charge that rings false in one that tells you not to hope for a better tomorrow! Don't- don't let anyone tell you to accept the downsizing of the American Dream, not in our America, not today, and not tomorrow, when Barack Obama is President of the United States.

As someone who has spent the last seven years trying to occasionally give our cringe-worthy President the benefit of the doubt by remembering that the real power belongs to the people he hires to help him make decisions, I am stunned to be able to imagine an America led by a President who I would actually want to set the tone for our nation-- to do more than surround himself with smart people-- to be the energy behind moving in a very new direction-- to define the presidency as a position of integrity and humility as well as strength. It is refreshing and exciting to remember Presidents who have done this, and I love it. I'm getting excited. I admit it. Hope, false hope, whatever. I like Obama, I like what he's doing to the campaign, and I am certain that the Democratic party is improved by paying attention to him.

.

In other news, I have to decide whether or not to start working an 8-hours-per-week grantwriting job. I have an interview scheduled for Monday, but I'm feeling very conflicted by a number of issues, not the least of which is the nature of the job itself. I don't want to get into too much detail, but let's just say the employer doesn't seem to really know what he's asking me to do. (He offered no details about his expectations, for one, and the pay he offered is about one-quarter the going rate for a grantwriter with a little experience in a somewhat nearby big city. Sure, I have a very, very, VERY little experience, and this ain't the big city, but one-quarter?? Really?? Not that that's the main issue here, but it makes me think the guy hasn't really looked into what it means to hire a grantwriter.) In some cases, I think creating your own job can be a very good thing, but in this case it makes me nervous. Nice guy, good cause, but very likely total chaos in figuring out what the heck I'm doing. Not sure about that-- although I could work from home in my pajamas, any hours I want, and adding "grantwriting" to my resume might be worth it in the end... unless it leads to a potential future employer asking how much I made, and then here we go again with the miniscule pay. What to do...?

.

We took Lea to the gigantic playground twice this week (like the one at East Ward Elementary school, D-towners). It was 65+ degrees, which is creepy big-picture-wise, but fun for the moment. I had been really worried about the beginning of her career as a walker coinciding with months of being cooped up inside. So it was a nice little bonus to get out and let her chase the big kids around and play the huge set of chimes and fall down in the wood chips and jump right back up with a grin. Of course, I didn't actually help build this particular playground, as I did at East Ward. And yes. Coating nails with a bar of soap so they are easier for the workers to drive in is helping.

.

We're 3 episodes away from finishing (again) Season Two of Lost before we race through Season Three, in preparation for Season Four to begin three weeks from tonight. I freaking love this show. I sometimes love to hate this show when it makes no sense, but mostly I just love it. Of course, Season Four might be only six or eight episodes long, and that would be heartbreaking, but that's life. As long as someday, in my lifetime, they tie up all the loose ends, and I mean ALL the loose ends, including Adam and Eve, including exactly what the monster is, including a VERY precise history of the Dharma initiative, including how the crap Richard Alpert doesn't age, including how Desmond goes on his crazy time-loop journey. I need answers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse! I need to believe that someday you will provide them. That is all.

And they're back!

2008-01-05T14:39:00.000-05:00

After being on the road for seventeen days, we're finally home. It was supposed to be sixteen days. We were supposed to get home last night. Then, about 150 miles from home, Lea threw up. So we stopped, changed her clothes, got back on the road, and she threw up again. Assuming it was carsickness (we'd been on some bumpy roads), we decided to stop in Blacksburg and get a hotel. If Lea's motion sickness is anything like mine, I figured, she's not going to feel better unless she's out of the car for at least a few hours. This was at 10:30 pm, so our options were limited.

We stopped at the Super 8 and Brian drove the last 100 miles to Abingdon to bring the cats home (oh yeah, did I mention the cats were crying in their carriers during all of this?), unloaded the car, turned the heat up in the house, and turned right around to come back to Blacksburg.

Meanwhile...

It wasn't carsickness, but a nasty stomach bug. Poor little kid was vomiting about every half hour, until she was so tired she was sprawled face down on the hotel bed dry-heaving practically in her sleep. She kept looking at me when it happened-- like, "what is happening to me?" It was excruciating.

Anyway. She finally fell asleep at about 3:30 and we all slept fitfully off and on until about 8:30. Then we loaded up the car one last time and drove home. Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-19T15:06:00.001-05:00

We're on the road for the next two weeks, so internet time will be limited.

Merry merry Christmas.

Be wonder-filled.

Year in Review, Part 4: Attachment

2007-12-17T23:20:00.000-05:00

Over the summer, someone asked me, "How attached are you to Lea?" Admitting it sounded like a weird question, she went on to explain that a friend of hers (I think) was planning to opt out of attending a wedding because she didn't want to have to be away from her baby.

I remember thinking at the time that All the Mothers of the Internet would have a feeding frenzy over that question, as they tend to do, leading to pages upon pages of debate over (1) what constitutes a sufficiently attached parent, or (2) whether it makes any sense to be trying to quantify parent-child attachment, or even (3) if putting such an emphasis on attachment might be counterproductive in the long run. Feathers would be ruffled! Drama would ensue! Lines would be drawn in the sand!

[I have to insert some self-mockery into this, by the way, because every once in a while I'm slightly unsettled the fact that 90% of the new mothers I "know" and rely upon for support are virtually strangers who I only know online. But, I suck it up because I live in a tiny town and that's the way it goes.]

Anyway, to answer the original question, I consider myself highly attached to Lea. I generally love being around her, and I tend to assume that she goes where I go. Sometimes I absolutely need and want an extended break, and sometimes I go places where it's not practical or possible to take an infant, and that's a good thing. But for the most part, caring for her in the way I have come to prefer as a matter of routine usually means a pretty close proximity.

Take the wedding scenario: if you're breastfeeding, it's not as simple as getting childcare, or even as simple as pumping and storing milk for the baby ahead of time. Because long term, if you want to keep a good milk supply, you've got to be emptying the breast with relative frequency. (This is also necessary to prevent some serious, serious discomfort and hugeness, two things that tend to be even more pronounced in formal wear.) If the baby's not with you, you have to pump again. So, going to a wedding and reception, even across town, means you have to be willing to find a place to hang out topless for half an hour with your pump. So my answer is yes, I'll go to a wedding without Lea, but I'm going to be a little bit more snobby and selective about it. The one non-family wedding I've been invited to since Lea's birth was the absolutely pump-worthy nuptials of my friends Julie and Ben. So I did all of the above, and it was a fabulous evening. But even with all of that work, I was treated to this priceless comment from a more-than-a-little-drunk friend, late in the evening: "You have more cleavage than you came with!" Just sayin'.

All of this is to say that tending to not be far from your baby, a hallmark of "attachment parenting" (and yes, this is a thing, for those unversed in such lingo), sometimes has as much or more to do with logistics as it does with ideology. I don't mean to brush off the virtues of being emotionally attached-- because I strive for that too-- but I think it's worth noting that I have come across people who would seriously admonish me for not taking Lea to the wedding with me (or skipping it), because it necessitated me being away from her for something like 13 hours. For some people, the ideology is all-encompassing; it's almost like, instead of making individual parenting decisions and allowing their parenting style to be shaped by those decisions, some parents commit themselves to a style first, and consult the "rules" of that style every time a new decision must be made.

It's weird. But I'll admit: it's crazy enticing. Parenting is freaking terrifying, and it feels safer sometimes to glom yourself on to a popular way of doing things and check your every instinct with other people who've chosen that way. You'll either be validated (feels great!) or you'll be corrected (sucks, but happens less and less frequently as you spend more and more time absorbing yourself in the "right answers"-- you'll start to see your instincts looking eerily like all those other people's). So eventually, if you conform to a certain ideology and look only to like-minded people for support, all you're going to get is validation. What could be better?

Charting your own path is hugely uncertain, but it's better. It has to be. This is why I will never call myself an "attachment parenting" mom, as much as I try to foster attachment with my daughter. I do probably 75% of the things that people look for to establish AP cred, as it were, so I can probably continue to pass, but I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with the way the term is sometimes used to denigrate people who do things differently.

Let me tip my hat here to Al Franken, who pretty much sums up why I'm a liberal in "Loving America, the Al Franken Way", a chapter of a recent book of his that brilliantly illustrates why measuring someone's patriotism by how much they "love America" makes no sense: it's just more complicated than that, and anyone who says otherwise is rewriting history. "Salem witch trials," he begins, "bad. Revolutionary war, good...

Slavery- bad
Ending slavery- good, but hard
Civil War reenactments- weird
Massacring Native Americans and breaking our treaties with them- bad
Indian Casinos- ?
Child labor during Industrial Revolution- bad
Child labor mowing lawns and baby-sitting- character-building

<snip. Oh, and read the rest of the funny and moving list in Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them>

Making mistakes- bad, but inevitable
Correcting mistakes- good, but not inevitable
Calling those who point out mistakes "unpatriotic"- itself unpatriotic
Owning up to our mistakes- brave
America- home of the brave

(Thanks, Al.)

I have seen almost every parenting decision, the totally mundane and the hugely significant, broken down into the "attached" way and the "detached" way, and sometimes, I buy it. But sometimes, it only serves to draw a boundary, and why do that unless you're interested in separating yourself?

Seeking attachment with your child, the PCJ way:

Breastfeeding- the gold standard nutrition-wise, and in many cases, emotionally beneficial for mom and baby. Should be encouraged and supported by law, healthcare providers, and workplace policy. Preferable for optimal health, but not essential for good health. Not always easy or possible.

Breastfeeding past infancy- sometimes still the best way to soothe and/or nourish your child. Sometimes not at all necessary. Not weird or wrong.

T-shirts for baby boys that say "boob man"- a little creepy, but whatever.

Formula- usually manufactured by companies that have done unscrupulous things to make a buck. Still, a net positive when there is no breastmilk to be had.

Co-sleeping- cozy and convenient, if you and your kid can sleep that way. Very safe (just as safe as a crib) as long as you aren't impaired by drugs, alcohol, or medication. Impossible if your baby needs her own space. Or if you do, for that matter.

Cribs- Safe beds for babies. Not cages, people.

Baby-wearing- fun and eye-catching (and sometimes eyebrow-raising, which is half the fun). Allows for most excursions to be baby-friendly. Good exercise. Easy and comfortable, if your kid tolerates it. An upright wrestling match if she doesn't. Sometimes hot and gross in the summertime. Sometimes expensive.

Baby bucket- a carseat, best used in the car (and to and from said car). Probably not very hip-growth-friendly to be in for long chunks of the day.

Responding immediately to every cry- probably best for young babies. Increasing wiggle room as baby ages.

Cloth-diapering- earth friendly and usually frugal, but not an attachment issue.

Vaccines- hooo boy. Strongly urged by the vast majority of people who've collected and analyzed the data for themselves. Otherwise, sometimes scary as crap, counterintuitive, and hugely complicated, emotionally and otherwise. Often manufactured by companies who have done unscrupulous things to make a buck. Still, not an attachment issue.

Being a full-time parent- an awesome thing to do if it doesn't threaten your financial security or mental health.

Parenting, period- complicated.

Being flexible- essential.

Relying on the guidance of loved ones- it takes a village, right?

Relying too much on the rulebooks of strangers- nerve-wracking and self-doubt-inducing.

Watching a child grow- humbling.

Humility- a gift.

Attachment- almost inevitable. Regardless of all of the above.

snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes

2007-12-16T20:29:00.000-05:00

It didn't accumulate on the ground too much, but it's very pretty to look at.

Today

2007-12-01T16:37:00.001-05:00

Lea took about 10 steps at the library. So far, she'd taken one or two here and there, but tends to drop to crawling whenever she has a destination in mind. Well, it seems the determining factor is whether her hands are available. At the library, she had a book in one hand and a puppet in the other, and had her eye on the sliding-bead-table thing across the room. She took a couple steps, paused, and glanced at the chair right beside her, which she ordinarily would have grabbed onto for the next bunch of steps. But then realized her hands were occupied, so she bent her knees slightly like she was thinking about crawling. Again, hands required... so she just kept waddling until she got to her destination. We were so dumbstruck, we didn't even follow her. Then she slipped and banged her chin on the table and screamed like a banshee. Bad parents. Yay baby!

It's already been obvious that she's not one of those babies who takes one step and never looks back. This kid loves to crawl, and has been crawling all afternoon, even after her library adventure. Hey, no hurry.

At 12:37

2007-11-21T12:20:00.000-05:00

... we met Lea.

Holy smokes, what a year! I am very lucky to have such a great kid.

A simpler, more cat-friendly time

2007-11-20T10:55:00.000-05:00

Poor kitties. They had so much more lap time, even when I had no lap at all.

One of my favorite things about the end of pregnancy was that Rita really seemed to know what was going on. Her brother was oblivious, but she seemed to have some kind of woman's intuition going on, and took great interest in, and care around, my belly. Sweet girl.

Year in Review, Part 3: Stuff

2007-11-18T21:33:00.000-05:00

This is just for fun, as I reminisce about all the last-minute planning I was doing a year ago, trying to figure out what we needed to have on hand.

Looking back, I'm actually very glad that the home we brought Lea to on her first day of life was a one-bedroom apartment, so we had no nursery to fill with things that might have seemed necessary at the time. It was sort of sad to not be able to decorate, but I'm guessing that it saved us a lot of money because we had to be really intentional with the space we had, which meant, among other things, no cushy "glider" or any other furniture. (Although, one of those gliders would be lovely, of course.)

I've been meaning for a while to reflect on the stuff of Lea's babyhood, what we've needed, what we haven't, what has been surprisingly useful or useless, and what I would recommend without reservation to anyone with a new baby. So here goes.

First of all, what are the bare necessities?

-You've got to feed the baby, so breasts or bottles/formula. I was lucky to have phenomenal breastfeeding support, so nursing started to go well pretty early. All I needed was a nursing pillow (the big brands are Boppy and the cringe-worthy "My Brest Friend" pillows. I liked the Boppy because it seemed more versatile and was prettier). If you're nursing, I also recommend buying a bunch of bottles of Gatorade and leaving them on every surface near every chair you might find yourself feeding the baby. In those earliest days, I would always get horribly thirsty as soon as we started. Then I'd be stuck with nothing to drink. The Gatorade was so satisfying to my exhausted post-partum self.

-Diapers and wipes. Don't get a ton of diapers in one size; buy one small pack of preemie size and one small pack of newborn size. When you get the baby home, open the N pack. If they're too big, then open the P pack. If not, leave the P's unopened and have somebody return them for you, and bring you some ice cream with the refunded money. Pampers Swaddlers are pricey but practically failsafe. I think it's worth it for those first weeks when everything is so new. You want to have diapers you don't have to worry about. (And, psst, even though we're cloth diapering in the daytime now, Lea still wears disposables at night, and her tiny butt still fits in the largest size Swaddlers. So we splurge on those since we only use one a day at this point.)

-Clothes. You're probably going to be doing a lot of laundry no matter what. I can't remember why, but we did laundry almost every day (towels and sheets, I guess?). So we did fine with just 4 or 5 good footed sleepers. Then after about a week, as it became clear what kinds of garments worked well, and what size we should buy, we went out and got some more clothes.

-A place for the baby to sleep. Lots of new parents I know keep their newborns right in the bed with them, but we discovered early on that Lea highly preferred having her own space for sleeping. Still, it was easiest if she was right next to me for nighttime feedings, so we set up a Pack-n-Play right beside the bed. This was pretty perfect. We kept her there for four months.

-A carseat. Pretty much the only thing I wouldn't buy used. We found the "baby bucket" style (which clicks in and out of the base, installed in your car, pretty easily) to be a good bet for a winter baby. We could get her all bundled into it indoors and transport her to the car, click her in, and not have to fuss with a lot of cumbersome outerwear. The downside to this is that it gets outgrown, usually well before you can turn the baby forward-facing, so you'll have to replace it with another, larger infant seat.

Not necessary, but I highly recommend:

-A sling. For newborns, I recommend the affordable and cozy Moby Wrap. It might look complicated, but it's really not so bad. This will allow you to get the baby all snug against your chest, where he/she will probably fall asleep, giving you the opportunity to do dishes, laundry, go get the mail, or just get up and move around on your feet for a while. Plus, it's great to take out in public when you're ready to do that. I've also heard really good reviews of some pouch-style slings (which just go over one shoulder instead of both), such as the Kangaroo Korner Adjustable Fleece Pouch. This never worked for us because Lea liked to be upright, so the Moby was the way to go. (Plus, there's a way to cradle the baby in a wrap much like a pouch would do anyway. Basically, a wrap has a learning curve but is ridiculously versatile). The only downside to a Moby is that it's very stretchy, so once your baby hits a certain weight, it doesn't work as well. If you want to keep wrapping, you'll want to look for a woven, non-stretchy wrap. Which brings me to the other downside of the Moby, which is that it's kind of a gateway drug to the world of gorgeous, cozy, designer baby-carriers. Which I covet. Embarrassingly so. I've never been a clothes person, but man, I drool over, for example, the German-style Didymos Simon wrap. (For the record, I have been pretty successful at reigning in my lust for these things, and have only purchased one woven wrap, used.) The reason this method is so comfortable is because the baby's weight is not hanging off you; it's bound to your chest, and distributed evenly across the shoulders. It actually feels not much different than pregnancy. In fact, that's kind of the rationale for baby-wearing; "nine in, nine out" is the rallying cry of the baby-wearing "movement," if there is such a thing-- the idea being that gestation sort of extends throughout infancy, and babies benefit from being held close to their parents for much of that first year and beyond. It's also great in the winter. I never worry that Lea is cold if I have her wrapped onto me.

-A breast pump. Pumping is a total chore, but it's good to try to build up a stash of frozen milk. I wouldn't recommend trying to start until breastfeeding is well established, though, because it can be frustrating and demoralizing. ("A half an ounce? In twenty-five minutes?") It's important to remember that the baby is more efficient at getting the milk out. Anyway, I found the Avent Isis hand pump to be pretty user-friendly and simple.

-Some kind of baby "container," even if you're co-sleeping. I just think it's important to be able to have an absolutely safe place to leave the baby for a minute or two if you need to. For a newborn, a garage-sale bouncy seat can serve this purpose without taking a lot of space. For an older baby, you might do well with an Exersaucer (also easy to find at garage sales).

-Cloth diapers. Seriously, this is a million times easier than it sounds. We got started when Lea was about four months old, with the assistance of jilliansdrawers.com, who offer a "Try Cloth for $10" program. You pay a deposit and they send you a variety of highly-rated modern cloth diapers-- no pins or plastic pants!-- and you try it all out for two weeks and send back what you don't want. They'll refund your deposit minus $10 and the cost of anything you keep. Through this system, we discovered Fuzzi Bunz, which are just as easy to use as disposable diapers. Fuzzi Bunz are a "pocket diaper," which means they have a waterproof outer layer, a fleece-y inner layer, and a slot in the back where you can stuff an absorbent insert in between the layers. Easy peasy. Landfill friendly. We just wash and dry them at home every third day. This has already saved us a good chunk of money. (It's an investment at first, to be sure, but we broke even months ago.)

Things we never, or almost never, used:

-Specialized burp cloths and changing pad covers. We just used old towels for both of these purposes.

-The swing. Luckily, this was a hand-me-down. Lea never liked being in it, so it just never got used.

-Most of the cute blankets we got as gifts. If you decide to swaddle your baby, and your baby is on the bigger side, the flannel receiving blankets you typically get will not be big enough, so you'll need to find a larger blanket (or two) anyway. Other than that, blankets didn't serve much of a purpose for us. Lea is just now sleeping with a blanket over her for most of the night, and most experts advise against putting them in cribs at all.

-In the very beginning, socks. Socks just didn't stand a chance. So anything with built-in feet was much preferred.

-Microwave steam sterilizer for bottle and pump parts. We just washed this stuff by hand or in the dishwasher.

-Baby bathtub. We used it a few times very early on, but it quickly became easiest to just take Lea into the big tub with one of us.

Things we never had, and didn't miss:

-A jogging stroller. We actually just got one on loan while a friend's family lives abroad for six months, and it's nice, but not even close to necessary for a non-jogger (don't laugh; I know plenty of people who have gotten them just because it seems like something you're supposed to have).

-A Diaper Genie or anything similar. We just use regular trashcans and empty them frequently.

-A mirror to put behind the carseat.

-A second carseat base, for which Babies 'R Us implored us to reconsider. This is a total racket; the carseat can go in any car, base or not. It takes thirty extra seconds to get it belted in, but 49.99 for an extra base is just foolishness.

Things that are useful but I mostly just love them because they're fun:

-Babylegs.

Legwarmers for babies. Painfully cute. A great extra warm layer on the legs without an extra step for diaper changes. Also, useful anytime of year with a crawling baby (especially if you have cheap carpet, which can tear up those sweet little knees). This might be one of my favorite things about motherhood. Legwarmers! For babies! Sigh.

-Baby clothes by H&M. Really well made, durable, and simple designs (solid color onesies, pants, and the best heavy cotton tights I can find.) The other cool thing is that they tend to be cut with more room for cloth diapers. Some other brands are true to size on Lea except for her big cloth-covered booty.

-Books by Sandra Boynton. We're still in board book terrain-- Lea will destroy anything made of paper-- and Boynton's cute rhymes and illustrations are the winners so far.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things, but that's just what comes to mind right now. All in all, I feel like we've done a decent job at thinking critically about what is actually necessary, with the very occasional splurge. Oh, and one last, probably obvious thing:

-A camera! Make sure it's easy to use, transport, and charge. Use frequently. If you're like me and never got into the picture- taking routine before, force yourself to get into it! It might seem like a hassle at times, but it's a good habit to establish. Now I just need to force myself into the craftiness habit and do something creative with all these pictures...

Tis the season?

2007-11-16T20:48:00.001-05:00

Tonight was the Abingdon town Christmas parade. Awesome marching bands. Candy. And about a hundred church-sponsored floats, including one that read...

Such-and-such Freewill Baptist Church
Pastor Junior Gobble.

Junior Gobble.

That is all.

"Other Mother" is a verb

2007-11-14T22:33:00.000-05:00

It's true: I get a lot of my mothering support and advice from a great little online forum for women, including a lot of new mothers.

Some women there have coined the term "other mother," used as a verb, as in: "Ugh, I totally got other-mothered by an old lady at the bank who said Petunia was too fat and I should really watch her weight," or "Holy other-mothering! My sister-in-law told me not to dress Bobby as a cat for Halloween because it's too girly and will turn him gay."

Well, I've been lucky enough to pretty much just be a spectator in that conversation, until today.
Today was my first really bad experience with an Other Mother. It was a grayish, gloomy day, but unseasonably mild, so I decided that we'd take a nice long walk before it gets really cold tomorrow. We hiked all the way to the post office across town. I had Lea in several layers of clothes, and held snugly against my chest in a wrap-style sling. By time we were almost back home again, I was sweating.

So as I turned onto Walden Road, this car passed me, then slammed on the brakes and reversed. I figured the woman was going to ask for directions. Instead, when she rolled down the window, she asked, "Um, are you ok?"

Me: "Yeah, I'm fine!"

Her, furrowing brow: "You don't need a ride or anything?"

Me, smiling: "Nope, I'm just--"

Her, dismayed: "You're just--" (pause) "--taking a walk?"

Me: "Yep!"

He: "Well, it's just that I saw the baby, and I thought--"

Me: "Oh, we're ok, thank you!"

Her: "It's just--" (pause) "--it's cold out."

Me: "Oh! Um..."

Her: "Yeah, it's very cold for a baby to be..." (at this point, she was shaking her head and speaking to me as though I was twelve.)

Me (perplexed): "It's sixty degrees!"

She sighed, literally threw up her hands, and drove away. When I got home, I checked. It was sixty-four degrees. Am I crazy? Isn't that a perfectly baby-friendly temperature? The woman had a "Baby on Board" decal in her window, and she can't have been more than five years older than me, so what the hell? How is this a reasonable thing to say to a stranger?

Year in Review, Part 2: Care

2007-11-08T15:08:00.000-05:00

A year ago today, I was dining on a steady rotation of strawberry jell-o, chicken broth, and chunks of watermelon.

This is because a year ago yesterday, I had a nasty stomach bug that had rendered me unable to handle any food or drink for a whole night and day. Aside from the misery of a 24-hour stomach bug, I was having contractions. It's not surprising; it's why there's folk wisdom out there that says you could theoretically induce labor by downing a castor oil and orange juice smoothie. If your digestive system is rumbling, your uterus might decide to play along. Mine did.

So after a night of no sleep (me) and election-season-induced sleeping-like-the-dead (Brian, who didn't even realize I was up and sick), we called the Birth Center at about 5 am. I hesitated to do this, because I was fairly certain it wasn't real labor, and I didn't want to be one of those crazies who calls at the drop of a hat as soon as she hits full-term. Still, I knew there was a risk that I'd get dehydrated, and that's no good for mama or baby. I looked at their handy "when to call" checklist, which listed "illness," so I took them at their word . Peggy, the midwife on call, said to come in. I think we packed a bag, but I knew I wasn't going to have a baby that day.

I didn't, of course. What did happen was this: they monitored my contractions, which were faint and very far-between. They reassured me constantly that I did the right thing by coming in. And they got me all set up in the living room adjacent to the birthing suites, snuggled under a blanket on the couch with an I.V. and a cup of ice chips. I drifted in and out of sleep while Brian tried to find something worth watching on daytime network T.V. Every once in a while, they tested my urine to make sure I was getting sufficiently rehydrated. Eventually, I was. And once I was able to keep a glass of water down, they sent me home.

This is what I loved about the Birth Center. I loved my care during birth, to be sure. But what I find myself continuing to marvel about is the the way I felt completely at ease through my entire pregnancy, even the parts where I was barfing my brains out. They could have sent me elsewhere once they realized there was almost no chance that labor was imminent. They didn't have to devote a student midwife to the job of nursing me through an ordinary stomach bug. And perhaps I got lucky, and they wouldn't have been able to do those things at all if there was more than one laboring woman in the building at the time. Regardless: what a revelation, to not even have to set foot in a waiting room-- to have the receptionist call me by my first name when I trudged in the front door, puke bag in hand-- to immediately be ushered to a comfortable room where one person would look after me (and my husband) the entire day.

The routine appointments, too, were top notch. We never had to wait more than a few minutes for the midwife to be ready for us. Once she did, we always had an entire half hour to ask questions, go over any medical or technical matters like the prenatal screening options available to us, get information on newborn care and breastfeeding, and listen to that quick little heartbeat for as long as we wanted. On top of all that-- and this is so important-- I was actively encouraged to be a full participant in my own care. They taught me how to test my own urine for sugar and protein levels, and read my own chart, and understand every detail of the physiological process of birth. Nothing was done without a thorough explanation of why it was being done. There was nothing assembly-line about it.

Only once did I have a negative interaction. One midwife gave me a really hard time about gaining a lot of weight one month. It ruffled my feathers to the extent that I intentionally avoided scheduling subsequent appointments with her for quite a long time. But when it came down to it, she redeemed herself and then some; it turned out she was the one who saw us for all of the appointments and testing that occurred after the due date, as I went further and further overdue and we had to talk about the possibility of a Pitocin induction at the hospital. She was frank about the reality of it, but reassuring and very kind. She also connected us to a pregnancy-friendly acupuncturist.

Lucky for control-freak me, the induction was avoided, and you know the rest. Just hours after my bring-on-the-contractions needlework, my water broke and 13 hours later, Lea was born. We had the Birth Center delivery we'd been hoping for, and I couldn't have been happier with the experience. I know I'm tremendously lucky, I do. I thank God for the day of Lea's birth for a million reasons, and the fact that things went pretty much just as planned is a huge one. I know that I could have easily required a medical induction or even a c-section, and that ending up at the hospital could have been the reality for me as it is for about 20% of Birth Center clients. But the other great thing about that system is that Birth Center midwives have hospital privileges at Bryn Mawr, so they can stay by your side and even continue to be your primary caregiver for a lot of things. I do believe that even if I'd ended up with every intervention known to obstetrics, I would have felt very good about the care I received from those women. In fact, one of the things that moved me the most was the attention paid (at a breastfeeding support group meeting) to the complicated feelings of disappointment and even grief expressed by women who were healing from c-sections. It's a feeling I couldn't relate to, but I knew for sure that the group's facilitator was making a difference to those new mothers whose plans had to change.

I know, I know. Enough with the love-fest. But I can't help myself. How can I give too much credit to the team of people who helped transform me from a terrified girl who got pregnant about five years too soon to a confident woman, ready to fully embrace the transition to motherhood? By making me feel capable of handling pregnancy and labor with the strength of mind and body that I already had, my caregivers in turn helped assure me that I was capable too of feeding and soothing a newborn, of nurturing and stimulating an infant, of encouraging and protecting a toddler, and of every task ahead of me as a mother.

This is why midwifery matters to me: it's not just about how the baby gets out, it's really not. It's about how the woman becomes a mother. In giving birth, she is born. Maybe that's a philosophy that's way too out there for some, and I'm ok with that. I don't pretend that this approach is right or even interesting to every mother, and I have no delusions that free-standing birth centers are the way of the future for the majority of even routine pregnancies. But I hope that the number of women for whom it's an option continues to grow, and perhaps it's something I'll even be a part of from the other end one day. It's worth thinking about. Hell, I'm still thinking about it every day, a whole year later. Maybe I am onto something after all.

a very strange phone call

2007-11-07T15:50:00.000-05:00

Me: Hello?
Person on phone: I'd like to speak to the mister or the misses of the house?
Me: Ok...
Person on phone: Is this the misses of the house?
Me: Um, yes?
Person on phone: That's great!
Me: ...
Person on phone: This is the misses Jones?
Me: Johns?
Person on phone: I'm calling from Dish Network, how are you doing today?
Me: I'm fine.
Person on phone: That'd be great! Now can I just ask you, Mister Jones, are you a cable?
Me: What?
Person on phone: Can I just ask, are you--
Me: We have cable, and we're not interested in switching, thanks. Please take me off your list.

This was mostly strange because the person calling spoke 100% unaccented English. Impressive, considering how screwy the syntax was. I also couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. Off-putting, and amusing.

Happy Election Day!

2007-11-06T21:03:00.000-05:00

I mean, Happy Birthday Eric!

Top Five Things I love about my brother:

(5) He's a great writer.
(4) He didn't mind hanging out with me, doing things like watching A Christmas Story on VHS, when I was having a particularly lonely freshman year at UMD.
(3) He's a genuine friend to my husband. This is one of my favorite things in life.
(2) He knows by heart: most of the stories (and commercials) collected on the Rocky and Bullwinkle marathon our parents taped when we were little; the best episodes of Friends; all the lines of both hookers on Fargo; and even a fair amount of an Agatha Christie BBC movie that I'm pretty sure was only ever checked out of the Chester County Library by me.
(1) He delights in small creatures like cats and my kid.

Hope it's been a good one, and local election coverage is exciting, but not so exciting it keeps you working all night long. Happy Day!

Rounding out October

2007-11-02T17:10:00.000-04:00

Still hunting for the perfect fall image, we took the camera to Park's Mill, which actually still grinds cornmeal on the giant stone mill. (They also serve barbecue). The mill is located just south of town, down the most mountain-y side road in the immediate vicinity, so just driving there is a lovely experience. Lea really loved watching the water coming down the mill run and going through the wheel.

When Halloween actually rolled around, we had many events to choose from. There was a children's costume exhibition Saturday evening (evening=bewildered, sleepy baby), a church festival on Sunday, spooky-story-time at the library on Tuesday, and actual trick-or-treating on Wednesday.

Fun times with neighbors Krista and Gregory

And get this: on Halloween, as we walked to Zazzy's, a black cat crossed our path. Yeee-ikes.

Bedtime for Lea the Lion.

Stars Hollow South?

2007-11-02T16:52:00.000-04:00

Last weekend we set out to capture the essence Abingdon in fall, which is pretty stunning so far. What's funny is that they have decorated the town a lot like I remember elementary school; cornstalks, bales of hay, pumpkins and gourds. They even covered this little statue on main street with a skeleton costume. Anyway, it's been really nice to be here this past month, especially as the weather has gotten more and more fall-like. We took these pictures on a mild, grey Friday afternoon, and on the way to and from the Farmer's market on a very chilly, clear Saturday morning.

And of course we had a beautiful model for all of it.

Travels

2007-11-02T16:37:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I made the 8-hour drive to PA with Lea on my own. This was the first time managing a drive that length solo since the night we moved, when Lea was not even 3 months old. So I was pretty nervous but it ended up being really pretty manageable. We made two stops on the way up: one at a rest stop just south of Harrisonburg, where we had a nice picnic lunch and some good crawling-time, and one on the PA turnpike just to use the bathroom. I was so proud of my little girl for being such a good sport in the car that whole time-- not to mention facing backwards. For the ride home, I did an experimental night-time drive, and I think this is the way of the future for us. I left Exton at 6pm (just an hour before Lea's bedtime), but she had skipped her afternoon nap, so she was out by 6:45 with barely a whimper, and essentially slept for the entire drive. I did have to stop to nurse her once, but she went right back to sleep. Score.

Here are some photos from our visit Highland Orchards, the source of great nostalgia for me every perfectly crisp fall morning I can't get there. It was a Saturday in October, so of course a madhouse, but Lea had fun with the animals (and the other kids, too).

I don't know what was up with this llama, but she/he lay down very purposefully, and the goat immediately climbed up on her/his neck. So weird:

No, Lea, I don't think the goat wants to eat that rock.

Trike-a-thon

2007-11-02T16:30:00.000-04:00

Lea's infant program is part of the Sinking Springs preschool, which hosted a Trike-a-thon to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Obviously, it was geared more towards kids who could do actual triking, but it was fun to participate anyway.

Lea's not too sure about Rayna's help...

Year in Review, Part 1: Work

2007-10-30T19:20:00.001-04:00

I've been craving a reason to write something slightly brainier than "Here's a picture of my cute daughter!", but let's be honest; most of my brain is, in fact, occupied with All Things Lea. That's just the way it is. So, a compromise: I'm going to spend the next month or so reflecting on where I was a year ago, and what has changed since then-- for me, my family, and the little creature who has changed all of us so profoundly. I'm also hoping to do some deeper thinking about some bigger issues relating to motherhood and childcare.

Part of the reason Big Changes are so heavy on my mind right now is because just last week when I was in Pennsylvania, I went in to visit my old place of work at Habitat Philadelphia, and realized that it's been just about exactly a year since my last day of work. October 28th, 2006 was the last day I got up in the morning and went to work. Wow. I have officially had ZERO income for a year now.

Here's something funny: I remember when I was in 8th grade, I was in a community theatre production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I was having a discussion with another girl in the play, Lauren, about our future goals. She said, "Well, I only have two things I know for sure I definitely want to do sometime in the future: play Maria in West Side Story and get married." I surprised myself by answering "Hey! All I want to do is play ________ in ________ and get married!" (Who knows the answer?)

But wait. Let me clarify. I don't mean to say that at 14 years old, I thought the key to my future fulfillment was simply to find a husband and rock the best non-dancing female lead in all of musical theatre. I knew I would want to do other things, including to pursue some kind of professional career. But the question then, as now, remains: what?

I'm trying not to put a ton of pressure on myself to figure it all out real quickly, but I must say that having a child complicates things in a huge way. There are some days when I kind of think that if I had established myself on a definite career path pre-Lea, I would be itching to re-enter that path right about NOW. She's less mom-dependent, physically and otherwise, and I'm starting to feel a certain brain atrophy. I miss being challenged intellectually and working with other adults. I miss problem-solving.

Then there are other days when I can't imagine myself committing long-term to any career that will make it distinctly challenging to be present, emotionally and physically, for the huge variety of things my child might need me for. A few weeks ago I found myself weeping to Brian that I want to be able to make Lea's Cogsworth costume for her sixth grade play like my mother did for me. (Actually, let's put it out there: I hope Lea gets to be Belle, dammit.) How will I do that if I'm a nurse-midwife or a fulltime teacher? Or, um, anything really? How would I possibly be able to find time for big projects like that when I am so easily undone by a hectic schedule, and an array of demands on my time as simple as basic housework? I know it can be done, of course; I've seen it done. It's just daunting.

Here's another thing I've been mulling: childcare. Let's discuss my Number One Gripe with my otherwise beloved feminist movement: the devaluing of childcare. I don't like it. I don't like that there are still feminist leaders like Linda Hirshman out there saying that an educated woman who chooses to be a full-time parent is an affront to the whole cause. That's BS. Here's why: somebody has to care for all these children. The work must be done. If you're going to imply that the work is beneath degree-holding women (by saying, like Hirshman, that "an educated, competent adult's place is in the office")-- that they owe it to the world to do something "more"-- then what are you saying about the people (women, 99% of the time) who make their living doing childcare? I guess they're an affront as well, because the work is so lowly, right? Or are those women who work as daycare providers to be excluded from the feminist movement altogether because their place of work is a nursery, not an office? Or what?

It makes me think of one particular bit of my favorite recent read, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles the Kingsolver family's quest to eat only locally-grown and -raised foods for one year, and along with that, to put a finger on just what America's "food culture" is. Let me sidestep the issue of childcare to let Kingsolver make my point for me as she discusses a similar post-feminist issue: food.

"I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes...

... It's a reasonable proposition. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. "Hey, ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply...

... When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation. "

A hoodwink it is: in order to convince the world that women should have options beyond homekeeping, certain thinkers of the feminist movement (which, let me reiterate that it is one that I place tremendous value in) have taken the route of devaluing the work that must be done to keep people clothed and fed and nurtured. And I find this sad, and I find myself constantly apologizing-- with my tone of voice or a shrug or the hurried way I answer the question "What do you do?"-- for work that I know is vital to a functional society.

Kingsolver laments the pathological food culture she sees all around her. I am very glad to say that I do not think our child-rearing culture is in nearly such dire straits, and that I do see creative solutions to the childcare/feminism conundrum. But for some families, the solution is going to be a mother who serves as a full-time parent, sometimes for 2 months, sometimes for 20 years. And I want that to be okay, not just for my own comfort every time I engage in small-talk, but because I think that the right way to approach this as a feminist is to embrace a tradition where every woman-- and man-- can evaluate the options available to them without seeing child-rearing as a pursuit less meaningful or less worthy than the rest.

That said, I will repeat: I miss using higher-order thinking skills. I go absolutely wild for a project that will require some creative problem solving (do you remember the fervor with which I described my solutions to our plumbing and flea emergencies? It felt good to tackle something that demanded a bit of planning and cleverness on my part). Baby-care is mundane. But the real sticking point is that it is often simultaneously totally predictable and impossible to plan around. What I mean is, most days consist of a pretty limited variety of activities: take short walks. read board books. play with blocks. plop Lea in pack-n-play with wooden spoon while I cook. go outside and grab leaves. stroll laps through Target. But in spite of the predictability, it's very hard to know ahead of time what I will be doing at, say, 2:30 tomorrow afternoon. Plans are constantly changing if Lea is cranky or hyper or tired, or if we got stuck in traffic earlier and she already spent way too much time in her carseat, or if she has a runny nose and time outdoors seems like a bad idea. The goals are (in order of priority): to keep her happy and stimulated, keep me sane, and if possible, keep the house somewhat clean (please note that this is a very distant third for me).

It's challenging in ways going to an office every day never was. I go long stretches of time not speaking to another adult, and I can't tell you how much I would love to be able to take a 15-minute tea break twice a day like I used to. And I miss having a paycheck and a little more financial freedom. But I love being here to try to interpret Lea's increasingly-language-like babbling, and to watch her study textures and make sense of books. I love policing Lea/cat encounters ("gentle! be gentle!"), and taking her to story time at the library. What I really love right now is having the time to continue to breastfeed without the logistical nightmare of pumping and storing, to make pretty nutritious meals, to save money by using cloth diapers, to walk around our beautiful town, and in general, to feel like we're living a decently healthy life. I like the pace of my life in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of these things would be much harder to do if getting myself to and from a job, and getting Lea to and from daycare, were added to the mix.

So here I am, smack in the middle of life as a stay-at-home mother, and wondering what's next. I literally do not stop thinking about these questions, evaluating the possibilities for how I may or may not pursue a profession sometime in the next few years. I guess that's the second hoodwink at play here: the self-reflection that can be so inescapable when you feel pulled towards two paths that seem unavoidably divergent. Maybe I underestimate myself. Maybe I underestimate all women, I don't know. Do I need to turn in my feminist card now?

Whatever. I'm keeping it. It doesn't feel like a contradiction in terms to vehemently defend my choice of a current job as well as my right to choose something else whenever it makes sense for me and my family. And I suppose it's fitting that I close with a sentiment echoed by every feminist before me: may it be just a little bit easier for my daughter.

I just love this

2007-10-27T11:44:00.001-04:00

Taken while we took a little break during a long bike ride-- Lea's first experience with the bike trailer. I think she was a little overwhelmed.

Louisville

2007-10-27T11:29:00.000-04:00

This also happened 5 weeks ago. Hey, that's the way it goes.

We spent a very fun 3-day weekend in Louisville, and even though Lea and I both spent much of the time snot-nosed and sick, it was relaxing and great to see E&H.

Park!

Pancakes!

A windy car ride!

Another park!

With fountains!

And a night on the town.

10-month pictures!

2007-10-27T11:25:00.001-04:00

Yes, these were taken 5 weeks ago!

I'm really glad the Birth Center t-shirt was size 18 months. This has been fun. I only wish I'd thought of it at 1 month, so I could have done every month instead of every other. Especially because those first two months were the biggest change. Oh well.

Day at the Park

2007-10-27T10:59:00.000-04:00

Moving on

2007-10-17T00:05:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note to say we figured out a stopgap picture solution, so I'll be catching up on the last few months of insane cuteness in short order.

In the meantime:

The last time the Phils were in the postseason...

2007-10-01T16:35:00.000-04:00

... I had bangs. Not just bangs, but the kind of bangs that I thought needed to be swept from one side of my forehead up in a wave over to the other side.

I could be reached by e-mail at psjj85d on Prodigy. But only if you, too, had Prodigy. Also on Prodigy, I enjoyed playing the quiz game "GUTS."

I taped the Rick Dee's weekly top forty on Sunday mornings, hoping to be able to record such gems as "How Do You Talk to an Angel" and "I Would Do Anything for Love." (Note: if you were a cute boy in my class, I claimed that I was actually a fan of, for example, Green Day, "but only their old stuff." I never was.)

I spent a good amount of time trying on fancy dresses in the mall, in preparation for the ninth grade formal that would occur two and a half years later.

I went to youth group, where we played games like "stick out your tongue and hold this piece of chocolate on it for as long as possible without swallowing your drool."

I made a gigantic posterboard sign to hang on our front porch that said "Go Phils Go!"

I remember finding it completely awesome that one of the platoons that year was at second base: Mariano Duncan and Mickey Morandini, and that if you combined them somehow, their name could be the unbeatable "Mariano Morandini."

I thought I could influence the outcome of games by doing things like dialing "1-800-HR-Lenny" when Dykstra came up to bat. Crazy, huh? Except that the first time I did it, Dykstra hit a homerun. For real.

I had a paper route. I wasn't allowed to stay up late enough to watch the ends of all the regular-season games, but my mom would always come down while I put the papers in their bags to let me know the outcome of the previous night's Phillies (and, erm, Mets) games until the magic number was zero. [Um, as it turns out, the Mets actually won only 59 games that year. Why do I remember it so flat-out wrong? It was the Expos we were chasing down.]

Speaking of which, I had a cat named Zero. Good old girl.

I'm pretty sure I was allowed to stay up during the playoff and World Series games, because I remember approximately 5,000 frantic phone calls from my Nana. The entire conversation would go something like: "He got 'im!" "Yes, Nana, he did. Two outs." "OK!" End of conversation. Two minutes later: "Did you see? He got 'im!" "Right! Three outs!" "OK!"

Le sigh. I would like to be in Philly right now.

In honor of my husband

2007-09-29T11:05:00.000-04:00

"Baseball will break your heart. It's designed to."

Bart Giamatti, 1989

Thus far, I've managed to keep myself from getting emotionally invested in the season. I mean, I've followed along, but it takes a very specific set of conditions for me to get a nervous stomach or a lump in my throat.

OK, we've achieved those conditions and now I'm antsy. Despite what Brian will say, anything could happen, still. Chances are very good that one of us will wind up heartbroken sometime in the next 36 hours. Yiiiiiiiiikes.

It might be a while...

2007-09-18T20:15:00.000-04:00

... before I get more photos posted. The hard drive on our desktop crashed, and I'll probably hold off on uploading a million pictures to our laptop until we figure out whether or not we're going to bother replacing the hard drive, or do something else.

Poo.

More end-of-summer pictures

2007-09-10T13:00:00.001-04:00

Watching the rain.

Setting up camp. I feel the need to explain that at this particular campground, they want you to set up your tent on these big wooden decks. So, no, we're not just in somebody's backyard, it's a real state park.

Hiking at Backbone Ridge trail.

Watching the creek below...

... and dipping in her toes.

Breakfast this morning (first day of school!). Yesterday I made a bunch of high-calorie baby-friendly pancakes, to mixed reviews. But we tried heating one up this morning, and she was a little more enthused.

The walk to school. She looks reluctant, but was all smiles once we got there.

According to Glenda, she played all day and was interested in neither eating nor sleeping. When we got home, she promptly drained me dry and passed out. So this is turning into a very quiet day for me.

While Lea's at school...

2007-09-10T11:21:00.000-04:00

... you'd think I'd do something totally non-baby-related, but no, I'm updating my blog with photos.

Actually, it was no big deal to drop her off. She was oblivious. Two of the older babies were crying when their parents left, and Lea crawled up to them, grinning madly, and they stopped crying. It was sweet. I ducked out the door and she didn't even look up.

So here's a bunch of pictures from the last month or so. I never posted any of the pictures from our Pittsburgh/Exton/Ocean City trip, so I'll start with that.

Gratuitous sweet mama/baby picture, from our lunch stop in WV on the way to Pittsburgh.

We spent part of Saturday at the Pittsburgh zoo, which was horrifically crowded but still fun.

At the hotel, Lea was highly entertained by the air coming out of the A/C unit,

and also appreciated the opportunity to practice pulling up to standing, aided by the curtains.

Oh, and she crawled the entire length of the hallway. Come and play with us, Danny...

Sunday we braved the rain to attend the Phils/Pirates game at PNC park, which was delayed several times but well worth it (although they ended up losing, boo.)

The walk across Roberto Clemente bridge was very cool. I can imagine that, if I lived in Pittsburgh, and the Pirates were really good, it would be fun to get all hyped up walking to the game among a crowd of fans clogging the bridge (which they close to cars on game days).

Lea slept on my chest for the first few innings, and then entertained herself with a Pepsi bottle.

And entertained us with her sad-baby face every time the bottle was taken away.

Bonus to all that hyper-stimulating baseball goodness: very tired baby slept for nearly all of the 5 hour drive to Exton.

We spent the week just hanging out, visiting family, going to Ikea (me), and rolling/crawling around the family room floor (Lea).

Then Brian joined us, and we all headed down to OC for the weekend. Then, he and I had our longest outing together since Lea's birth, when we went to Shea stadium to see the Mets play. The next day, we had some fabulous beach time, and rounded out the weekend with a big extended-Campbell-family dinner at a great place in Cape May.

It really was a fantastic week. I especially loved the last-minute decision to go to the shore, which is something I really miss, living so far away. I have many fond memories of deciding to go, throwing things in a bag, and being on the beach just a few hours later. What a life.

It's a school night!

2007-09-09T20:55:00.000-04:00

For Lea.

It's true-- tomorrow, Lea starts a two-morning-per-week infant program at a church here in Abingdon. There will be five babies: Lea and one other 9-month old, two 13-month olds, and one 17-month old. Caring for these five babies will be two very nice women named Glenda and Kate, in a great little room that Lea explored with great vigor at the open house last Thursday night.

We had to:

-pack a school bag with a change of clothes and a snack
-sign forms allowing her to go on "field trips" such as a neighborhood walk
-make a list of things she likes to do and is afraid of

It is so funny, really. Mostly, it's SO GREAT to be able to look forward to three hours off twice a week. My plan for tomorrow is to go the coffee shop and read a book and drink something delicious. Slowly.

Sucktastic news of the day

2007-08-29T15:47:00.000-04:00

To all of you who had the pleasure of hearing me blather on about starting a midwifery apprenticeship this fall: never mind. The midwife in question, the only one I have found who's working in this region, can't take on a second apprentice after all.

Now how am I ever going to find out if baby-catching is a suitable line of work for me?

In case you missed it, here's why it was going to be awesome:

-Extremely part time. The idea was, I would start my apprenticeship by attending the prenatal appointments of just one or two women, starting from their very first monthly appointment. That's, what, maybe 6 hours a month (including transportation) for the first 5 months or so.

-The chance to see the process from start to finish, beginning as a spectator, then learning how to do basic things like take blood pressure, then eventually working up to doing internal checks, then finally attending a birth (again, just as a spectator). After a few of these, I could start attending births as an assistant.

-The opportunity to figure out if birthwork is something I can actually see myself doing. From there, I would have started applying to RN programs, which is the first step to becoming a CNM (certified nurse-midwife).

Ah well. I just can't feature going ahead with the pursuit of an RN until I have some sense that helping a woman through her pregnancy and delivery is something I am well suited to. And thus, the gigantic question mark of What is Next in my Life remains gigantic.

Oh, and also sucktastic: Lea has a cold. She is the picture of a snot-nosed little kid, actively trying to lick the boogers out of her own nose. She's not sleeping well, she's super fussy, and she's barely eating.

I am about ready to jump out of my skin here.