For you, Mom

When Clara was born early, my mom immediately hopped on a plane, flew to Syracuse, and stayed for two weeks. She cooked for us, cleaned our apartment, and drove me back and forth to the hospital to visit Clara, since I couldn't drive and was managing to have a very slow c-section recovery--probably from the stress of Clara's time in the hospital and all the back-and-forthing.

The thing is, when I was in the NICU with Clara, my mom was huddled in a waiting room, feverish and miserable, because the whole time she was really quite ill. She finally realized she didn't just have a typical head cold, so she dragged herself to urgent care, where she discovered she actually had pneumonia and was treated with IV antibiotics. She was truly miserable, but never once complained. She just kept on going and took exquisite care of us during a very stressful time. She didn't even get to see Clara until the day before she left, when she'd been on the antibiotics long enough for the nurses to let her into the NICU wearing a surgical mask. I still remember her expression of love and wonder as she held that tiny girl in her arms for the first time.

Not quite two years later, my mom drove with me and then 19-month-old Clara from Syracuse to Coeur d'Alene. It was a truly miserable drive, compounded by my pregnancy, some truly horrible weather, a sad little toddler, and--of course--the world's tiniest car. Three months later, she came back to Coeur d'Alene after Jonathan's birth. She still cooked and cleaned for us, but she also spent hours entertaining Clara and making her feel like she was the most special little girl on the planet.

Just two months ago, my mom came again, this time to Missouri to help me recover from yet another birth. She played with my kids, talked with me for hours, did my laundry, cooked my meals, and made me feel capable of taking care of three kids by myself. By the time she left, I was strong enough (physically and emotionally) to give independent mothering a whirl again. She helped me get strong enough.

And nearly eight years ago, my mom flew from California to Utah in chilly late February to wait with me and Jeremy as we anticipated the birth of our first baby. Once again, she cooked and cleaned and talked. She helped us time my early contractions. She told us it was time to go to the hospital. And then she prayed and cried with Jeremy while I was taken into emergency surgery to try to save our little Sam's life. She stayed with us after we made the decision to take Sam off of life support, and she sat near us while we waited for Sam's heart to beat its last beat. She held him and loved him. She and Jeremy's mom dressed him for burial. She sat with me at his graveside service. She listened to me talk and cry and wonder about the experience for years. She still does.

My mom has been with me to welcome all four of my beautiful children into the world. She has loved each of them. She has loved me. She is the one who taught me how to be a mother, because she is my mother--a wonderful mother, full of fire and light and fun and passion and compassion. But she's also been more than my mother. She's been my dearest friend. I love her, I treasure her, and today I also say,

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Hair Fairy

Every morning when Clara wakes up, Jeremy and I are eager to see what the hair fairy has done to her in the night. Usually the hair fairy does something truly stunning, often involving the weaving of a tightly tangled rat's nest in the back or in a mop of loopy, wild curls on top. It's never quite the same, but it's nearly always memorably tangled.

Clara's hair is a blessing...and a curse. People love to compliment her on her curls, and when her hair is done well it really is cute. But overall her hair is a real source of tribulation to her (and, I'll be honest, to me). She does not like to have it brushed because of the tangles, and every morning we do our battle of wills in my effort to send her out the door at least a half step above the "wild animal" look.

(I should add that I'm probably getting my just desserts with Clara, since I *vaguely* recall giving my mom all kinds of grief about getting my hair done. In my defense, though, she really was rough with the brush. And once she burned me on my forehead with the curling iron--an act of aggression that I'm convinced was retribution for my giving her a hard time. Thoughts, Mom? :)

Lately, Clara's hair has been getting increasingly long and unwieldy. She's fond of telling me she wishes she had "long, flat hair," but that's just never going to happen. And when she said that even with her curls she wanted to grow it out, I just had to count to three before telling her that everything that made her sad about getting her hair done would just be worse with long hair. Finally, I convinced her to let me cut it, and we got the job done this afternoon. She seems happy with the result, but I am truly elated. I feel like a huge weight (of curly blonde hair) has been lifted from my shoulders. And I think I did an all right job, despite my lack of know-how. I do like being able to take her to get her hair cut, but in times like these, you know...

Here are photos: one before, two after. As a bonus, you can see the truth of my housekeeping in the background. What a great day!

In awesome wonder

Every once in awhile I see something so breathtakingly amazing that I can't help but feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for the miracle of creation. This is one of those times: Earth from above, in a series of 18 time-lapse photographs taken from the International Space Station. It's truly remarkable, and reminds me how small each of us is. Sometimes it's good to feel small.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Two months

Cole's two-month "birthday" was yesterday. Two months! I took him in to the pediatrician today for his well baby check and learned that his weight is in the 90th percentile, but that his length and head circumference are only in the 75th percentile. Who would've thought that Jeremy and I could produce a child with only a moderately large noggin? Wonders never cease.

Cole is truly a delightful baby. He is good-natured and pleasant. He sleeps eight hours in a row at night. He has a sweet little smile. He is soft and warm and snuggly. Sometimes I look at him and think, "Two months ago, he wasn't here, and now he's this whole little life!" Sounds so obvious, I know, but it feels like a little miracle every time I think about it. We surely do love that baby.

Flash back

This post takes us back many moons, but I feel like I didn't get to half the blogging I should have this summer. Darn pregnancy!

In late June, we went with Jeremy's family to Lava Hot Springs, Idaho for a family reunion. I'd never been to Lava (and may never have gone if I'd known the locals pronounce "lava" as in rhymes with "have-a"). Pronunciation challenges aside, it was a beautiful place. We rented an old church house-turned-schoolhouse-turned vacation rental, and it was full of charming quirks. Most important, it was full of space, which made it a lot easier for a family of 21 to gather. Had I not been pregnant and once again preparing to move across the country, I may have even found the whole thing relaxing! As it was, even without the personal capacity for relaxation, it was a fun and memorable trip.

One of the greatest amenities in the vacation rental was the big gym. Jonathan and Clara spent hours there with their cousins. The kids played lots of dodge ball, with two of Jeremy's sisters and our two oldest nieces playing tirelessly with the younger kids. Clara was kind of afraid and didn't play much, but Jonathan had a blast. I don't think he quite got the point of the game, since no one ever threw the ball at him (he's pretty small, after all), but he loved the thrill of running up and down the court. And as you can see from the video, he surely thought he was playing.



We also had a family talent show, which showcased some pretty memorable and fantastic skills. Jeremy and his sisters even did an anti-drug rap from they all remember from their childhood, where Jeremy and his sister Rebekah were in a public service announcement with pro basketball players like Isiah Thomas, Doc Rivers, John Salley, and Kevin McHale. In truth, I have a video of the four of them doing the rap, but Jeremy has declared it "not blog-worthy." Trust me when I say this, though: it may be the most blog-worthy item in my photographic archives. Alas. I'll yield to Jeremy on this one. For now.

We also took our water bugs to the big Lava swimming hole, though not to the hot springs themselves, since they were quite...volcanic. Regardless, the kids love being in the water and had a grand time. I was grateful to be pregnant and therefore unavailable to join my crazy nieces in a leap off the super high dive. I just might have done it otherwise.




And as with any good vacation, we stayed up way too late every night and had an increasingly manic set of children to deal with. But they loved every single minute.

Too big for a bassinet

And now he sleeps in a big crib. Isn't he still too small to be too big for anything?

I love seeing Cole swaddled in a sweet little bundle. He only gets swaddled at night--part of our "night is different from day" sleep philosophy. Pretty soon he'll be too big to be swaddled, too.

This is all happening too fast this go around.

Snow and rainbows

We woke up to snow yesterday morning, much to Clara and Jonathan's delight. It wasn't much snow, and it was certainly of poor quality, but that didn't seem to matter, and we dressed them in their snow clothes at 7:00 in the morning so they'd be able to play before Clara went to school at 7:30. They had a grand time, even if the snow was already to hard and icy to make snow angels. (That didn't stop them from trying, but neither of them could even sink through the crust when they lay down!)

The snow looked bright and lovely, but it's a reminder that winter really is coming, and that I need to start getting more creative about things to do inside. It surely is a lot easier to watch the kids ride bikes for an hour than to entertain them inside, but I am determined to be up to the task!

We started our plan of creative productivity by making rainbow pancakes for lunch. They took a pretty long time to make, but the kids loved stirring the batter and were uncharacteristically patient as they waited for their pancakes to cook.

I made all seven colors off the rainbow, having been duly chastised the day before when I made only six colors of dry rainbow rice for a little craft project (which we still haven't done). Clara looked at the six little muffin tins of rice, wrinkled up her nose, and said, "Where's indigo?" Great question. I'm not convinced that anyone really even knows what indigo is, exactly, but I faked it with the pancakes by having indigo be a blue-ish purple and having "violet" be a pinkish purple. All parties were satisfied--and well fed. I ate four of my rainbow pancakes, and Jonathan ate three. But Clara ate the whole rainbow. That's my girl.

The write stuff

So my friend Britney issued a little challenge for herself (and anyone else!) on her blog: to write 30 blog posts in 30 days during the month of November for "National Blog Post Month" or "NaBloPoMo." I guess it's kind of a phenomenon in the blogging world, and it seemed like a great motivation to me to get back into blogging mode. Plus, I assume it's a bit of a riff on "National Novel Writing Month" (or NaNoWriMo), which I first heard about in grad school. For NaNoWriMo, you write an entire novel-length work during the month of November. My sister Megan and I have attempted NaNoWriMo a couple of times (though I think she's come much closer than I have), but we've never made it. How much easier it seemed to post something to my blog every day for thirty days.

Then I realized something, after waking up in my recliner for the last two nights after falling asleep at about 8:30 with a baby lying on my chest:

I am exhausted.

It seems strange that I wouldn't have realized this before. After all, I have an eight-week-old baby who, despite his very many charms, still doesn't quite sleep through the night, meaning I don't quite sleep through the night. Add to this the fact that he likes to be awake (and held) in the evenings, usually from the minute the other kids go to bed, and I am with at least one (usually more) of my delightful children from about 7:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. every day. And then I fall asleep on the couch. I stumble into bed and fall into a dreamless sleep until Cole wakes me up again, and then we hang out until he's ready to go back to sleep. What I'm saying, as you may see, is that if my eyes are open, I've got a child with me.

I hope you won't misinterpret this as complaining. I enjoy mommyhood, on the aggregate, and I actually quite treasure my extended evening time with Cole. Nevertheless, it's a tiring proposition, and I have little mental energy for writing or being creative, at least on any kind of consistent basis.

What this all means, I guess, is not that I've given up on NaBloPoMo (which is, incidentally, just the kind of abbreviation that I bet would annoy Jeremy if I said it too often), but rather that I've given up on posting every single day. Nevertheless, I still have high hopes to finish 30 posts this month, if only because--at the very least--I know it would make my mother happy. I have a hunch she knows just how I feel.

The end of the future as we know it

For many years, Jeremy and I have figured that we'd know exactly when the future arrived because everyone in the world would be eating Dippin' Dots. This assumption, of course, is based on Dippin' Dots' carefully crafted slogan: "The Ice Cream of the Future."

Well, I have some bad news: the future may never get here, because Dippin' Dots filed for bankruptcy.

I have mixed feelings about this development. Obviously, I'm a bit sad that the future is over before it even started. Not only are Dippin' Dots gone, but I see a pathetic dearth of hover vehicles driving all of the carefully constructed sky highways. On the other hand, if the future was going to be determined by a nearly tasteless pile of liquid-nitrogen-frozen ice cream beads made by a company based in Paducah, Kentucky, then I'm not sure the future was destined to be very bright in the first place.

Nevertheless, the end of Dippin' Dots feels like the end of an era, and Jeremy and I are scrambling to figure out what the next sign of the future will be. When people finally start riding around on Segways? When robots make my breakfast toast? I'm at a total loss. My only comfort now is in reading back issues of Popular Science magazine. Because according to them, "The Future Is Now."

For Cole, on his blessing day

To a Child
By Sophie Jewett

The leaves talked in the twilight, dear;
Hearken the tale they told:
How in some far-off place and year,
Before the world grew old,

I was a dreaming forest tree,
You were a wild, sweet bird
Who sheltered at the heart of me
Because the north wind stirred;

How, when the chiding gale was still,
When peace fell soft on fear,
You stayed one golden hour to fill
My dream with singing, dear.

To-night the self-same songs are sung
The first green forest heard;
My heart and the gray world grow young—
To shelter you, my bird.

Birthday

Today we've been celebrating five years of this face:


But of course we've been celebrating it so much we are too fatigued to actually write about it. More tomorrow...

Brothers