PS - I turned 31

Wow, that's a lot of time to spend being alive. I don't have a particularly distinguished set of accomplishments to go with those 31 years, but this last year I added a new baby and a midwifery license to them. I think creating a new human can be a significant accomplishment for my 31st year.

While nothing hugely significant happened on my birthday, my kids did wish me a happy birthday approximately 12,425 times; this made me feel both loved and slightly annoyed. We went hiking:



Again, at Point Defiance, but this time on the other side of the point; we walked from Fort Nisqually to the Gig Harbor lookout, and then followed the spine trail back to where we'd parked. Oops, they learned something:



Obligatory Chubble photos for the day (here hanging at the playground after our hike):






When we got home, the kids noticed that our blackberry tangles finally had ripe berries, and went about harvesting and processing them:



Meanwhile, Fran made us all chips in the deep-fry and started dinner on the grill, and we had a very nice evening. The kids really, really wanted to make me a cake, and this process narrowly skirted disaster but did - miraculously enough - result in a cake. I am the proud owner of three new necklaces, which apparently is THE THING to get your mom on her 31st birthday.

It was a non-spectacular but happy day. And...onward.

Poetry

The refrigerator roars into the sudden silence of our napping home.

Produce sits subservient on grocery store shelves.

I pound a dizzying rhythm on the keyboard, the poetry returned to my inner monologue; I feared it lost forever, to age or fatigue or something even more difficult to enumerate - as if one can name or number the loss of an inner poetic voice in the first place - but here it is again.

My internal voice doesn't just seize at the random flotsam of everyday stimulation, the way it has for the past couple of years; it narrates a coherent stream. Sentences often unfinished, yes, but narration (and not simple overwhelmed observation) nonetheless.

I don't know whether this blog post will be comprehensible to anyone at all, or whether every person I pass has an internal poetic monologue that I can't hear or sense. I set it out to the world (bearing in mind that grandiose concept that anyone can read this blog, though few do), anyway.

Thank you B and ~L~

I think she likes it!

Full

It's kind of hard to imagine how I fill those so many hours of so many days that stretch out on either side of my existence as a stay-at-home (again, misnomer, nobody staying home around here) mom.

Our days are filled with trips to the beach:





Sewing cool pants (one of several pairs accomplished that day):



Trips to the flower garden (Tony took these first two):






Hiking (here at Point Defiance):





Not to mention piano lessons, Art Club, and playdates. Feeding the kids, and feeding them again. Nursing the littlest one, and nursing her again. Reading my way through the hearty stack of fiction novels that threatens to topple off my bedside table. Some mama friends and I have been talking about how when you are a mom, there are precious few things in your life that you get to be FINISHED with. Maybe this is why so many of us are drawn to crafting in some way or another. I can finish sewing a pair of pants, and be done with it. I will never, ever, ever finish the dishes; not for real, anyway, when another is sure to appear 5 minutes later.

Is it any wonder that I haven't had the time to fold my own laundry yet this week?

Still, the last little bit of paperwork that I finally took time to complete and send in to the Department of Health bore its intended fruit, and I can turn my head as I type and see my active Midwife License, neat and official in a frame I picked up from Goodwill - all we can really bother with these days - just for the occasion.

Hot!

Two days ago we washed the deck. And we didn't just wash it a little, oh no, we spent 6 hours pressure washing and scrubbing on hands and knees (my fingers still hurt). It was so clean when we were finished that it was probably cleaner than the floors inside the house. OK, certainly cleaner - it's been about a week since we vacuumed last. And then yesterday rolled around, all 90 degrees and ridiculously hot even in the shade (rare for Washington), and it was SO worth it.




It is much nicer to lay about in the shade reading than it is to swelter, right? I also got some spray paint (for the wicker furniture) and refinishing supplies for the tables, but those projects weren't done yet when I ran out of materials. It turned out to be pretty nice on the deck without the furniture there, maybe when we put stuff back some of it will live down in the yard instead - at least until winter rolls around.

Girliness has been reading chapter books aloud to BittyPrincess. I am extremely proud that this was their own idea and I'm also very glad that there's someone willing to read aloud, because I hate doing it. This may or may not make me a bad homeschooling parent. You want to read it? Then YOU read it.



And Chubble was, of course, very cute.



She's the first of my kids to enjoy hanging out on her tummy - the infamous "tummy time" that I think is such a crock of shit. I did a little (not too very heavy) research and basically concluded that "tummy time" is only really necessary if you're not holding the babies enough for them to get used to activating their core muscles to keep their balance. You don't need to go through the whole baby rotisserie (sleep on the back! tummy time! look, fun stuff overhead! play blankets!) if you're carrying them around. It sounds funny to say it like that, but yeah; I think it's easier to carry the baby around than it is to worry about whether they're developing properly as they're wiggling about on some surface somewhere. ANYWAY...baby feet!



Check out the eyebrows:



It's supposed to be high 90s today. I'm going to try to set up the tent before it gets too hot out there, so that we can sleep outside - it will be 70 degrees out there overnight, but potentially stifling in here.

Finished Voyager by Diana Gabaldon. I enjoyed it, certainly, but I'm finding the level of coincidence in the character reappearances to really stretch things to the point of scoffability, and I usually have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing (I love coincidentally running into previous characters as I read along! But many of them halfway across the world, independent from each other and for different reasons? I think you need to explain this one, Ms Gabaldon). Still, good book, and the next two in the series are sitting on my night stand waiting for me to finish Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which finally made it to my library reservation shelf. I'm only a few chapters in but I'm liking it; the proposed year is in the 1990s, but I can imagine this as being the future-as-imagined-today, too, which is some pretty serious staying power for a book written in the 1960s.

Ten Years

Wow, 10 years seems like no time at all. I think I love my husband more now than I did when we got married. We've matured, both of us, in different but compatible ways. I don't know whether to blame luck or foresight for the fact that as we've both changed, we've settled into a comfortable and loving spot rather than growing apart.

Anyway, like I said before, we're sitting at a big anniversary with an infant again. But it's not for lack of childcare offers that we spent the day with our kids. Another unknown: is it a good thing that we spent an ideal day with our whole family, or does that say something pathetic about us as a couple apart from the fact that we have children?

We had planned nothing. I pulled off some pretty convincing dancing around with the kids in the morning:



But Francesco had left for work on schedule, ass-early in the morning. Unbeknownst to me, instead of his usual routine, he went to the gym and then went and got flowers and pizza and surprised me back at home, just as I was settling into a pretty deep "wow we suck" kind of funk.



Fed and happy, we headed out to the beach:





And then dropped a somewhat appalling amount of money on supplies for the kids to make us dinner:







Maybe it's pathetic, and maybe it wasn't, that it was a really good day. We have a lot of years left for having good days without the kids, and I think it says good things about the rhythm we've set for ourselves that we're NOT sick of the life we have right now.

Chubbles!

Chubble's most common expression:



And now, a bunch of pictures just because, well, she's a baby. She's cute. And she'll look different next week.

Kids at Play (Wordless Wednesday, a Day Late)

Love

I love my family.

And I love staying at home, even though I feel oddly unsatisfied at times, like there's a further level of relaxation that I'm just.not.hitting despite cooperative friends and family. It might just be that the current level of stress-out and my maximum relaxation level aren't far apart enough. Still, I'm enjoying "just" being "at home" (those things in quotes because "just" is kind of funny given what gets done in an average day, and "at home" is just a joke given that I actually stayed home all day only once in the last two weeks).

A few days ago I sent in the last little bit of paperwork to get my midwifery license. While I don't anticipate trouble, I also know that it's been almost a year since I passed my exams and am wondering whether the late completion of my application will be suspicious given that most people push everything through ASAP. I'm crossing my fingers that things move smoothly through and I'll have license in hand soon. I am reluctant to use it. I like having my baby time. And family time. And I am supremely lucky in that Fran understands the whole "me" time thing, so much so that Tuesdays are "him and kids" days and when he wanted to do something else today (a Tuesday), he got his brother to babysit rather than co-opt my "me" day.

Anyway, I forgot to mention in my last post that last week we went kind-of-hiking again. It was a little (2.5 mile) baby (relatively flat with a huge-ass driveable-if-it-was-open) trail.



We went to the new Pen Met 360 park (so named because it covers 360 acres). We knew it wasn't "finished" yet, but what we didn't realize was that there wasn't any forest left to speak of. It was a hot day. The trail was dusty. It was not a peak hiking experience. It will be GREAT to bike on, though.



A little over half a mile in, Girliness and ~L~'s 10yo girl ran ahead and didn't bother to check in with us. For the rest of the hike. They left little hints about where they were going...



...but we didn't see them again for quite a while. Which wasn't exactly our idea of fun or safe hiking, despite the really safe trail. And is also completely, totally against the hiking rules we've set for the kids (no walking ahead without an organized plan and a GPS), which we didn't think that we needed to tell them they needed to follow even though the trail was easy. They were required to write two-page papers on hiking safety in the aftermath.

They only did their papers, I think, because we required them before Girliness and ~L~'s daughter were going to have their Nerd Party (they ate Nerds candy, acted like Nerds, and in general had a massive sugar rush). They had their Nerdy sleepover party and acted like hungover jerks the next day, particularly Boyness. I've decided that Boyness and food colorings don't mix...it wasn't at all just a sugar thing, because I let them have a TON of sugar on a regular basis. It was the food coloring in the candies, which the kids almost never have.

And I'll leave you with a slightly happier picture...



Cubble and Boyness listening to music together. Love, love, love.

I forgot to mention: I also finished Dragonfly in Amber. I liked it more than I expected to given the slow beginning and some mediocre reviews from my friends. It still feels like a placeholder book, the way so many books that are in the middle of a series wind up feeling. It isn't that I want major action and resolution in every book; it's that I don't like it when a whole book essentially becomes a background-information book, where it exists only as a source of information for further novels. I liked it anyway.

Write Something

There are almost too many somethings to write. None of them particularly interesting, but oh well. Here they are anyway.

We had a great get-together last night. Fun with friends and kids getting along. Chubble even slept for quite a while during it. The 5-6yo girls were particularly cute.

I forgot to take out the trash and am listening to the trash truck make its way around the rest of the neighborhood. I think the crew is taking extra long just to rub it in.

10 month year anniversary this week. Nothing planned. We thought maybe we'd do "something" but are a little short on cash and a lot long on children. It's kind of pathetic because we also had our 1st and 5th anniversaries with babies too young to go and actually do anything big (big, in my world, being the-two-of-us-somewhere for a day or two, not two weeks in some far-flung tourist spot). There's always 15 and 20, right?

Hmmmm...I helped Girliness temporary-dye her hair red. It came out pretty awesome. BittyPrincess wants to do hers now.

Chubble is:

Giving big wet baby-kisses
Sleeping through the night (for real! 10pm-7am!)
Loving her Johnny Jump-Up
Laughing maniacally at a friend of ours

And peeing (and usually pooping, too) in the sink. She's done it for me, Fran, and Girliness. We just hover her semi-sitting over the sink and she goes. On purpose. It's awesome. As long as someone gets her there before she really had to go, we avoid the whole wet diaper deal altogether. Which is kind of funny given the hip-high stack of diapers we have for her that aren't really getting used all that fast. But also kind of awesome given that I still hadn't found a diaper arrangement that didn't result in a rash. And kind of awesome all by itself. There are whole communities on this subject that I have never bothered looking into, and since this is just kind of working for us I don't think I will now, but this is a "thing." Until Chubble came along all super compatible with this kind of arrangement, I thought it sounded totally nuts.

I think I used the word "awesome" about 20 times in that last paragraph just because I recently heard about somebody who can't stand how people use the word "awesome." Awesome, awesome, awesome. I can't remember who is being driven up a wall every time I say it, but AWESOME. Teehee. Of all the weird things to get bugged by.

They're Baaaack

Time flies when you're down a few children...

We got the kids back on Sunday evening. By all reports they were great during their getaway, but since it was grandparents' reporting, I'm not sure how true it was. They were surely their same old irritating selves today. We tried to blow off some steam at the beach with limited success.

I feel like the exercise in book reviewing has served its purpose, and I'm thinking about the blog more often now. Nonetheless...

Shadowmarch by Tad Williams was quite enjoyable. He writes really well and I don't really get tired of it. While this and the series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn appear to have similar roots, another series that he wrote - Otherland - is quite different, so I'm assured of his versatility, which makes me want to continue reading. The next book in this series is on request from the library.

I'm about halfway through Diane Gabaldon's sequel to Outlander, a book fittingly titled Dragonfly in Amber. So far it's pretty lackluster.