Where I am right now

I deactivated Facebook about a month ago. I feel compelled to write something explaining this decision, but there are so many things all tied up together in it, and I can't seem to wrap my head around it all to compose a coherent blog post about it.

Camp Meeting this year changed my life. I wasn't expecting it to. I wasn't expecting an altar call to send me down this path. Sanctification. Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Theological concepts I have kept at arms length for my 30 years of Christian faith, and inhaled all at once when something finally clicked for me.

Tearing down the high places in my life. Prioritizing, and scheduling (which feels like a four-letter word to my spontaneous heart, but is proving to be genuinely liberating). I thought I knew what I was doing after 30 years of this, but suddenly, I feel like a newborn Christian. Scrambling to figure out how it all fits together. Groaning under the weight of the responsibility of two more souls. Failing daily.

Facebook is the social equivalent of snacking all day, rather than eating three square meals.* I'm yearning for depth. Looking for meat and potatoes in my friendships. Quality over quantity.

And under and through all of this is a recurring thread: The value of unexpressed thoughts. "But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." (Luke 2:19) Letting thoughts simmer and develop completely. I wasn't sure I wanted to, needed to, or even should blog about this. Because I'm still working through it all, and it's not fully cooked yet.

I have reread this post a dozen times, and have written three different concluding paragraphs, all of which I have deleted. I don't think it's possible for me to be satisfied with this post, so I'm just going to leave it at this. Imperfect, and unpolished - an excellent representation of my current state.

 

 

*Google+ is an all-you-can-eat olive bar.

Hour-a-Day April: Day Twenty-Eight

You know when you're packing up for a move, and you pack really carefully for a few days, labeling every box meticulously. Then the day of the move, you realize how much more crap there is, and you don't have enough time to sort through it all anymore, so you throw everything in boxes and label them "misc" or "junk"? Then, the next time you move, you find those boxes, which you never opened, and throw them in the moving truck, along with half a dozen more boxes that you just labeled "random" and "crap"? Then you do the same thing all over again? And again?

When we moved to this apartment three years ago, it was the seventh place we had lived in seven years of marriage. Seven times, we have gone through the "Crap, we're out of time, just throw it all in a box" routine. And those boxes all went into the walk-in closet.



I spent a little over 2.5 hours emptying boxes today. I must have been in the right mood for it, because I threw a lot of things out. One full kitchen trash bag of garbage, plus the things that went into the various "donate" or "give to specific people" piles. A few things got filed or relocated, and a few things (like yarn and knitting/crochet supplies) were reboxed and labeled properly. I finished most of the left side of the closet. I expect I have another 2.5 hours of work to do on the right side of the closet, but we're gradually getting there.



I had a packrat breakthrough today. I hold onto things for many reasons. Some things have genuine nostalgia or record-keeping value, like old yearbooks, medical records, tax documents, photographs, creative writing, or journals. I try to find a coherent way to keep these things organized and safe, while taking up the minimum amount of space. (One file cabinet is sufficient right now.) I'm pretty good at whittling down the nostalgia stuff if I ever have the time to sort. What I'm terrible at is the "But it's still good! Someone might be able to use it someday!" stuff. I'm pretty sure I learned this from my dad. He took pride in being able to find the correct random bit needed to solve any given problem from his treasure trove of miscellaneous stuff (a.k.a. our basement). Broke a shoelace? I have spare shoelaces! Is fluorescent orange okay? Lost a screw? Let me grab my seven jars of random screws, we'll find one that fits! Sprained your ankle? I have ace bandages in four different sizes!

There is also a pride in repurposing broken things. Sure, there's a hole in this backpack, but the drawstring clamps are still good, I could use them on another backpack! Yes, the elastic waistband on this skirt has crumbled with age, but I could use the fabric to make a wrap-shirt! I know this card has writing inside it, but if I cut the cover off, and glue it onto card stock, I could reuse it! And those are only the arguments that have succeeded. My brain has been thwarted in attempts to save: a deck of cards with only 42 cards, because there is probably some game you can play with it, shoes with holes in the soles, because I might be able to cover the holes with glue or something, and an answering machine, because, even though we don't have a home phone, we might be able to use it as a tape recorder for the girls to play with.

Anyhow, back to my breakthrough. 28 days into my HADA challenge, and I still have so much STUFF to sort through. And it hit me today that all this stuff has a hidden cost: My time. It's not just harmless junk sitting in a box waiting to be used; it's a burden. It takes time to dig through and find the item I need, it takes time to sort everything into neatly organized categories, it takes time to move everything around when I change my mind about the layout of the house. It eats so much time. And honestly? Time is the one thing I have the least of right now. We don't have a lot of money, but you know what? We can afford a pair of shoelaces. And if I have to hang onto this much stuff that I might need just to have that one thing one day that I do need, it's not worth it. It's not worth the time, it's not worth the storage space, it's not worth the stress.

I came across a baby blanket today that I started making when my sister was pregnant with my nephew, over four years ago. I had managed to crochet about 12 inches of it when I decided that it was taking too long, and I wasn't very good, and I didn't want to spend however many hours it would take to finish a crappy baby blanket. But I kept it, for some reason. Maybe I thought I would finish it someday, I don't know. So today, when I found it, I told myself it either needed a purpose, or it was going in the trash. Use it or lose it. I decided that it wasn't worth making into a full blanket, but maybe one of Valerie's dolls could use a blanket. So I sat down, redid a few stitches that had come undone, called it finished, and wove in the loose ends. It took only a couple of minutes, and now Valerie's dolls have a remarkably amateur baby blanket.

I want to have less stuff. And I really am trying, but it takes time to change the way you think about stuff. I'm trying to be realistic about anything I save for future use. I think I might actually make that skirt into a wrap-shirt. I'm pretty sure I'll never make those greeting cards into new cards. I will reuse some of those gift bags, but I probably don't need to keep all of them. I do hate throwing things out, but that's what the donate pile is for. I probably overestimate the value of my junk, but at least I can think it's going to get used, even if Goodwill just throws everything out.

Oh yeah, I went grocery shopping tonight, too, after the girls were in bed. I'm tired, and this post is taking forever to write, so I'm just going to click publish and go to bed without all the obsessive editing I usually engage in.

Day 28 tally: 2.5 hours in walk-in closet + 1 hour shopping = 3.5 hours.

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Hour-a-Day April: Day Nineteen

I don't know if I'm running out of steam, or if I'm just still reeling from a busy weekend and two cranky kids, but man, HADA is getting harder and harder. It's really disheartening to make so much progress in one area only to see it completely disappear when you turn your back to work on another area. It's like when you get down to a dungeon with monsters that breed explosively, and even though you keep killing them, and you're way stronger than they are, you just can't kill them faster than they can reproduce, and the only way to win is to give up and back away towards the stairs and hope they don't kill you before you get there. What? Was that reference too geeky? Okay, it's like trying to shovel a driveway covered in slush. Sure, you can clear a path, but it just slops back in around the sides of the shovel before you've gone two feet.

Speaking of shovels, I shoveled my living room floor today. I wanted to vacuum a stretch of carpet so I could safely put Dorothy down, so I grabbed a snow shovel and shoved all the toys over to the toy box corner of the room. I vacuumed the floor, then went over to the pile and put all the toys away. In fact, I got the living room floor completely clean today. It felt really good. For about 10 seconds, before Valerie dragged all of the dolls back out and spread them evenly across the floor. Just like the plague rats. Or the slush. Pick your preferred analogy.

Today I tackled an especially difficult area of my bedroom: the top of my dresser. That's the place where I put things that I don't want to lose, but don't have a place for. My lifeguarding whistle, the string from the waistband of my honeymoon pajamas, the rope from the rearview mirror of our first car, some half-dollar coins, stamps, a library card (which I don't need to carry, because I have a key tag), my bedroom diagrams and scale furniture models for rearranging, extra shoelaces. I found places for about half of the things, but a lot of it just moved one step over to the top of Jeremy's dresser, to join the ever-growing "want to keep but don't know where to put" pile. It was a tiny bit of progress, but it was disappointing progress, because it felt like so little.

I didn't get much else done today. The girls were needy, and I was worn out. I got some laundry done, including the first load of winter wear, which all needs to be washed so it can be packed away until next year. I'm trying not to get too disillusioned, but the month is more than half over, and I still have so far to go on the projects I want to get done. And, I hate to complain about this in a public forum, but all the little things that I need my husband to do (sort a stack of papers with his name on them, weed out his "too many for the drawer" shirt pile, go through the electronics boxes and tell me what I can't throw away, etc.) are still sitting waiting to be done. I can only make so much progress when I have to keep navigating around piles and boxes of things that I can't deal with myself, in case I accidentally get rid of something I didn't realize was important. And every hour I spend on bedroom sorting projects generates another 5-10 minutes of something I need his input on, so I'm avoiding certain projects because I don't want to generate more work for him before he gets through the stuff that is already waiting for his attention.

Sigh. Sorry for the whiny post. Normally I just don't blog when I'm feeling down and overwhelmed, or I blog about unrelated things to try and focus on the positive. So I guess this is a side of me that most of you don't see very often. Unfortunately, it's a side I see all too often myself. I want to look at myself and see this great mom that other people seem to see in me, but all I see are my shortcomings. The messy kitchen, the umpteenth episode of Diego that I'm letting Valerie watch today, the unfinished projects. Frankly, I fully expected to crash and burn with HADA, but I thought maybe, if I blogged about it, I just might make it through the month. Maybe I would get things clean enough to trade bedrooms with Valerie before the mess took back over again. But I don't dare dream of making a life habit of it. I don't believe I will ever be like those awesome moms, who cook three meals a day and wash all the dishes after every meal, who watch one movie a week on Friday night and no TV otherwise, who do crafts and projects with their kids every day, who still find time to read books and exercise. I want to be better, but I spend so many of my days just in survival mode, it's hard to find energy for anything else.

Day 19 tally: 30 minutes sorting stuff on top of dresser, 15 minutes winter laundry, plus I'm stealing those 15 minutes of extra time from yesterday. Total = 1 hour.

Good Days and Bad Days

Last Friday was a rough day. I got to sleep at about midnight, then Dorothy woke me up at 3 a.m. Then, well, let me tell a story in Facebook status updates:

5:22 a.m. Dorothy is asleep, now I'm just killing time until Jeremy stops hitting snooze. Nothing's more fun than trying to go to sleep with an alarm going off every 9 minutes.

6:51 a.m. This grumpy Mama brought to you in a collaborative effort by all the members of her household to keep her awake at non-concurrent intervals.

7:00 a.m. As it turns out, those 45 minutes of snooze button pushing were my last chance to get any sleep last night. Sigh.

8:40 a.m. Anyone want to come hang out? Feeling overwhelmed today.

1:13 p.m. Where do I tender my resignation?

It was a pretty awful day, but what do you expect on three hours sleep? Somewhere in there, I managed to produce a blog entry in an attempt to focus on the positive, but it was only somewhat successful. In the end, a long nap (one that took almost two hours to bring about), a helpful husband (who managed to catch an earlier train home from work after getting off the phone with a sobbing wife), and dinner guests (who were gracious enough to bring dinner and to come late so I had extra time to clean) pulled me out of the fog. And Friday night, I got to sleep from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. which is double the amount of sleep I had managed the night before. Three more hours of sleep is apparently the difference between hopeless desperation and confidence that I will fumble through somehow.

Caring for a newborn is hard. I knew that from before, and I fully expected it to be hard again. But I had survived it once, so I knew that the darkest nights would be temporary, and that the sun would eventually come up in the morning. What I had "forgotten" was how hard life with a two-year-old was. Because that had crept up on me slowly, over two years, rather than being sprung on me all at once. Before Dorothy was born, I prepared myself mentally for sleepless nights and marathon nursing sessions. But I didn't prepare myself for the things I had been doing every day - the unpredictable sleep patterns, the hour-plus of laying beside Valerie trying to get her to sleep, the constant vigilance lest she get into something she shouldn't, keeping her entertained and attempting to wear her out so she would sleep, not to mention the energy involved in responding to a steady stream of requests, demands, and "Look, Mama!"s.

I had thought a lot about how I would take care of a newborn with a two-year-old around, but I had neglected to consider how I would take care of a two-year-old with a newborn around.

It seems like I talk about, think about, and blog about Valerie more than Dorothy. That's because Dorothy slipped quietly into the cracks of my life that I didn't know were there. But when she came, she brought an enormous spotlight with her and aimed it directly at her sister.

Dorothy has forced us to look at our daily lack-of-routine and create order. A predictable wake-up time helps me to make sure I get enough sleep. If I want Valerie to nap early enough to go to bed on time, we have to eat lunch on time, which means we have to eat breakfast on time so we can fit in a park trip or a play date between meals. I also quickly realized that I can't spend an hour lying beside Valerie at nap time anymore, and we helped her learn how to put herself to sleep. Throw daylight savings time into the mix, and that adds up to an awful lot of life changes for a little girl. I'd be overwhelmed, too. I have to remind myself that, while I've been through this "new baby throws your whole life for a loop" thing before, she hasn't. And if she is even half as overwhelmed as I was the first time around, I'm surprised her head hasn't exploded.

All in all, most days, things are pretty good. Valerie can be clingy and she has been acting out more than usual, but she has adjusted quickly to our new schedule, she goes to sleep on her own without complaining (a feat I thought impossible a few weeks ago), and she absolutely adores her sister. It's still not easy, but we have more "pretty good" days than bad days. Some days, I even manage to wash some dishes or fold some laundry! This blog post has been in the works for about a week, though, so I'm definitely not rolling in free time. (And since I started writing it, about seven more potential blog posts have begun percolating in my head, few, if any, of which will actually get written.) But that's Dorothy's fault for actually letting me sleep at night - I blogged so much when Valerie was a baby because there was nothing else to do at 3 a.m. Speaking of which, Dorothy is asleep, now, so I better get to bed. I'm posting this without thorough proof-reading, since I just want it to be done, so I apologize if it's not completely coherent. Semi-coherent is probably a more accurate representation of the state of my post-baby brain, anyhow.

War on Mondays

Mondays. Bah.

It's such a common condition that it's almost pointless to say that you don't like Mondays. It's like saying that you don't like the taste of manure.

I always thought that, in order for Mondays to suck, you had to have a Monday to Friday job to go to. I'm home every day now, seven days a week, what should make Mondays any different?

A lot, apparently.

I thought it was a coincidence at first, so I didn't think too much of it. I just seemed to be more down some times than others, I never really noticed the day. It probably would have taken me even longer to notice if it weren't for the fact that we have a standing Monday night date with some friends of ours, and suddenly, after I quit my job, I never seemed to have the energy to go anymore.

So what is it about Mondays? I have a few ideas. I think the biggest part of it, for me, is that I have all of these plans for what I'm going to accomplish on the weekend. The glorious, magical weekend. Full of unlimited amounts of free time, a toddler who entertains herself, and a husband to help me carry heavy things to the basement. Then Monday rolls around. And the house is still a mess. And there is still a 100-pound computer sitting in the middle of the kitchen.

I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that, but it's enough for me to start troubleshooting solutions. Mondays mark the point during the week when I have the most things on my to-do list, and the longest stretch of time before I will have help getting them done.

So, I'm declaring War on Mondays. Tomorrow, there is nothing on my to-do list. Starting this week, Monday will be the day when Valerie and I can just relax and unwind from the busy weekend. I don't even have to make us lunch, because I made sure that there would be enough leftovers from the weekend for us to have tomorrow. And, most importantly, no guilt. No guilt for not being more productive. No guilt for turning on the TV and letting Pingu entertain Valerie for a while. No guilt if I happen to still be in my pajamas when it's time to get into my pajamas again for bed.

How do you deal with Mondays?

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Looking Back

I hate to be one of those bloggers who is always apologizing for not blogging often enough, so I will try to resist the urge.

This blog used to be such a pleasure for me. Now it's starting to feel more like burden. One more thing in my life that I've taken on and then run out of energy for.

I'm weary. I feel like I've been in crisis mode for so long, I don't know how to handle everyday life. Maybe I'm not cut out to be a stay-at-home mom. I need someone telling me what to do, and when to have it done by. Perhaps more importantly, I need someone telling me I did a good job. It's a weakness, I know it. But I thrive on positive feedback.

I'm in the middle of seventeen different housework-related projects right now. They're all interconnected, so I can't just complete one of them. And I can't really complete any of them with Valerie around, because she just gets into everything, and unsorts whatever it is I was just sorting. Ironically, it would be much easier to keep track of Valerie if all of my sorting projects were done, because then she would have less to get into. Catch 22.

When I was in school, I always used to get sick on breaks. I read somewhere that it's a stress thing. Stress keeps the illness at bay during school term, and then, when the stress is gone, the illness gets to take over. I think this is the holiday flu for my soul.

A friend of mine recently did a "decade in review" thing on her blog, and I was considering doing one here, too. I think I might have done one here before, but I'm not sure. At the risk of being boring, here's my decade in point-form:

2000
-graduated from college in May
-actually didn't quite graduate from college in May, took incompletes in three classes, and finished my degree over the summer
-went to Japan with my family
-took a summer job at a lodge in Colorado
-started law school in Toronto, in a city where I knew no one

2001
-got married
-Jeremy didn't quite graduate from college as scheduled, so I took a year off of law school so he could finish his degree
-got a job as a waitress
-got a job as an administrative assistant

2002
-played a small part in "The Comedy of Errors" with the campus Shakespeare troupe I had started as a student
-Jeremy graduated from college
-moved back to Toronto with my husband, and started my second year of law school

2003
-Jeremy couldn't work, because his immigration didn't go through yet
-spent the summer in Philadelphia, working as a waitress
-moved back to Toronto, and started my second year of law school
-Jeremy's immigration finally came through, but he still couldn't find a job
-in December, my dad had a stroke

2004
-Jeremy got a job as a church custodian
-graduated from law school
-started the bar admission courses
-my dad had a second stroke, and died
-I managed to find an articling position in Ottawa, so we could move closer to my family
-Jeremy was unable to find work in Ottawa for a while

2005
-Jeremy found a job in January
-my articling position almost killed me, but I stuck it out
-I was called to the bar of Ontario, and promptly resigned
-in December, we moved in with Jeremy's parents in Philadelphia

2006
-started seminary
-started working at Starbucks
-dropped out of seminary
-after a few months of looking, Jeremy found a job doing computer stuff
-a few months later, Jeremy got mysteriously sick
-still sick, Jeremy lost his job

2007
-Jeremy still sick
-found a job at a law office
-bought a car
-we moved in with a friend on the other side of town
-Jeremy finally got the right treatment, and started getting better
-Jeremy found another job
-went back to Starbucks to be an assistant manager
-we got pregnant, but lost the baby
-we got pregnant again in December

2008
-we finally got our own place - a nice little rental townhouse near Jeremy's parents
-I demoted myself to part-time at Starbucks
-Valerie arrived on August 5 (three weeks early)
-Jeremy lost his job in October
-I went back to Starbucks when my maternity leave ended, instead of quitting as I had planned

2009
-I tried to juggle working with being a wife and mother
-Jeremy got to spend some quality time at home with Valerie
-Jeremy found another job in July
-I quit my job in December in order to stay at home full time

Phew. I thought that might be exhausting. I wonder what it's like to have a year go by without at least one major life-changing event, like moving, graduating, losing a job, death, or new life? I wonder if I'll ever find out?

I'm sorry for the down-ness of this post. I swear, I have cute stories and Christmas memories to share. But this is what is on my mind right now, in the middle of the night, surrounded by Things To Do. Okay, time to sleep. Everything is always brighter in the morning.

Breaking out of the holding pattern

Well, it's been over two months since my last post. Perhaps I should have kept up with the monthly birthday letters - at least it gave me an excuse to post once a month. Sigh.

I really feel like I've been in a holding pattern for the past year and a half. Take Valerie's bedroom, for instance. I was supposed to have two weeks of maternity leave before she came, maybe more, since first babies are always late, right? But she came three weeks early, and I had no buffer time to prepare myself, my life, my house, my world, for her arrival. It's all a terrifying and beautiful blur, those first few weeks, and then, before I really started to get my bearings as a mother, Jeremy lost his job, and I had to go back to work, and the blur resumed. It was only supposed to be temporary, just until he found something. And nine months passed, in that holding pattern. Nine months. That's longer than I spent pregnant.

Then, once he did find a job, I found myself having a hard time trusting that it was really for real. And I couldn't bring myself to quit my job, just on faith. Four more months.

I finally bit the bullet and picked an end date. Cashed in my stock options, and quit my job. Sixteen months after Valerie was born, I finally get to stop saying goodbye to her to go to work. And I'm having a little bit of a hard time believing that I'm really done. (So is she - she's been more clingy these past few days than she has been in months.) I'm not waiting for anything anymore, and it's a little unnerving. Especially since now, I get to deal with all the stuff that kept getting bumped down on the priority list by more immediate demands.

Which brings us back to Valerie's room. No curtains on the windows, no decorations on the walls. Barely a walkable path from the door to the crib. A jumble of things I need to deal with: curtains to hang, outgrown clothes to sort and label, our old TV to set up somewhere, a desk chair to clear a space for in our room. Yeah, don't even get me started on our room. I think it used to have a floor.

I'm trying to be realistic. I know it's going to take a fair amount of time to undo sixteen months of neglect. (Actually, more like two years - I wasn't an overly productive pregnant woman, either.) And, let's be honest here, a good part of the problem is quite simply me. I'm a procrastinator and a clutter collector who is much more likely to wile away a few spare hours watching a dumb movie or reading blogs than being productive. I recognize that. But usually, I can at least keep the chaos to a bearable level. It would be nice to regain a tiny bit of control. But then again, I am the mother of a toddler, so maybe I shouldn't dream such ridiculous dreams.

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This is why I'm a bad blogger

This is my Memorial Day weekend, in point form, to demonstrate part of why I am terrible at blogging.

-Thursday morning, work at 5
-Thursday afternoon/evening, spend time with Jer's parents and grandparents (who are visiting from out of town), dinner at Ruby Tuesday's
-Friday morning, work at 5
-Friday afternoon, necessary nap
-Friday evening, Jer's cousin's wedding, 90 minutes away. Home after midnight.
-Saturday morning, sleep in a little bit
-Saturday afternoon, picnic in the park, volleyball
-Saturday evening, dinner with Jer's parents and grandparents
-Sunday morning, church, get there early to drum with the worship team
-Sunday afternoon, necessary nap
-Sunday night, go out for a coworker's birthday, home after 2
-Monday morning, work at 5:30
-Monday afternoon, family barbecue
-Monday evening, gaming until well after midnight
-Tuesday, no work, collapse into a quivering mass of recovery.

It sure was fun, though, but who has time to blog in the midst of all that? On the upside Jer has finally finished the massive computer project that he was working on that was preventing me from uploading and editing photos and videos. So, I can finally post pictures again! On the downside, I now have 60 minutes of video clips and 3.5 gigs of photos to sort through. I may find time next month. Maybe.

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Three Months Old!

Dear Valerie,

Today Yesterday Almost a week ago, you turned three months old. There are many reasons that this month's birthday letter is late, most of which have to do with too much to say and not enough time to sit down and do justice to saying it. Then I had to remind myself that I am doing this for you and for me and not for a Pulitzer Prize. So, here is a fumbling attempt at sorting out an extremely momentous month.

First, we took a trip to Canada, and you got to meet your cousins, April and Nicholas, for the first time. You barely notice your cousins at this age - you are much more interested in the funny faces that adults make at you. But in your interactions are glimpses of the future. Even though we live so far apart geographically, I am glad that your aunts and uncles and your daddy and I all conspired to have kids so close together in age. I'm looking forward to watching how the three of you develop the unique, cousiny, long-distance friendship that I can already see forming in your baby-love. Founded, at least in part, in a shared embarrassment of what huge geeks your parents are.



You get to see your cousin, Trevor, slightly more often, and I hope you will have a great relationship with him, too, as the two of you grow closer in size and mobility. Trevor is an active kid, and I would love to see you kicking a ball around with him, but I will understand if you inherit your mother's sports-ineptness. He loves you to pieces, even if you won't play with him yet, and he can just about say your name (although it comes out "Allery"). You're a lucky girl to have three awesome cousins, so close to your age.



Oh, and I would be delinquent if I didn't post at least one picture of you with your dog-cousin, Reggie (Nana and PopPop's dachshund). Your dad loves forcing the two of you into many a photograph, and maybe if I post one, he will stop torturing the poor dog into posing with you.



Your biggest developmental milestone this month has been holding your head up. It happened all of a sudden, after our trip to Canada. You had been lifting your head before that, but now you just keep it up most of the time. I hardly have to support your neck at all anymore, unless you're feeling sleepy. But then you usually get snuggly, too, and I don't mind a little bit of regression when it gives me such a cuddly baby in return.



I'm slowly realizing that you're starting to grow up. Sometimes it takes a milestone like that to make me notice. Sometimes, it takes a doctor telling me that you have suddenly jumped to the 75th percentile, when you used to be in the 15-25th. And sometimes, it takes opening up my wallet to show someone a picture of you, and nearly dropping my wallet because I am stunned by how little you look like the picture in my wallet anymore.

This month, as I mentioned, has been ridiculously eventful, in our house, our city, and our country. It started with your father losing his job, which threw all of my plans for us, and my naive ideas about how our family was going to function, into a tailspin. The bottom line was that I ended up having to go back to work.

I work for Starbucks. It's a good, honest job, and I enjoy it immensely. And we needed health insurance, and me going back to work was the easiest, most logical way for us to get it. But I am a worrier. It's one of my biggest flaws. And I worry that I am sending you the wrong message. I don't want you to think that I value money over spending time with my family. I don't want you to think that being a mommy isn't a fulfilling or valuable job on its own. And I worry, on the other hand, about sending the message that mothers can't work or shouldn't work. And I worry about sending the message that mothers can't be lawyers, because I stepped down from that career. I worry about a lot of things, and I don't suppose you think about any of those things. You probably wonder where mommy's boobs are, and why you have to drink from that weird bottle thing instead. But one day, you'll have questions about all of those other things. I hope I have answers.

For now, you are enjoying the quality time you are getting to spend with your daddy. And, when mommy and her boobs get home from work, smelling like coffee, you giggle and grin and smile at me for several minutes, then you latch on and nurse for two straight hours. Seriously. You eat like a maniac lately. It's a good thing that you're a breastfed baby so you're allowed to pig out all you want. And it's a good thing you're too young to stop me from posting photographs of your adorable pudginess. Just look at those rolls!



This month was also your first Hallowe'en, which during a less eventful month would have merited its own post. But alas, I still have a lot of things to get around to in this letter, so here are two pictures from Hallowe'en to tip the cuteness scale of this post.





This month was the World Series, too. And, although I don't normally care much for baseball, your father does, and it's easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of rooting for the home team. This was the first championship a Philadelphia team won in 25 years, or something like that. It was thrilling to watch them win, and to hear our quiet little suburb go wild with horn-honking and fireworks. I think they won because you were wearing your Phillies booties.

But the most exciting thing of all came on the very last day of your third month of life, when America voted for their new president. Even though I'm 30 years old, this was the first time I was living in the United States during an election, and it was the first time I was able to vote in a presidential election. Near the end of the campaigning, I was almost ready to lose hope. I had never seen such an outpouring of hatred as I did coming from supporters of both candidates leading up to election day. I deliberately avoided political discussions because, although I knew I had given my choice a lot of thought, just mentioning my political affiliation brought all kinds of false accusations down on my head. This was doubly hard because, for the first time in my memory, there was a candidate that I genuinely wanted to support. A candidate that I genuinely believed could carry America through this financial crisis and into better days. And I'm a little ashamed that I kept my mouth shut during the campaign, but I saw so much anger and hatred being thrown around, I didn't think it would have been productive.

I voted for Obama. Twice, because I voted for him in the primaries, too. And I am proud of my choice. I am proud of my country for choosing him as their president, not because democrats are better than republicans, but because he is the right man for the job. McCain's dignified concession speech made me cry. Obama's inspiring acceptance speech made me cry. And, as excited as the city of Philadelphia was in the days following the Phillies' World Series victory, the mood was even more celebratory the morning after the election. I am optimistic about this country for the first time in years, and am finally starting to think of it as my home, rather than just "that place I live that's not Canada." And I'm excited for you, that you were born in the same year that America elected Barack Obama president. And I'm hopeful that maybe some of those difficult questions that I worry about having to answer someday will be a little easier to answer, because when you ask me about what you want to be when you grow up, I will be able to answer, truthfully, "Yes, you can even be president."



Love,
Your Mommy.

---

Six weeks

As I was heading to bed last night, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something on the agenda for today. I racked my brain, but came up with nothing. In the end, I decided that, if it was that important, I would have written it down.

When I woke up this morning, it hit me: today, Valerie is six weeks old. Which means that I am now six weeks postpartum. That's the magical number when I am supposed to be fully healed from childbirth. I've been so concerned with Valerie's milestones that I haven't been really paying attention to my own. Unfortunately, I think I'm behind the healing curve. I'm pretty much done bleeding, but I still have some reddish, sore spots, and it still hurts to sit, and sometimes to pee. I probably shouldn't be worried, I know six weeks is an average, not a magic number. But it's disappointing to reach the end of a countdown and discover that you have not yet arrived. My postpartum visit with my midwife is tomorrow - I guess I have a few questions I'll need to ask.

Six weeks is a magic number if you're an insurance company, however. Today's the day my paid leave runs out. I'm not going back to work yet, but the insurance company has dubbed any more time I take off "bonding" time, and therefore not eligible for paid leave. I told myself, before the baby came, that I would treat the paid leave as a license to not feel guilty about not getting anything done around the house. I was being paid to sit at home and heal, so anything I accomplished above and beyond that was a bonus. That resolution didn't stop me from occasionally getting frustrated and overwhelmed at the heaps of dirty dishes, but it also didn't wash them for me, so something had to give. I did give myself a pass on all the big projects, however, not the least of which is sorting through and putting away or throwing away all of the crap we moved from the old house. There is a lot of it. And after today, it's going to start taunting me every time I walk by it. Or rather, it will continue to do so, and I won't be able to tell it to shut up anymore.

Some days I really miss living in Canada. Nine months of leave would be really nice.

Happy birthday-ish, Valerie!

Valerie is two weeks old today! It's hard to believe that she is supposed to still be inside of me for another week. Surreal.

We've had her home for eight nights now, one of which went pretty well, and seven of which were killer. Other babies in my August babies forum are sleeping for four or five hour stretches at night, and it just seems so impossible to me that it almost makes me laugh. Almost. Valerie needs to eat every 30-60 minutes all night, and once the nursing, burping, and usually diaper change are all done, I might get five minutes to sleep before the cycle starts all over again. Let me tell you, nights are very dark for me.

But, the sun comes up eventually, and sometimes she lets me take a two-hour nap in the late morning, and then I somehow have some energy again, and it seems like I just might survive this motherhood thing. Maybe.

Saturday night was her one good night - she let me sleep for over two hours, not once, but TWICE during the night. I was really grateful for this, because I had hoped to be able to take her to church this week, and I actually was able to. I really enjoyed having my little family at church, even if we did need to sneak out of the service twice to nurse and twice to change diapers. She loved the singing, which didn't surprise me, since she loved it when I was pregnant with her. I'm wondering if I'll be able to play the djembe with her in the sling... she always loved my drumming in the womb.

Today was not too hot or humid, so I took her outside for a few minutes to get some fresh air and vitamin D. She didn't quite know what to make of the great outdoors - she gaped rather oddly throughout the whole affair. I hope this nice weather holds so we can go outside more often.

I know this stage of her life is temporary. I know that, as hard as it is right now, eventually, she will let me sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time. I know that I will carry fond memories of the little squeaking noises she makes while nursing, and the first time that she turned to find the source of my voice when someone else was holding her and she heard me talking. So I'm taking lots of pictures, and taking each day at a time. Because really, what else can I do? I'm a mama, now. And I wouldn't give her back for all the world.

First sponge bath at home (8 days old)


First time in church (12 days old)


We spend a lot of time in this position (12 days old)


First time in the sunshine (2 weeks old)


More pictures on Flickr.

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Homecoming

On Saturday night, as we were driving home from the hospital, I realized with a pang of regret that August 9, 2008 was the first day of Valerie's life that I had not taken any pictures of her. What a delinquent mother I must be, to start to slip so soon! But, as I thought over the day, and how much I had cherished every minute of the 30 every three hours when I was allowed to hold and feed my baby, I think I made the right choice. I wouldn't have wanted to have wasted any of that time tracking down the camera, not even for the sake of "I have pictures from every day of her life." A memory is no less memorable for not having been recorded; in fact, there is a unique value in those memories. Never fear, however, we've taken about 65 pictures since then.

On Saturday morning, Valerie's bilirubins were down, so they took her off one of the three lights, and we found ourselves getting optimistic about actually taking Valerie home on Sunday. Jeremy had a family party and a church party that he wanted to make appearances at on Saturday, so I gave him my blessing to leave me at the hospital so that I could feed Valerie throughout the day, and he could show off pictures like the proud Papa that he is. I'm glad he was able to go, so that he could connect with many of those wonderful people who had been praying for us and bringing us meals, and keep them updated. Phil and Rachel came by to spend part of the day in the education room with me, and it was really nice to spend time with them, even if it probably wasn't the most interesting day for them. Besides, they brought me ice cream.

When they ran her blood work at the end of the night on Saturday, her bilirubins were back up to almost the highest they had been the whole time. I went ahead and packed an all-day bag again for Sunday, and went into the day rather unoptimistically.

The first thing I discovered on Sunday was that someone had moved the hoses for my hospital-grade breast pump, so I had to wean those imaginary second and third babies rather abruptly. Let me just offer my sympathy right now to any mother who has ever had to wean a child, because wow, what a painful experience. That's all I'm going to say about that.

The next thing I found out was that Valerie's bilirubins had gone down a tiny bit, so they were going to take her off another light, but that didn't cheer me up too much, because the last time they took her off a light, her numbers skyrocketed, so I figured the same thing would happen this time. Sunday was a long day, and it didn't help that we had to keep moving out of the education room (which, in spite of getting tiresome, was actually quite comfortable) to make room for other families to visit with their babies.

Monday was exactly one week from the time I checked into the hospital to get induced. When we arrived on Monday morning, the first thing the nurse said to us was, "We're going to do what we can to send you home with your baby today." And she seemed to mean it. It took an eternity to get all the discharge stuff taken care of, but by about noon, we were finally on our way home with our six-day-old baby. I know six days in the NICU is not a very long time in the greater scheme of things, but boy was I glad for it to be over.

A visiting nurse met us at our place with a portable UV light and showed us how to put it on Valerie so that she could start burning up those nasty bilirubins. (Boy, am I going to be happy when I don't ever have to type that word again. Blogger even underlines it in red, because it finds the word offensive, too.) She is attached to the wallaby machine by a six-foot plastic umbilical cord, so her mobility is somewhat limited, but at least we can hold her, now. Being able to hold my baby whenever I want is the most amazing thing in the world.

Monday was a rough day for Valerie, transition-wise. There was too much going on for my little baby who had spent 90% of the first six days of her life wearing goggles and isolated in a small plastic box. She ate poorly, and I started to worry that, when the nurse came the next morning to check her bilirubin levels, they would rush her back to the NICU again. But, as soon as it was dark and calm in the house, Valerie turned into a different person. A very hungry person. And she ate so much that night that I didn't even need to pump, because she was actually keeping up with my production for the first time ever.

Tuesday morning, she was looking noticeably pinker, and, just to demonstrate her new-found normal-babyness, she decided to projectile poop across the room for me when I was changing her in the morning. He bilirubin levels hadn't gone down, however, which confused me a little bit, because she looked so much better, both to me and to the visiting nurse who had come to take her blood for the test. But when we took her to the pediatrician in the afternoon for her first check-up, the doctor explained to us that the numbers don't mean the same thing all the time. A one-day-old baby with a count of 16 is really bad, but a six-day-old baby with a 16 is not bad at all. That would have been something really nice to be told, I don't know, about six days earlier when the nurses started telling us numbers that we knew absolutely nothing about, beyond the fact that they were not good numbers.

Valerie dozed for a good chunk of the day on Tuesday, but it didn't bother me as much as it had on Monday, because I knew she would probably perk back up again right around when I wanted to go to bed. Which, sure enough, she did. Just a little before midnight, alert Valerie took sleepy Valerie's place, and started eating and eating and eating. (I just looked at my notes - she ate 14 times between 11:30 pm and 8:00 am.) Which left little time for Mama to sleep, but fortunately, we still have a freezer full of pumped milk, so Papa was able to pinch-feed for me once or twice so that I could catch a few winks. Then, when my mom came by in the morning, I put her on Valerie patrol so that I could sleep for a couple of hours, and other than one, short bottle-feeding, she didn't wake up to eat until I woke up again at noon to feed her. Her bilirubins weren't any lower this morning, but honestly, I don't care as much about the numbers anymore, because I can see how much better she is doing for myself. You know that whole "sleep when the baby's sleeping" thing? It makes a lot of sense. Difficult to execute, however.

Wow, I talk a lot about Valerie's eating schedule, don't I? Sorry about that. Here are some more pictures, as a reward for trudging all the way through that last, boring paragraph. (More pictures on our Flickr photostream - click on any picture to get there.)

With Mama (five days old)


Watching baby eat (five days old)


That look on my face is, "They're letting me take my baby home!" (six days old)


My little glow worm (six days old)


Wakeman family portrait (eight days old)

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You should try soft pretzels with ranch dressing. Yum.

So, I disappeared for another month. This is starting to become a bit of a habit. Maybe I should just change the by-line of the website to, "Now with monthly updates!" Then we will all know what to expect.

Speaking of expecting, Auggie is doing well. She (and yes, I am using the feminine pronoun in a gender-uncertain context; I blame going to law school in Canada for that tendency) has become extraordinarily active in the past month. She remains almost completely quiet the entire time I am at work, and then as soon as I am at rest, she likes to disturb my rest with pokes and prods and kicks and jabs that cause me no end of amusement. Except when I am trying to sleep. Then they are less amusing.

I learned an important lesson this Sunday in church: Don't wear shirts that are skin-tight across your six-month pregnant belly if you want to be able to pay attention to the sermon. Auggie loves music, and whenever I sit down after singing or drumming, she decides to keep the beat going for a while. This week, "for a while" lasted throughout the entire service. I kept laughing, because you could actually see my belly bounce up every time she kicked it. And, of course, the other people in my row kept looking at me to see why I was laughing, and then they would see the little kicks, and laugh, too. I really hope the pastor was trying to be funny, because an entire section of the church was suppressing giggles for the entire sermon.

My mom turned sixty this year, and I turned thirty, so we decided that we should do something special to celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime "I am half your age and both our ages end in zero" event. So, we went to see a Broadway show with my sister and her mother-in-law. Believe it or not, this was my first Broadway show. I saw "Phantom of the Opera" in Toronto when I was 11, but this was my first New York City Broadway with a Capital 'B' Broadway show. It was awesome. We had coal oven baked pizza for lunch, and saw a matinee so that my sister could get back in time to feed her baby before bedtime. I snuck my baby into the show without buying her a ticket (shhhh....) but I'm glad I did, because I think I have a Broadway baby. Easily the most active Auggie has ever been was during the big choral numbers of the show. I wonder how young is too young to start your child in tap lessons?

The show was Curtains, with David Hyde Pierce (and a couple of other people from "Frasier," too), and it was amazing. But then again, I am no Broadway critic. I probably would have been starstruck and impressed by anything.

My sister sent me a picture of the four of us outside after the show. I'm the fat one in the purple shirt.



So, let's see, what else has been going on in my life in the past month or so? I spent most of the month of April quite sick. I even went to my doctor because I thought I had something serious like mono (and, if you know me at all, you'll know that it takes a lot to get me to believe that I am sick enough to go to the doctor). Fortunately, I did not have mono. Unfortunately, I did not have anything treatable, so I just had to stick it out until the pollens changed and my allergies died down a bit. Yeah, allergies. I spent a whole month sick from allergies, and there is not a single blooming drug that you can take for allergies while you're pregnant. I've never had allergies like this before though, so I can only hope that it was just some kind of fluke combination of a bad pollen season and being pregnant and having no immune system, and that I won't ever get them like this again.

Meanwhile, I have still been working full-time at the store, which has left me completely drained. Eight hour days on your feet the entire time is pretty exhausting when you're simultaneously building a human being. The paperwork hasn't gone through yet, but hopefully, by the end of the month, I will be down to part-time hours. Then I might just maybe have time to blog more than once a month again. And get that daily nap that I was supposed to stop needing about 13 weeks ago when I entered the second trimester.

Oh yeah, and we also moved. See? This is what happens when I only blog once a month. I forget to mention big things like moving all the way back to the opposite side of the city, to a lovely townhouse that we have yet to move all of our crap into, so it still looks nice. Or at least, it still looks new and empty, which is nice in its own right.

This just proves to me that I need to blog more often. I still don't think I wrote about my trip to Florida in March. I definitely didn't get to write about the lovely day I spent in Princeton with Katie and Mike and Isla (and Squidgy), who were down from Canada for a conference. Nor did I write about the fantastic weekend, albeit cold, that I spent in a Virginia forest with a bunch of story-gamers playing all sorts of fun games. Jeremy even learned how to make boffer weapons out of PVC and duct tape.



But, when you're always either working or sleeping, and you manage to squeeze in a day (or even a weekend) to do something fun for yourself, you pay for it afterwards with extra working and sleeping. Hence the infrequent blog posts. I've been told that now is the time to do things for myself, to go on trips and have fun, because it's the last chance I'll have to do those things without having to figure out how to include or make alternate arrangements for the baby. I'm not 100% convinced by this argument, because I'm truly looking forward to sharing camping trips and, one day down the road, games and Broadway shows, with Auggie. But I do understand that, in just a few short months, my life will be changed irrevocably, and if there is something I really want to do now, I should do it now, before my life and priorities are turned completely upside down.

That said, I am making it my goal to thoroughly enjoy my third trimester. And yes, all of you mothers out there, I heard that snigger you just made. But really, I have been so tired and overworked for the first two trimesters, I have had very little chance to enjoy myself and my pregnancy. But I'll be dropping to part-time hours, I have several trips planned, and, always subject to providence throwing me a curve ball, I want to make the most of this. I might even (wait for it...) blog more often! I have a few ideas for the third trimester, including a weight/date pool and featured guest belly artists. Wow, I don't think I've ever done a "coming attractions" thing on this blog before. I guess I'm stuck with it, now!

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A Week With a Baby

I arrived at my sister's house late Saturday night. I was supposed to be there Friday afternoon, but a bunch of last-minute stuff came up that threw my plans off. Once I had done everything I could on Saturday, however, my awesome husband shoved me out the door (figuratively, of course) amidst promises that he would take care of everything else (which he did).

The thing that struck me most vividly about living with a five-week-old baby for a week was how irreversibly a baby re-centers your life. And you'd think that would be a bad thing, but it's really just different. For one week, I got to see what it's like to have a baby at the center of my universe, and what really amazed me was how much life still continued to move along pretty much normally around that new center. And I'll stop there before I start to wax too poetical. I'll admit that I got off easy, because I didn't have to get up for thrice nightly feedings, and my sister insisted that I shouldn't have to be on diaper duty all week. But I really enjoyed the rhythm of living with Alana and Eric and Nicholas for that time. And Alana took lots of pictures of us for me to post on my blog.

I won't go into a detailed blow-by-blow of the entire week. We ate three meals a day and evening snacks at night, Nicholas eating approximately twice as often as us. I did as much of the cooking as I could, vacuumed, did dishes, went grocery shopping and stacked firewood. While Alana nursed, I read. When Nicholas was fussy, I walked around with him and let him look at the world to keep him entertained.


When his neck got tired of twisting around to see what there was to see, I held him on my chest until he fell asleep (exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of trying to read the words on my shirt).


Sometimes, he would sleep soundly, and I would rest him on my knees and send Alana to bed while he napped and I read (or just stared at him).


Sometimes, I would entertain him by reading him his dinosaur book,


and sometimes, he would entertain me with his Dr. Evil impersonation.


Other times, we would just hang out and let mommy do housework unencumbered.


During the week I was there, I learned to tell his hungry cries from his bored cries, and he learned how to stick his tongue out for me when I encouraged him with laughter. (Sadly, there are no pictures of this, which is odd, since he did stick his tongue out an awful lot.) Alana and I both swear we saw him smile real smiles, not just the gassy ones. While I was there, Nick discovered his hands, and by the end of the week, he had developed a really strong grip.


We took walks with Nick and Eli (Nicholas' big, hairy, canine brother). We visited Alana's Taiko group to show Neko-chan off to Alana's second family. One night, Tim and Allison (a friend from college and his girlfriend) came to visit me and we played Settlers of Catan while Alana and Nick napped. We picked a whole bunch of tomatoes from Alana's garden and made sauce. We talked, we laughed, and we splurged and ate ice cream almost every night.

As I was looking over the pictures that Alana sent to me (and over them, and over them, and over them), I realized that not only was I enjoying how adorable my nephew looked in those pictures, but I was also enjoying how I looked in those pictures. I haven't liked very many pictures of myself in the past few years - I always seem to look old or tired (to me, of course, everyone else always seems to think I look fine). But since I quit my job at the law office, I have had several people tell me how much happier I look. And a week at my sister's, a week that for all intents and purposes should have seemed routine and boring, a week of living simply on a schedule driven by the needs of an infant, that week seems to have been the icing on the cake. I look at these pictures, and I like the way I look because I look happy.

back

Well, I'm back at home after spending a week at my sister's house in Vermont and a weekend in Ottawa for my ten-year high school reunion. I have loads to say, and, for the moment, have no idea where to start saying them. Until then, here are two more pictures from the wedding I went to two weekends ago (sent to me by my sister-in-law, who felt sorry for me and my lack of photos of myself from the wedding).

Jeremy and I, being silly as usual:


The Davis clan, now with a third generation!
From left: Jeremy (my husband), Jule Ann (me), Jill (my mom), Eric (my sister's husband), Trish (my brother's wife), Benjie (my brother).
Front: Alana (my sister) holding Nicholas (my nephew/her son).

Weekend Redux (with pictures!)

Thanks to fortuitous timing (okay, fine, it was mostly deliberate), I find myself with nearly three weeks of "vacation" between the closing of one chapter in my work life and the opening of the next. I'm loving the break. And of course, in true Jule Ann form, I have packed the break so full of activity that I will probably be more tired when it is all over than I was to begin with. But that's just the way I am.

To be fair, several of my planned activities involve relaxation. I spent most of the afternoon last Wednesday at the pool with Ali to start things off, and it was blissful. Then, on Thursday, Ally and I went thrift store shopping, because I needed a dress to wear to a wedding this weekend. I found a great dress, and had a great time. I also found an awesome corset, which, of course, I purchased, because there is a moral imperative to buy a corset that actually fits you when you find it for $4.50.

As an aside, for the curious, and/or for those who think that I am simply an inconsistent speller: I do have two different friends whose names sound like a small street, and one spells her name Ali and the other spells her name Ally. Which either clears up or adds to the confusion, I'm not sure which, but I like to think it's the former. I was going to attempt to clear up / add to the confusion even more by posting some pictures of me with Ally and me with Ali, but I somehow can't seem to find a picture of me with Ali, so here is one I stole from Ali's Facebook:


And here is one of me with Ally:


And now, back to our story.

Jeremy took Friday and Monday off of work in order to make this weekend a nice, long one. Friday we drove up to my mom's cousin's cottage at Silver Lake, Western New York. We were hoping to get there in time for some lakeside relaxing / swimming, but we got a late start, took a long lunch break, and then arrived at the Lake at about the same time as a huge windstorm, which dropped the temperature to well below comfortable swimming temperatures. Fortunately, we also arrived at the cottage only a few minutes after my brother and his wife, so we had a nice visit with them before heading up to my uncle's house at about 7:30 for the after-rehearsal-dinner party.

It was nice seeing everyone at my uncle's house, even if everyone else was mostly pre-occupied with last-minute wedding preparations, which it was kindof nice to not be part of for once. I was mostly pre-occupied with meeting my nephew, Nicholas, for the first time. Such a cutie. Here, have a picture:


Actually, that picture was from Saturday, because I was too busy holding him and cuddling him and loving him to take any pictures on Friday. So, why don't we skip to Saturday in the narrative, so that I can post the rest of the pictures.

Saturday morning was nice and relaxing. We all fought over took turns holding Nicholas, until he and Jeremy fell peacefully asleep together on the couch, and no one had the nerve to disturb them.


The wedding on Saturday was beautiful, but my camera sucks, so none of my ceremony pictures turned out. We sat in the back row with Alana and Nicholas to keep them company while Eric was taking pictures, which meant that we were the last people to be released from the church. So, we did what bored people do, and took pictures. Here is one of Nicholas with Grandma Jill:


And here is one of me kissing Jeremy, which I am including in part because it is fun, and in part because it is the only one I have of myself from this weekend:


After the wedding, I accompanied my sister to the nursery while Eric was taking the wedding party photographs, which really doesn't add anything to this story other than context for this picture of Alana and Nicholas:


The reception was held on my uncle's property, in a pole barn that was constructed specifically for this occasion. In case you ever wondered about my tendency to take on enormous projects that sound like a great idea at the time, end up being more work than I thought they would be, nearly drive me crazy trying to get them done, and then end up being finished just barely in the nick of time, this is proof that I come by this trait honestly, through my father's DNA. The building was gorgeous, perfect, and completed mere days before the wedding:


And yes, for the more observant car enthusiasts among you, that is a 2007 Mustang convertible that Alistair and Heidi made their entrance in. With "Final Countdown" playing in the background. My family is awesome.

There was a lego competition, and our table's entry, an homage to the word "poop", earned honorable mention. There was a wedding cake on every table, which enabled my Aunt Ester (the one who brought the parachute to my wedding) to dig a little hole in our cake for Mr. Mouse to set up his home.


And, while we're on the topic of cake, here is the only picture I got of the bride and groom that is even remotely good enough to post (I really need a new camera):


What was that? You want another picture of Nicholas? Okay, here is one of him with his Auntie Trish:


Alright, this post is getting to be pretty long, so I will rush through the rest of the weekend. We got to spend some quality after-wedding time with the extended family, and said our goodbyes to everyone but my mom on Sunday morning. Then we headed to my mom's sister's house with her to have lunch and visit with my mom's side of the family. It was especially nice to see my cousin Sean and his wife Melody, along with their four boys, who are about twice as big as they were the last time I saw them.

And then, in case we hadn't packed enough into one long weekend, we stopped by Liverpool on the way home to see Dora and Scott and their boys, whom I also hadn't seen since they were about half the size they are now. It was a really nice visit, and it was really great seeing them all again. Hopefully, now that they are only four hours away, we will see more of them in the future.

Star-Studded Weekend

Friday night, I made star-shaped meatloaf. And star-shaped biscuits. And I attempted to make star-shaped cucumbers, but they fell apart.

Unfortunately, I was then too tired to go to a 10 pm showing of Stardust. So I went to bed.

And I cleaned the house for five hours on Saturday. Which sadly doesn't involve any stars. But Saturday falls in the middle of the rest of my weekend story, so there you go.

Church picnic on Saturday afternoon didn't involve any stars, either. But it did involve me going into my pastor's pool fully clothed.

Saturday night I made flan for Dan and Ally. And it wasn't star-shaped, either, unless stars are yellowish tasty blobs of goo and caramelized sugar. Which they might actually be. I don't know. I've never tasted a real star.

But I did go see Stardust on Sunday afternoon with Jeremy's family. And I loved it. It instantly went in my top ten favorite movies of all time. Right alongside the Princess Bride. There are now two amazingly awesome fairy tale movies out there to choose from.

And to round things off, we went to the secludedest field we could find with a bunch of friends and family on Sunday night to watch the Perseid meteor shower. And we saw one really good meteor, and a few little ones, but then the clouds moved in and kept us from seeing anything remotely close to the promised meteor-a-minute. But meteors or not, it was fun to spend an evening in a dark field with friends. Just don't trip over the hose.

Actually, that didn't even round things off completely. Monday night, I worked at Starbucks, which is starrish, too, and therefore may be tacked onto my starful weekend. It was an important shift, too, because it was the last time I will ever be working at Starbucks as a barista.

And today involved no stars, although I am wearing my star t-shirt, and I am sure I could come up with some sort of star metaphor for working my last day at the law office. But I won't. Feel free to make up your own metaphors: I am on vacation.

Stage one of my vacation: Laying by the pool with Ali tomorrow.

And then, this weekend, at my cousin's wedding in Rochester, I will finally get to meet my newest nephew, Nicholas. Yay!

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Shorties

Happy: I am going camping this weekend with a bunch of my college friends. I have never been less packed and ready for a camping trip, but I am greatly looking forward to the R&R.

Super-happy: My sister had her baby last night, the first grandchild for my mommy! I am an aunt, now, for the first and second times in only three months. Yays!

Also happy, but less defined: I have officially put in my notice that I am leaving the law office. I’m leaving on good terms, to pursue a different opportunity. What that opportunity is, however, is not yet official, so I’d rather not blog about it at the moment. Between the two positions, I am giving myself a much-needed vacation, from August 18 to September 3, with my cousin’s wedding on the front end and my ten-year high school reunion on the other end of that time, and hopefully some quality nephew-cuddling and sister-assisting in the interim. Maybe I will be able to see some of you, then!

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Long Overdue Update

You know how they say that it takes three weeks to form a habit? So, if you brush your teeth every morning for three weeks, it will become a habit, and you will brush your teeth every morning automatically? Or if you run for 25 miles every morning for three weeks, you will run for 25 miles every morning automatically? It's not true. At least not for me. When I started my job at the law office, I brewed a pot of coffee every morning for almost a month, then one day, I slept in, and the habit disappeared. Just like that. Now I get my coffee from a fast food restaurant. No, I won't tell you which one. But I have tasted around, and I like it the best from this place. Anyhow, I'm the same way with blogging. I get in a groove, blogging regularly, then something happens, I slip out of the habit, and it takes me ages to get back into the groove. I should take up smoking. I bet I would forget to smoke one day, then suddenly be completely unaddicted.

So, my job at the law office. It's going pretty well. I think I'm pretty good at it, I get along with the other people in my office, and it's interesting and challenging work. But I'm really not happy. There is a stereotype in the work-a-day world that somehow, in the progression of growing up and getting more respectable jobs, customer service is low on the totem pole, and eventually, you have to grow up and get an office job. It's a pretty widely accepted assumption, and if you're ever in thr position to review resumes to fill a soon-to-be vacant office staff position, you will notice that a large percentage of the applicants have job histories that start with things like restaurant or retail, work their way up through telemarketing, and eventually settle into office work. I guess part of the reason for that is that a lot of people don't really want to work in customer service positions, they just get stuck there because they have few other options entering the job market at 16 years old with no qualifications.

But you know what? I want to work in customer service. I like people. Being around people energizes me. When I stop to get my coffee in the morning, I pull past the drive-through and into a parking space, simply because going into the restaurant and speaking face-to-face with my cashier makes me feel more connected in the world. I know that probably makes me weird, but I feel like I could make a lifelong career of serving people. So, long story made slightly shorter: I actually never quit my job at Starbucks when I took the law office job. I've been working occasional shifts there, in part because I missed the awesome people I worked with, in part because I wanted to stay up-to-date on the new drinks and products (aside: the new oven-warmed sandwiches are awesome), and, in a big part because those shifts at Starbucks thoroughly brightened my week because they let me interact with people on a larger scale than what I encounter in a small law office. (Another part of keeping myself in the Starbucks loop is that I think Starbucks is a great company, and if I am going to make a career of serving people someday, I honestly can't think of any company I would rather do that with.)

And there I go breaking Dooce's First Rule of Blogging, talking about my job on my blog. But I don't think I have said anything here that I am (or should be) ashamed of, and I definitely am not sharing any secrets.

As for the non-job portions of my life, I may have to come back with a fuller update later, since I need to get to work soon. My beautifully pregnant sister is due in two weeks, but today is my day in the baby pool, so send labor vibes her way for me! My husband is loving his computer geek job, and seems to have really found his groove there. My housemates' wedding was last weekend, and after a very stressful rehearsal day wherein we kept losing essential people, the wedding went off beautifully. We really enjoyed our houseguests, and I was only a little bit sad but mostly relieved that we ended up with only three people staying with us instead of eight. I was especially sad to drive Brian's best men back to the airport, because Portland is a long way away, and I feel like they were totally the kind of guys we could be great friends with. Bitsy almost died on me, and I got scolded by the oil change guys for letting her transmission fluid go completely dry. I have realized that I have no place owning a car, and really don't know the first thing about regular car maintenance. Any advice on this front would be greatly appreciated. Like, for example, how often should I be checking my fluid levels? Someone asked me if a 20-year-old was my daughter, so apparently, the weight I have lost this summer was all in the parts of me that make me look young. I made a trip, by myself, up to Ottawa to see some old friends and Canada Day fireworks. It made me very sad to see how out of the Ottawa loop, well, out of almost every loop, I have been for the past year or so. It was nice to see Geoff and Marg and their adorable twins, though, and to spend some quality time with my brother and his wife. Perhaps, in another post, I can also attempt to explore my bizarre mental state, in which almost everything I do seems to be both sad and nice, like my trip to Ottawa. Until then, know that I miss you all, appreciate your love and support, and wish I was a better blogger.

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A Passel of Partial Posts

I love the purple walls in my house. I will love my house even more when we finally get our shelves this weekend so we actually have a place to put things, and when we get our bed so we can stop sleeping on the floor on an air mattress. (Edit: I wrote this several days ago, but didn't post it yet. Bed and shelves acquired, many things still remain to be put away.)

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Okay, I'll admit, it's not always easy, but the benefits of living in community far outweigh the stresses. We take turns making dinners and lunches. The other day, I opened my lunchbox to find a napkin with a note from Erin, "JuJuBi, Jesus loves you. Make good choices. Love, Mommy." It kept me smiling the rest of the day.

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The next three weeks or so promise to be just as busy as the last few. I might not be around the blogosphere too much. I apologize for that.

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I swear, I had about 10 partial posts to write when I started this, but now I don't remember what the other ones were.

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Oh yeah, one of them was this: Twice, I have posted pictures of my baby nephew, and neither time did I mention his name. I'm too subtle. I put his name in the labels section only. Sorry. His name is Trevor. Trevor Jaden. Or, possibly, Trevor Jay, if he wants to be a DJ when he grows up. I'm rooting for Trevor Jay.

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