imagination

I have posts to write. Things I want to share. Questions for you all, explorations, photographs. And I’ll get to all of that soon, I promise. But today, J sent me an e-mail entitled “My Perfect Day,” and tonight she gave me permission to share [most of] it with you. This isn’t a real day, not one we’ve lived nor one we are likely to live any time soon. It’s just my wife’s current imagined ideal. There’s so much between these lines. So much implied with each sentence, each desire. That this is my wife’s fantasy day is so lovely. What a wonderful creature I’ve married.

A few things to note before reading:

- “G” is a little baby to whom J is currently donating milk. His mom has had a rough time.

- In my wife’s fantasy day, SHE makes breakfast and does the dishes. Adorable.

- Oh, for an afternoon stroller (and not in-arms) nap. This WILL happen, right?

- No neighborhood lawn boy – Skip or otherwise – weeds our lawn. If anyone knows of a Skip, though…

- In J’s fantasy day, she has found us an imaginary babysitter [so far we've only left B once, and that was with extremely trusted friends] who both adores Bram AND plays with the cats. The degree to which our cats are neglected haunts me MUCH more than it haunts her. J’s inclusion of this one detail lets me know how much she loves me.

- Does a gluten-, soy-, and dairy-free dessert even exist? If so, someone should make it for us.

- In her fantasy, our boy is sleeping in a sleep sack, which means we’ve successfully weaned him off of swaddling. Gods bless her for imagining us on the other side of this process.

- Finally, how adorable is my wife?!?

I wake up of my body’s own accord at 8:00 in the morning. Bram is still asleep in his crib from the night before. At this point, he’s clocked nine hours, so I know it will be over an hour before he’s awake. I stretch out and open my eyes. R’s warm, sleeping body is curled up next to me. Sunlight is streaming in from the sides of the blinds. Both cats are curled in a warm, contented ball at the foot of the bed.

I get out of bed quietly; careful not to disturb my sleeping family. I creep downstairs, open the blinds, turn on the monitor, and pump. Because Bram is sleeping through the night, I’m able to pump 10 ounces in 15 minutes. It feels good to pump. I can make a big weekend bottle for Bram and two freezer bags for G. Then I get started on breakfast. I know that R doesn’t like overly complicated foods first thing, so I make a simple egg scramble with hash browns and gluten free toast. There’s fresh-squeezed juice and freshly brewed coffee (with real local cream for Renee and coconut milk creamer for me). I set the table with placemats and napkins, and I cut a quick bouquet of flowers from the garden for the center of the table. I turn on NPR very quietly in the background. The morning sun is warm and relaxing. All feels right in our tiny cottage.

First, I hear R stirring. I can almost hear the contentedness of her slowly coming out of sleep, stretching out in the bed, realizing there are good smells coming from downstairs. A few minutes later, I hear her soft footsteps on the stairs. Her sleepy smile and bedhead are just too cute. She’s so excited about breakfast, about the boy’s good sleep, and about the day ahead of us. We leisurely eat and dress. Eventually, Bram begins to stir. I go to him and we have a nice morning nurse. R gets him changed and dressed for the day while I attend to the morning dishes and the laundry.

By 10am we are all fed, dressed, and ready to go. We head out to the Farmer’s Market where we pick up the week’s delicious CSA (lots of hearty kale, heirloom tomatoes, a load of fresh spinach, carrots, peppers, and radishes). We stroll around the market carefully selecting delicious food for the week’s menu. We visit with friends. Bram takes it all in riding around on R’s chest. He seems to delight in all of the sounds and colors and smells. On our way home from the market, we stop by the co-op to finish off our week’s shopping. After the yield at the market, we only need a few items. We pick-up treats for the afternoon and I notice that three more strips have been taken off of the doula flyer that I hung last month. As I already have two families on my docket, this could be the third family that I need for certification. I’m feeling really good about this new path.

After the co-op, we head home. Bram has some nursing while R puts together sandwiches and huge salads for lunch. After lunch, I clear the dishes while R and Bram begin some floor time. Bram’s gotten so good at rolling over and grabbing his toys. He’s started to vocalize a lot more now, and we really feel like he’s grasping the baby signs that we’re teaching him. It seems like we’re on the verge of some big “firsts.” The three of us enjoy stories, toys, kisses, and songs together. When we can tell that he’s getting sleepy, we head outside. Bram has gotten comfortable taking his long afternoon nap in the stroller, so R pushes him all around while I go for my run. We’re out and about for well over an hour. The weather is beyond perfect. We see so many of our neighborhood friends playing with their families, as well. Life is good. 

Bram is so asleep when we get back from our walk that he lets us put him down in the Mamaroo. We’re both able to finish our respective workouts before Skip (yes, Skip) the neighborhood lawn boy comes over to garden for us. We give Skip thirty dollars knowing that our whole garden will be mowed, edged, weeded, and otherwise perfected by dinnertime.

R and I take turns showering and being with the boy. By 6pm, we’re both cleaned up, Bram has been nursed and changed, and there are two fresh bottles for him in the fridge. Our loving and trusted sitter arrives in time for our date night. We feel incredibly safe about leaving Bram with her. They have a good relationship and we can always tell that Bram has been well-cared for when we come home to him. She even does the dishes and plays with the cats while Bram sleeps. She’s a Godsend and we always fall over ourselves trying to pay her more money, which she will only reluctantly accept.

It’s 6:30pm and Renee and I are out on the town. We have dinner reservations at [a restaurant we love but really can't afford] to properly fete our recent accomplishments. The dinner is perfect, candlelit, and intimate. We both love our food and our gluten, soy, dairy free dessert. We arrive at the movie theater (for a movie we’re both excited to see) with enough time to take pictures in the photo booth. The movie is good. Really good. And by 9:30, we’re feeling connected, relaxed, and like no-one has leaked any bodily fluids on us for over three hours. We’re so excited to see Bram that we talk about him the whole ride home. When we arrive, the sitter is feeding him the last half of his second bottle. He’s got that glazed over sleep look in his eyes. She recounts the fun they’ve had, we pay her well, and say goodnight.

Together, we get him into his sleep sack, rock him and sing to him, and put him (fast asleep) into his crib in our room for another great night’s sleep. It’s only 10:30pm at this point. R and I are feeling rested and connected and excited to be alone together. … We go to sleep so excited to meet tomorrow.

 

two-month-happy

Bram still likes to be worn. A lot. And he is still the sweetest.

He also rocks it retro-style.

Here he is with the novel that inspired his name: Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer’s fictitious retelling of Bram Fischer’s life (or more accurately, the life of one of his daughters). This is the first novel I fell in love with in grad school and it’s a big part of my voice chapter. If Bram doesn’t grow up loving books, it won’t be for lack of access.

Bath time: a big big hit in our cottage. (Naked time in general is a hit; the water is just a bonus.)

Okay, so the boy isn’t in this photo – and I’m not even sure J knew I was taking it – but seriously, folks: my wife is gorgeous. I’m more in love now than ever. I can’t tell you how sexy it is to watch her grow into such an amazing parent to our son. She really blows me away.

We’ve finally started to adore floor time (a great triumph for my back). We also adore Mortimer the Moose.

Me (and Hades) after J’s first day back to work. Boy is two-person attachment parenting easier than one-person. Still, we are figuring it out. And we are so so happy, if tired.

B and I sending our best love and luck to mommy on her first day of doula training. We just know she’s going to be awesome at this new gig.

Though it was threatening at first, this has become one of my favorite-ever sights. I adore seeing my two loves connect so deeply.

Our boy at two months! He’s quickly gaining on Ramona. And he steals our hearts more each day.

 

.thoughts on waiting and preparations.

The floors are finished! Hurrah! We made it through that major project with only a few hiccups along the way (and they weren’t even Rabbit’s this time). R handled everything beautifully, as I was either working or sleeping during much of the project’s completion. She has moved every book and item of furniture on our ground floor at least twice during the last seventy-two hours. rock.star. Also, R’s family came to town today for lunch, which doubled as our Christmas celebration together. We had a very nice time, received some lovely gifts (including a really nice baby food maker), and took up a pool about Rabbit’s birth date, time, weight, and length. It’s hard to believe that we’re only five days out from the first date prediction!

I’m including some photos of the finished product (please forgive me if this is overkill; we’re very stoked):

In other preparations for Rabbit’s arrival, R has put back several weeks worth of postpartum deliciousness. It’s hard to appreciate the depth of food that she managed to get into our modest freezer:

The creepiness that is being able to see our backyard in January. We should be under a deluge of snow right now. It’s just not right:

38-weeks along and we’re still quite fond of one another ;-)

The 38-week belly. More on this below:

My body has CHANGED over the course of the last few weeks. I can barely imagine how I will continue to grow over the next two weeks if we carry to our due date. I can’t even wrap my brain around going overdue (I understand that this is a strong possibility, but I choose denial for the time being). I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to prioritize concerning my physical self postpartum. Like so many things in life, there will be decisions that need to be made concerning my body, but much of it will be left up to a concoction of circumstance, hormones, metabolism, and other elements that are just beyond my grasp of control. Preparing for parenthood feels very similar to this. I have no idea what kind of individual this baby will be. Therefore, I have no idea what kind of parents he’ll need us to be. This unknowing is compounded by having no idea who our other children will be or how they will come into our family. Will Rabbit be smart? Strong? Attractive? Will he have special needs (medical or emotional)? Will he be social or introverted? Prone to anxiety, depression, or addiction? Will he be well-adjusted? Will he have a lot of questions about his genetics? About his donor? Will that never really matter all that much to him? Will he have a stronger bond to one parent or another? And our future children; what of them? The things I don’t know fill up the floor to the sky. I could fit the things I do know into my right shoe (and even those are subject to change at a moment’s notice). There are so many decisions to be made in preparing for parenthood, but I recognize that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. From choosing natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and cloth diapers to making choices about vaccines and diet, limiting consumer culture’s lechery, cutting back on sugar, cutting out television and video games, and figuring out how to foster a love of learning, of reading, and of art. How do we recognize and encourage innate talents, especially when they might be totally foreign to me and R (like classical music or organized sports)? How do we raise a compassionate, sensitive boy in a world that teaches men to be cutthroat and dominating? How do we instill values like feminism, equality, and generosity without giving our kids resentment against us or the morals that we support? I suppose we’ve had too much time to think about the “what-ifs” and no time yet spent in the “activity” of daily parenting.

Well Rabbit, the floors are finished, so you can make your appearance at your convenience ;-)

 

.the (somewhat) disheveled waiting game.

We seem to have the makings of a good sitcom plot happening in our home tonight. We’re 37 weeks, 3 days pregnant and we have 27 cases of bamboo flooring, 160 linear feet of freshly painted (thanks to R) quarter rounding, and 5 rolls of floor padding taking up residence in our dining room.

Exhibit A – the semi-hostile takeover of our dining room:

Fortunately, we did have the decent sense to hire a contractor to install the floors, and he’ll be here at 8am tomorrow to begin the two-day project. They will shuffle all of our furniture about as they lay the floors, but we were responsible for moving all of our books and personal effects from the ground floor (read: R moved all of our books and personal effects while I took a two-hour evening nap). Thus, our generally clean and well-organized house is in a temporary state of total upheaval. This, as it turns out, gets on both of our “nesting” nerves. We want nothing more than to barrel through this project and have our perfect little space (albeit with new shiny floors) back in proper working order ASAP!

Exhibits B and C – R looking skeptical amidst our many, many books:

To make the week even more exciting, winter has finally arrived in the midwest. After what can only be described as a lackluster December in the snow department, Mother Nature dumped our first real snowstorm in our town starting January 1. As I had to return to work on the 2nd, R was kind enough to wake up at 6am to shovel the car out of the driveway (and shovel the walk, scrape the car, and salt everything…she’s quite good to me). All of that work was (somewhat) for naught, though, as the City plows hadn’t made their way to my campus. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get enough traction in our little Saab hatchback to make it up the hilly terrain to faculty parking. I turned around, drove slowly home, and tacked an extra morning onto my winter holiday.

Exhibit D – my incredibly adorable, sleep-deprived, frost-bitten wife:

In baby news, we had our 37 week appointment with our fabulous midwife, C, today. It’s really fun to get to meet with her every week. She agrees that Rabbit is dropping, though that could put labor anywhere from 1 day to 4.5 weeks away. As she said today, “If I had the crystal ball for predicting labor, I’d be the most sought after midwife out there!” Her professional guesstimate is that he’s somewhere between 6.5 and 7 lbs. Both she and R think that he’ll be 8.5 lbs. at birth. I can certainly handle that, though the 10 pound guess of our nurse practitioner just seems cruel! R was quite surprised at the fact that our midwife didn’t rule out the chance that Rabbit could come early (“you could have this baby tomorrow”), though there’s a very good chance that he’ll stay put for weeks to come. Still, I think that R is pretty freaked out by the mere possibility that he’ll come before the floors are done/before she even has one class meeting with her new students. Mostly I find her surprised-worry amusing, but I really don’t think he’ll make his appearance until at least a week from now. God knows, though, that I could be super-wrong!

I think that’s all the news that’s fit to print tonight. We’ll continue to keep you updated on our progress! Thanks for all of your kind words and generous guesses of short labor times! You’re a wonderful community of friends…

 

giving thanks

Troublesome origins aside, I adore Thanksgiving. No material gifts; just gratitude, family, and good good food. Here (in no particular order) are just a few of my reasons for giving thanks on this day.

• You people. Friends. Family. Blog friends, whom I love from afar. Your words, your care, got me through this year, and then through this past week of panic. This week in particular, some of you came and spent whole days with me when my fear got bad. Some of you introduced me to paths of less suffering. So many of you listened to my fears, my struggles, without judgment. Thank you for your generosity and your compassion. It has not gone unnoticed.

• My health. All of my labs this week came back great. That rare disease? Not in my body. It’s hard for me to perceive my body as healthy and strong, but I’ll get there again. I am devoted to getting there again. To trusting. This week revealed some wounds. Now I’m ready to heal them.

• My wife, who as I type this is working on a vegan walnut lentil loaf in the kitchen. It’s an ineffable thing, the sense that you are understood by someone. That you understand someone. I am blessed by this marriage dance.

• My mom, who’s spending her Thanksgiving here with us, helping us prepare for Rabbit. Who bought J and me Christmas Eve pajamas for the last time this year (since next year, that tradition will move on to the boy). Whose presence this year has been of tremendous comfort. Family matters. Family matters a lot.

• Emmett Ever, who was with us last Thanksgiving, and who we carry now. I’ve always loved Yeats’s idea that “nothing can be sole or whole / that has not been rent.” I just never quite understood it before our girl.

• Rabbit River. Who kept his mama and his mum up for most of the night last night. And who is nearing four pounds. And who has the sweetest energy. And who I believe I was meant to parent.

• Rabbit’s donor. I don’t think about him a lot, but he’s on my mind today. Though we may never meet him, he is our family now. And I love him for his gift to us and for his silent presence.

• Gratitude itself. And joy. And the ability (struggle though it sometimes is) to be present. And wisdom, even when it comes through painful experience. And growing pains. And surrender. And vulnerability, even when it feels like it might break you.

• The greatness that is J’s 31-week belly, and the way it peeks out from this flannel shirt.

The mobile above Rabbit’s crib. The way it dances in an apparently still room.

The stained glass full of concentric circles. Circles, which feel like life to me. Circles, which will surround our little boy in the space where he will begin his life soon.

Thank you all for reading. For being a part of our family this way. For the things you share with us. For community. Happy Thanksgiving.

 

happiness isn’t a warm gun

It is, however, plenty of other things:

• It is Rabbit being twenty-five weeks today. Twenty-five! How did that happen?

• It is my wife’s twenty-ninth birthday, which was yesterday. (She shares her birthday with John Lennon. Thus the reference.)

• It is celebrating GOOD, GOOD times with the same beloved friends who got you through the not.so.good times.

• It is the set of comments at the end of my last post about skin-to-skin contact. I’ve realized before what a privilege this community is, but never quite so profoundly as I did reading those comments as they rolled in over the past handful of days. The time you took to share your birth and bringing.home stories, your thoughts about narratives and realities, your beloved memories and bearable vulnerabilities. Your reassurances. Your fierce activist reminders. The intimate language with which you broke down walls and sought to comfort. Thank you. Your openness means more than you know.

• And it is photographs of these happy, happy days:

Here’s our girl cat, Nemesis. She’s quite a looker.

Here’s her brother. He’s not too shabby either.

Afternoon sun through the nursery curtains. We nailed this, didn’t we Cheri?

J might not approve of my posting a first.thing.in.the.morning photo, but come on: This creature is CUTE. This is the morning of her birthday. I made her mini-frittatas (shout out: Christina) and decaf tea-latte. My wife is anyone’s for good food in the morning.

She wanted to make her (gay rainbow) birthday cake herself. She could not be dissuaded. Here’s the batter in process!

I found candles that flame in the color of the wax. Because what’s a gay cake without gay flames?

That’s C’s sweater. It matches the gay cake, but she has a husband.

C, A, and J: Much.Loved. Cake: Super.Delicious.

From left to right: Rabbit’s mum, his mama, his Aunt Adrienne, and his Aunt Kippie. One boy, barrels of love.*

* This is right before we made C and A watch The Business of Being Born with us. Huddled around one 13” Macbook. Because we have no television, and this is our birth team, and it’s what J wanted to do for her birthday. Do we know how to party or what?!?

 

seventeen

…is the number of weekends, counting this one, that we have until Rabbit’s due date. And of course, he could come early. We could have fewer. Since once Rabbit’s here, he’ll be pretty central to how we spend our weekends, these now feel sacred to me. We’ve longed for a child to parent for years, and we still long for that, but we’re LOVING this time we have together. This quiet, us time. This close-held intimacy.

If you’ve already brought children home, how did you spend these last weekends alone together? How do you wish you had? If you’re working on/waiting for children now, how are you using the time you have?

***********************************************************************************************************************

My beautiful.joyful wife and our sweet.sweet boy.

Me and Rabbit.

The rabbit we (J and I and our dear friend C) watched eating the grass seed I planted in the front yard. Look at those ears! I think our Rabbit’s ears might be big, too, but probably not quite this big.

The nursery.in.progress, featuring the stunning, all-cotton, softly lined curtains that Cheri over at (Etsy’s) Seams Original made for Rabbit. If you have sewing project needs, look Cheri up. She is so talented, and she’s been way way kind and generous to our family.

Curtains. Glider with Ottoman. Total nursery love.

 

gratitude.frame

Every now and then, I fall into the trap that is American consumeristic thinking. Every now and then, I panic about living on a doctoral stipend at thirty-three. I somehow forget how stupendously blessed we are. I am bothered by our disastrously painted wood floors, which we can’t afford to redo. I look at images on-line, and get inspired about the new color scheme I want to use in our bedroom – cool greys, whites, soft blues – and the chocolates and plums I want in our living room. For tiny moments, I am stricken by the notion that our home is somehow shabby. I notice where the couch is coming apart at the seams, and where the batting has been flattened. I notice the barn-like quality (this is not hyperbolic) of the wood on the floor of the kitchen. I hate these moments because they don’t feel authentic. They’re similar to the sensation I get when we’ve watched a television show with a too.thin actress: that I’m not fit enough. They remind me that I’m a marketing victim. That I can be manipulated into forgetting to be grateful.

But ninety-nine percent of the time, when I look around our home, I am utterly charmed. I love what we’ve created on such a modest income. I appreciate every little indulgence. I notice the beautiful things: the bookcase J put together last year, which is filled to capacity. The table I sought out for so long. The rugs I saved for over a year to buy. The gifts people have given us over the years. The GORGEOUS new glider my mom got us as a “Welcome, Rabbit!” gift. The framed artwork. Rabbit’s crib. Our cats. My wife’s belly.

When I’ve had these consumeristic moments in the past, I’ve gone shopping. Bought something to make myself feel better. I think this is normal. But lately, I’ve tried to consciously reframe my thinking instead, and I’ve found that this is easy to do because the gratitude.frame is more natural to me than the this.isn’t.good.enough frame. This still isn’t ideal because it leaves me focusing (mostly) on material possessions. But it’s a step in the right direction: awareness of what I have and not what I don’t have.

In the spirit of the gratitude.frame, then, here are some photos of things I love. And seriously: our little cottage is full of things I love!

1. The new glider. SUCH a delight to sit in. Seriously, the most comfortable thing ever. Also featured here is the blanket my Aunt Linda knit for Rabbit. So sweet and beautiful. And she didn’t even know when she made it that aqua would be one of the nursery’s colors!

2. The threshold between the small, upstairs hallway and Rabbit’s room. I love these colors together, and I love the clean white trim in the middle. I love the old heat grate and the light switch cover. For some reason, this is one of my favorite spots in the whole cottage.

3. The total splurge of a dresser we bought. We wanted it to last, and we’re hoping Rabbit will have someone to share it with in a couple/few years, so we thought six (low and accessible) drawers was the way to go. Note Hades & Nemesis on our floor pillows. They love a pillow stack.

4. The curtain rod (so far sans curtain), featuring three glass pieces we love. From left to right: J’s first Valentine’s gift to me (I have a weakness for spheres), a gift our friend Jana got us for our wedding, and our first Christmas ornament as a couple. Outside this window, you can see our gorgeous maple, whose leaves are mere moments from beginning to fall.

5. The artwork I found at a festival last summer with our friend MJB (I bought Rabbit the rabbit, MJB bought him the elephant and bird). I think they’re even more incredible with this matting. These pieces capture the whimsical quality we’re going for with this room (and are the inspiration for the murals our SUPER.TALENTED friend Rachel is planning! Stay tuned on that…)

6. The most dapper overalls EVER! My mom picked this out for Rabbit on a visit last Thursday, and I LOVE it. Do you see the suspenders? This boy is going to look so much like his gorgeous mom.

7. Rabbit’s first sweater! (Given to us by our incredible friend, Mick, about a year before we first started trying.)

8. The first piece of clothing we bought Rabbit: a typewriter onesie (of course) that says: “So my story begins.”

9. SHOES! (Given to us by our friends J & J when their daughter outgrew them.)

10. Bernard (who came home on the train with us after our July visit to Chicago). Wearing Rabbit’s bib-overalls (also a gift from J & J). Sitting in the crib on Emmett’s blanket.

11. The “Children Ask the World of Us” poster made by the “Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament.” J’s mom had this hanging as J grew up (I think it’s from the 70s, right Sarah?). My mom had it framed for us when we moved here. It’s one of my favorite possessions in all of the world.

12. A replica of Tiffany’s “Mermaid.” This hangs in the front window of our living room, and has even more meaning for us since E.

13. A pillow and blanket stack. (H & N aren’t the only ones in the cottage who love a pillow stack. This stack includes the blanket Mick made us for our wedding.)

14. Where I do a lot of my work. At our new (used) table. In front of our theory bookshelf. On our lovely, grey rug (my favorite of our three new rugs).

15. Our fiction shelf. (There’s spillover, but it holds A-Q.) And our new striped-brown rug.

16. Cat sibling LOVE.

 

dining rooms

Maybe it’s the dinner scene in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Maybe it’s the sense that J and I became a family in part in the kitchen, learning to cook together, teaching ourselves and each other whole new ways of eating and living. Maybe it’s the dinners I’ve had at the tables of friends: eating great food, laughing, admiring paper placemats decorated by kids. Maybe it’s the game of “high/low” that I’ve always imagined myself playing with my family at dinner, coming together to reflect on the highlights and the struggles of each day. But whatever the reason, the dining room is incredibly important to me. It’s the room that makes me most think of family.

When J and I first moved to this state, we had no table at all (and no money either), so we bought the first affordable set we could find, which was this:

Vintage 1982. “From Marshall Field’s when the Field’s name meant something.” Mint condition; a retro-lover’s paradise. But the only thing I truly love from 1982 is my wife. I was able to love it only with heaps of irony.

So I have longed for a new table, and I’ve fantasized that, before we brought our children home, we would have a table that fit my image of us, together, eating as a family. Now, my dream table is the table from Captain Malcolm Reynolds’ space ship, Serenity (from the one-season-only science-fiction western Firefly). And I do want to commission a carpenter to build one like that for me in the future because my dream dining room table would seat ten. I have some hope that this dream will come true. I have some hope of getting a real job when I’m done with this PhD (and real jobs are really necessary if your dream is to commission the construction of a ten top table). In the meantime, I’ve been looking for a table to love. Something classic. Something heavy and substantial. Something we can be a family while sitting around. And something (this has been the tricky part) that we can afford on our increasingly modest budget.

I’ve been looking for years. I’ve been looking every single day for months. And then, two days after my mom gave me some money for my birthday, I found it. Used. For about 1/10th of its value (and for almost exactly what my mom gave me). So here it is, looking gorgeous in our little dining room:

And a closer shot just for the pleasure of it:

LOVE.

(And in other happy news.)

1. We heard Rabbit River’s heartbeat again on Wednesday (July 13th): A sweet, strong 172.

2. I went kayaking this morning with a friend. We saw rabbits, baby and mama ducks, and a swan family. We saw the moon set and the sun rise. (Do moons set?) I learned that kayaking is hard work.

3. Summer Supper Club last night was happy and simple. Evenings outside in a midwestern summer should not be squandered.

4. I’ve been seriously nesting, and it’s not just the table. We packed our television away. It was never plugged into even basic channels, and we only really used it to watch old episodes of Queer as Folk, Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The West Wing during workouts anyway (something to occupy the mind while doing free weights and sit-ups). And we just didn’t want it here when the Rabbit comes home. We’ll put it back out someday, once we have more space and an armoire to hide it away behind.

Hope you’re all having happy summers!

 

random thoughts on the eve of our second trimester

1.This is the lovely 1920s heat vent in the will.be.nursery, and the new white trim, and the gorgeous Tupelo Tree walls. I love this room. The work that J and our friends did this week made it even more beautiful, and even closer to baby ready.

2. I’ve just gotten back into my dissertation (after a brief hiatus and a lot of procrastinating). I felt overwhelmed at first, but I’m starting to like that this year I’m creating both my most significant work of scholarship and our first child. It feels like such a fertile (creatively, literally) time in my life, which is new and thrilling and full of labors of love. Starting today, I have vowed to work on my dissertation every single day except Saturday, even if only for an hour some days, until the baby comes. In a way, it feels like something Baby G and I are doing together. I don’t want to fear either of these processes. I want to remember, in spite of all the self-doubt, that I’m equal to these tasks.

3. Though the first trimester nausea is not gone, it’s been complicated by a new symptom: starvation. I feel hungry most of the time. Like, achingly hungry. I dream about food almost every night, including one dream that featured a five-star, lesbian-owned, vegetarian buffet, which we hit up with friends at midnight. That was a good dream. Though food still makes me sick (to look at, to eat, to consider), I want it, and in large quantities. Yesterday, J brought home, among bags and bags of food, Marcona almonds, the ingredients to make from-scratch zucchini bread, the makings of egg rolls (which I’ve craved since week six and have yet to consume), lots of spinach, carrot muffins, vegan bratwurst, organic oven fries, baked salt and vinegar chips, local hand-milked cheese, and tons of tomatoes (which I’ve been craving like crazy). She is both tired of hearing me say how hungry I am and the lovingest wife around. In the next three weeks, the baby will grow from 2+ inches to 4+ inches long. We’re doing our part to help.

4. I can’t believe we’re entering our second trimester. We should hear the heartbeat at our midwife appointment tomorrow. Isn’t that amazing?

5. J and I have this way that we like to welcome a new year. We usually spend New Year’s Eve working out and cleaning/organizing the house. At night, we sit together at the dining room table and light a candle for every person/animal in our lives, and we set our intentions for our relationship to that being. Usually a pattern emerges. For me, this year, it was openness. Less fear, more intimacy. More trust. Better listening. Faith. Expansiveness. That seems to be what I want to offer everything in my life right now. Openness. At the end of the ritual, we have a huge plate of lit tea light candles, and we blow them out (which we say sends our intentions out into the universe) and use them all year, one at a time. We also keep a book of our top moments from the year, as well as the moments we’re glad to have behind us (which we fill out on NYE before the candle lighting/intention setting). Now that book has four year’s worth of highs and lows. I love the feeling of history we’re starting to acquire as a family. I love how deliberately we’ve built that sense of history, and I love that we get to offer it to Baby G. S/he can one day read what this year looked like for us, the good stuff and the hard stuff. The trying to make him/her. The growing. The context into which s/he will emerge.

6. J and I get e-mails all the time now from people who have heard about the pregnancy and want to offer us blessings. Family. Friends. From all over the world. People who are mothers themselves, or fathers. People who aren’t. People who know us intimately, and people on the periphery of our lives. They are all sincerely excited for us. They seem to believe that we will be good parents, that we are deserving of this honor. They’re excited to see who this child will be. They offer morning sickness advice, parenting advice, stuff they wish someone had told them. They tell us that Baby G is blessed to have us. They understand how blessed we feel to have him or her, and each other. It moves me more than I can say. It all feels like family. There’s so much joy around this little creature.

7. J is downstairs making those egg rolls I talked about before, and I’m sitting in the will.be.nursery with our cats. If this is a preview of the second trimester, I’m going to love these next few months.