Catching Up

So prior to my last post, the one with THE NEWS, about little E3, my blogging had fallen off a cliff into oblivion. But be ye not offended, dear reader, because my blog is not the only thing that I neglected shamefully for the last three months.

 A short and non-exhaustive list of other things I failed to do:

1) Clean my house
2) Clean clothes
3)Cook food
4)Buy food
5) Enjoy food
6) Parent with energy
7) Parent with lethargy
8) Parent in any meaningful way other than switching movies or ineffectually shouting at my children to stop wrestling


I could go on, but you get the idea. The first trimester is not kind to me, ergo, I am kind to no one. Fortunately other people are still kind to me, and thank God for my in-laws who took my children home with them and did no less than 11 loads of my laundry one weekend and basically helped me make it through the part of pregnancy where I was a shambling, retching wreck.

And thank God for my husband who picked up the slack and made sure that our children did occasionally get to eat hot meals that didn't originate in individual packaging. I couldn't enter the kitchen , much less open the fridge, without retching for quite a long span of time, so I think we can basically credit Tim for the fact that my children don't have rickets or kwashiahor or pellagra at this point. Just to really add a fun twist to pregnancy, we also embarked on this journey while Tim was still a trauma chief  (why? what were we thinking?), so he got to be on call every fourth night and still do most of the work around here.

The good new is that things could really only improve around here, and so they have.

Tim is off trauma and has no more call for the rest of his time at Mayo. My mind still boggles at that and I cannot really truly believe that my husband is actually going to be home every night for the first time in years. I keep waiting for the punchline of the joke.

"Story Time" :-)

We went on a vacation together, by ourselves, for the first time since Addie was born. It was surreal and glorious. We spent six days in the Pacific Northwest and not even a typhoon, a federal government shutdown, and a UTI that would not die could ruin the trip.  I was thrilling company, as I slept for roughly 15 hours every day, but fortunately Tim was patient and relaxed about our schedule. And I think that vacation was a big reason for the return of my energy and actual enjoyment of life. 

Ruby Beach, Olympic Penisula, Washington

Addie is a total "threenager" with all the drama and joys that brings. She's great conversation now and she makes us laugh regularly with her enthusiasm and her creativity. She also makes me dread the next decade or so when she gets into a snit about something and doors are slammed and creative insults are hurled my way. She has always been strong willed, and I think she'll remain that way for the foreseeable future, but she now tempers her strong personality with frequent moments of sweetness and heart melting affection.

Sneaking away to check out the water fountain

Graydon is obsessed with bears and wakes up talking about bears and how they roar and that they poop in the woods and sometimes they chase people. His other obsession is collecting as many toy cars as he can hold in his pudgy hands and then lining up the cars on something interesting. A stuffed animal, my leg, a big package of paper towels. It's like toddler performance art around here all the time. 

He wanted a peach. So he pulled a chair over and climbed up on the counter to get one. God help us.

E3 is 16 weeks old tomorrow and is starting to show. I have an anterior placenta this time, which means that my placenta is attached to the front of my uterus and is thus between me and the baby. It's unfortunate because that means that I can't feel E3 yet and I could always feel (and see!) Ads and G man super early on, at around 14 weeks. This time, not so much, and the midwives warn me not to expect to feel anything until around or after 20 weeks. But that is ok and I think by the time I finally do feel the baby move, I will be more than ready to rejoice over a new bond with the little person.

Here is what I should insert a "belly pic" but I don't have one right now. And I cannot be asked to take one pre 7 AM, so I think that will have to wait for next time. :-) 

With Great Joy...

...we hope to grow again, as a family, as people, as an ever-expanding universe of love and life, sometime in early April.

World, meet E3, 12 weeks and thriving

I could say so many things...and I'm sure I WILL say so many things in the weeks to come....but for now, I will just share what I wrote down for this little person roughly eight weeks ago.



Dear Baby of Mine,

Today I learned that you're here, and I cried a few tears of joy and smiled so hard my face hurt and thanked God with every bit of my heart and soul for letting me be your mother.

I don't know anything about you yet. I haven't seen your little bean shape yet or heard the whoosh-whoosh of your heart. I don't know if you'll make me feel exhausted or sick or give me awful heartburn like your siblings did. I don't know if you will make me crave chocolate (Addie) or roast beef sandwiches (Graydon).

But I do know that I love you already, and I hope we will get the chance to tell you so somewhere around April 11, 2014.

Love,

Mom

First Day of School!

As the post title suggests, today was Addie's very first day of school EVER, which is kind of a BIG DEAL, at least in my mind.

Her choice of outfit for today included special "glitter shoes" and a dress my sister Des got for her

 She was incredibly excited, so much so that she put on her backpack about an hour before we left. She grudgingly let me snap a few pictures, but was really too excited to care much about hamming it up for the camera.

 A grudging "Cheese" followed by "Mom, can we go?"

We had gone to visit her classroom and meet her teacher last week, and she remembered the entire drill. She found her hook, hung up her backpack and went straight into class without a single backward glance at me. I was so proud of her, even as I was a little sad for me. She is so ready for independence and for learning, and it is really harder for me to admit that it's time to let her take those first steps away from me than it is for her to take them.

Her choice of backpack: penguin!

Meeting up with BFF, Calum, before school. They are in the same class.

Rather than subject the world to my handwriting, I just asked Ads some questions today. The whole "chalkboard" thing is awesome and Pinterest worthy, but only if your handwriting doesn't look untied shoelaces.

So, for posterity, an interview with Addie, faithfully transcribed (minus only my laughter):

Addie Ewald 09/05/2013
Mrs. Batterson's T/R "Creative 3s" class

Me: What do you want to be when you grow up? 
Addie: A kid.

Me: A kid? Well, by definition, you'll be an adult when you're grown up. I was thinking more about what kind of job you wanted to do when you were big.
Addie: I want a job where I'm a kid.

Me: OK then. What are you most excited about learning?
Addie: How to drive

Me: Is there anything that worries you about school?
Addie: No, not really.

Me: Well, that's good. I'm so excited for you. Are you ready to go get some knowledge?
Addie: What's knowledge?

Me: Oh, you know, just information about the world around us.
Addie: What's the world around us?

Me: Um, well, the things we see...cars, people, buildings, plants, animals.
Addie:What are animals?

Me: OK, now you're just being silly.
Addie: What's silly?

After school, I asked her how things went and she said "Mom, it was very frustrating." I was concerned/confused and asked her why, and she said "Mom, I'm just really slow and tired. Can I go lay on the couch and watch a movie?" My daughter, the 13 year old  the 3 year old.

 I'm choosing to believe that it drained her, and she was just surly because she was over stimulated, but maybe it really was frustrating. When I think back to the first few days of a new job, it often IS frustrating to learn the ropes and the codes of a new place. It's not so much because the learning process is arduous, it's just because the feeling of being at sea until you've got it all down can be upsetting. 

I've spent so much time in school (21 years, I do believe, which makes me kind of gag/cry/laugh) that it's like second nature to me to fall into classroom mode. But I had to learn all of those things and that's what she's working on this year. I had kind of forgotten that you have to learn how to walk quietly in a hallway, how to sit and listen respectfully to classmates, how to take instructions from other adults, and how to function on your own in a new space and setting. It's good for her, and hopefully both the crazy excitement and frustration will soon smooth out into quiet enjoyment and a lifelong love of learning. Or maybe she won't be interested until they get to the driving part of the nursery school curriculum. We shall see.

"Oh, the places you'll go! "

Bat vs. Bee

I don't much like bats. I don't know that I've ever seen a bat in MN, though I'm sure they are here, but I used to see them all the time in NC. The sun would start to set and they'd come out and fly around in their little erratic swoops and dives. Once one of them dove a little too close to my horse at the end of one of my lessons and I ended up getting pitched over the horse's head, and yeah, I don't much like bats.

This picture has nothing to do with anything, except we took it in a cave in Panama, and there were a lot of bats.

Our summer has been a little haywire, a little "batty", if you will, and I'm trying to flow with all the swooping and diving and I'm just ending up flat on my back a lot of the time.

 I don't know if it was the wisdom teeth surgery or what, but my personal rhythm is so "off" right now. Sidenote:  it sucks to get that surgery done when you are as elderly as I am. I arranged help for myself for exactly 48 hours and then I thought I'd be good to go. And yeah, NO. It hurt for weeks afterward.

Anyway, back to my point. I prefer to get up early...painfully early...to run and do my devotions and drink coffee and blog and generally get woken up and all my kinks shaken out before the kiddos emerge and I need to be a present and intentional mama.

I want to be a bee. Bees work hard, and they have really clean little hexagonal houses. Also their houses are always stocked with homemade sweets. What's not to like? So I make little mental schedules for my days, and I mostly don't really follow them, which leads to a lot of completely unnecessary and totally self-made guilt.
 
I just cannot seem to be a bee lately. I belong to an Internet group where we (theoretically) check in with each other in the wee hours to share thoughts about our devotion and to be kind of gently accountable for getting up early. They probably think I'm dead. It's been THAT long since I checked in.

And I don't even know what week we're on in the devotion because I fell off that train around about week 3.

 Of course, I think my standards might also be a little too high. I got up Friday feeling like "oh man, I'm so late. Again" and was then mildly surprised to see that it was 6:27 and in whose world is that LATE? I have been living with a surgeon for too long, apparently. Except you can never really have too long with your husband, but you know what I'm saying.

This morning I did make it up at 5 AM, and I got my run in, WITH my dogs, and I staggered back inside on jelly legs and with a sense of "all is right in the world" until I nearly sat down on Addie, who had apparently ditched her bed in favor of the couch in the playroom/office. Her mind is a mystery sometimes, though I'm very much looking forward to her explanation when she wakes up.

 So back to the topsy-turvy thing, it is slowly dawning on me that life with small children is probably always going to be slightly chaotic and that maybe that doesn't mean that I'm doing it all wrong. Maybe that's just the nature of the beast(s). Perhaps even when I  am on my schedule, weird things will just happen, and my task is not to figure out how to better regulate everything, but how and when to let life happen outside the schedule and the plan.

I guess it's like exercise, where you have to find the right balance between listening to your body's pleas for rest and pushing yourself to make it a little farther.  If you always choose one option over the other, you aren't going to be very healthy.

I feel like I blog about this all the time, though I'm not sure that is true. It might be that I just think about it a lot. My mental blogroll is about 4 times the size of my actual post count, after all.  So, here's to figuring out how the nature of the beast, over and over again, until it's eventually deeply engrained in my own nature. Part bat and part bee, which I think would equal a "beet".

Tiny Dancers

One of my favorite summer activities is a street festival that takes place on Thursdays on First and Third Streets in downtown Rochester. This is imaginatively called "Thursdays on First and Third". I heart Minnesotans, despite the fact that "wry wit" was effectively culled out of their Scandinavian forebears a looooong time ago. Never forget that these are the people that find Garrison Keiller funny.

The name might be overly informative and slightly dull, the but the festival is so much fun. There are always two live musical performances and there are dozens of booths featuring local restaurants and artisans. And the fare is not your typical fried Oreo on a stick and cross stitched samplers, it's more like organic sustainably farmed fish tacos featuring local greens and cilantro salsa and burnished copper wall sculptures. It's seriously great.  

My kids love Thurs on 1st (name simplified for ease of use), and so do Tim and I. I usually meet my girlfriends downtown for lunch on Thursdays and try to sneak back with Tim if he emerges during daylight hours. Which he usually does during the summer, if only because daylight lasts until about 9 PM.

Treats from the homemade fruit pop stand. Addie is telling G to back.off.my.sicle.

My children have no notion in the world that running around a lamp post is kind of an odd thing to do.

Ads and G and I have been talking a lot about dancing lately. Addie is very into ballerinas, and princesses, and dancing ballerina princesses in particular, and if they can also have fairy wings and ride unicorns, then so much the better. Subtlety, thy age is not three.

Love this girl!

"Watch me stomp like a dinosaur"

I "blame" part of this obsession on this lovely book...and I actually do love this book and think it's illustrations are beautiful. Then Addie's "honorary aunt" Edith bought her the accompanying matching game, and the obsession was fully cemented. This was one of those presents that is a little "too good" as your child wants to play with it constantly. But there are worse things, and Addie did learn how to finally say her "Ls" as she said "Lilac". Though I do kind of miss "Why-wac".





Graydon prefers Giraffes Can't Dance, probably because of his current obsession with all things animal. Ask him what any animal says and he will moo. He's hasn't gotten the finer points down yet, but by goodness, he knows he likes animals.

I confess, I think the message of GCD is a little odd, because it's all about a clumsy giraffe that learns to dance and wows the other animals by being true to his inner rythymn. And yes, that's a great message, but is it really one that small kids need to hear? I've never met anyone truer to their authentic self than those of us under the age of five.

Still, between the two books, we've been talking about dancing a lot. And Thurs on 1st gave us a great opportunity to shake it out to the tunes of Jelloslave. If you're like me, you're picturing a college grunge band that took one too many jello shots. Nothing could be further from reality, as Jelloslave is actually an ensemble band of cellos and ecletic Indian instruments. Check them out here.

http://jelloslavemusic.com/

Not a great picture, but you get the idea.

 

 The kids freakin' loved it. Graydon and Addie got out the stroller and went right up front and danced like no one was watching them. They didn't care that there was a huge crowd of people cracking up at their moves. Soon enough a group of kids was up front dancing and I was smiling so hard that my face hurt. It was really beautiful and so much fun.

Busting a move

Still working it out

Giraffes may not be able to dance, but toddlers can.

And twelve dancing princesses could not be nearly as cute as twelve dancing kiddos.

The Impossible Dream

...getting a good shot of both my children at once. I guesstimate that it happens once out of every 100 attempts. I have about 10 seconds before the photo shoot degenerates into a wrestling match.

 

I also have this enormous backlog of pictures and blog posts right now, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it, honestly. It's just way too much of a hodgepodge to put in one big post, even one big picture post.

I think I actually do stick to my goal of blogging twice a week...success!... it's just that I'm not publishing that quickly...fail! Mostly because all of my blogging takes place pre 7 AM and that's not always my most coherent time.




Anyway, I'm not gone, and I am blogging.

And much like throwing meat to hungry lions, I thought I'd throw out some recent Addie and Graydon pics before my parents and siblings destroy me. My musings on life are well and good, but they really just want to see the punkins.

It might take me another month or two to get a decent photo, but in the meantime, at least they love each other. Most of the time. 

Perseverance

This is going to sound like a really mean "I hate Rochester" post for about one paragraph. But hang in there, because SPOILER ALERT, it doesn't end that way.

When we moved to Rochester four years ago, I was really sad to leave behind my life in Philadelphia. I missed my job, I missed my friends, and I missed my city. I missed being able to go home for a weekend visit. I distinctly remember driving back to the Roc from the Cities after dropping my Mom off at the airport, taking in the view of seemingly endless cornfields and soybean fields and thinking "I hate it here" and surprising myself with that thought and the depth of that emotion. Because I truly didn't want to hate it and I didn't want to be sad. I had a brand new (to me) house and a baby on the way, and life was good...so why couldn't I get with the program and just be happy? Darn it, was it so hard to just LIKE where I was living?

Well yes, it was, a bit. And after a few years of reflection, I think I know why.

If you have been through a book club with me before, you know that I love Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. And no, I don't like the movie, that sucked. And I know that some people loathe that book, including my own sister, but for me, that book, at that time in my life, was profoundly important. Anyway, this is not one of the profound parts, but Gilbert at some point mentions the idea that each place and each person have a word, something that encapsulates what/who they are in their very essence. And if your words don't mesh, you can't really get along with a person or be at peace with a place.

So recently I've been pondering Rochester and its word. And this was a hard job. Some places are easy to define. Rochester is tough. It's home to one of the best medical facilities in the world...and also to a lot of farmers, thus making it sort of a cosmopolitan and yet country kind of place. It's a city that takes its personality from a hospital, which quite frankly, is never a good thing. It's a city where eating in a restaurant beside a person swathed in bandages or making room for an oxygen tank along is totally normal.  The walking wounded are everywhere and some of the sights you see in a local Target tug at your heartstrings and turn your stomach all at once. It can be rough, but it's also a place of hope and answered prayers. It's a place where big problems are fixed and survivors celebrate their victory over disease and disability. And yet it's also a city plagued by murders of crows. You see what I'm saying here? That's Rochester. A place of last chances and answered prayers that also happens to have a problem  with omens of doom taking over the downtown.

So it wasn't easy to nail down a word, but after much thought, I suggest that Rochester's word might be "Perseverance".

Dictionary.com defines perseverance as:

1. steady persistence in a course of action, a purpose, a state, etc., especially in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.

2.Theology. continuance in a state of grace to the end, leading to eternal salvation. 

I love that there is a theological definition to this word too, which I confess, I wasn't thinking about at all, but frankly if residency doesn't turn your eyes to God, you will be turning to "crazy" with a quickness.

Yes, I think Rochester's word is "perseverance". And that explains why it took me so long to get along with Rochester. I am not yet sure what my personal word is, but I KNOW it's not that. I am not one who perseveres. I'm one who says "Well, to hell with this, let's get a bottle of wine". Nobody WANTS to learn how to persevere because that necessarily means doing something hard. No ones talks about enduring this chocolate cake or staying the course of their bubble bath.

I wasn't a perseverer (real word? no, but roll with it). But maybe, just maybe, I am now. And I do love it here, not so much because of the weird contrary contrastiness (also not a real word) of the Roc, but because I needed to be here and to learn how to endure, how to persist in spite of "difficulties, obstacles, or disappointment".  And I needed the people here, the women who help me continue "in a state of grace to the end". 

I'm not going to write about resident life because that's been done more effectively elsewhere, by people who have been through it themselves. But perseverance? Yes. They learn that. My goodness, they have to learn that or they don't make it.

Life as a patient or a patient's loved one? I've been there, sweating bullets and choking on tears in the PICU. Perseverance? Yes. It requires strength you don't know that you have and don't particularly want to have, but you MUST have it for your loved one. It's the strength to stay and the strength to face the possibility of letting them leave. And there is no difficulty like that, no thing that is harder to see to the end.

And life as a resident's spouse? I could write a novel, though don't worry, I won't do that here. But yes, you had better learn how to do it all, by yourself, and find happiness in it. Perseverance.

So now? I know that I can do this thing. This medical spouse thing, this motherhood thing, this LIFE thing. And I said "do it by yourself" but really, you don't do it alone. There are times that it feels that way, because your primary partner is gone so much, enduring their own tests, but you find people that help you, that quietly step into the gaps, and help you persevere.

One of those people left last week. My friend Melissa went back to California. She is the first of the fifth years to leave. I knew it was coming, of course. And I expected to be sad, and I am sad. I'm sad because I miss Mel and Cora. And I'm so grateful for the time we got to spend in Florida together and for Mel's sweet heart and generous nature which allowed her to like me even though I'm nothing like her and could easily drive a put-together person crazy.

And Melissa is always perfectly put together ...to the point that she and Cora are always dressed in complementary outfits. I consider myself well groomed if there are no immediately visible food stains on my outfit. When we were in Florida, she made a spread sheet comparing the prices of food and supplies at area grocery stores. I bought a balloon pump and 55 balloons for Graydon's 12 month photos, which then drifted all over our apartment for the remainder of our time in Florida. I think you get the picture. 

 I'm also sad because this is just the beginning of the end. The rest of the fifth years are packing up and moving out, and it's surreal to me. They're all great people and good friends. The last to leave will be Danielle, and when I think about Danielle and Sydney leaving, and not having sweet little Miss S every day, I immediately start crying.

Great, now I'm crying.

But yes, that will be a hard goodbye. There is no bigger compliment than handing your child over to someone. And Danielle is awesome, the kind of friend that lets you cry about a bad day and then brings you a bottle of wine the next day, just in case the bad mood is lingering. And she raised a luminous and lovely daughter that I will miss terribly, and Addie will miss terribly. She really believes Sydney is her sister. Sometimes on the weekend she freaks out and says "Mom, we forgot to get Sydney!" when we're leaving an activity. I'm not sure how to explain that she isn't going to get to play with her "sister" for a long while.

Soon my year will be the fifth year. And then it will be our turn to pack up and move too. All my friends already know where they are going...Utah, Canada, Alabama, North Carolina, Nevada....they are spreading out all over the States.  Realtors are being engaged, houses are being prepped for sale, and "we really need to do this before we leave" lists are being prepared. So yes, it's the beginning of the end.

The end of the end is still a year away. But I've already had my first little taste of how hard it will be to say goodbye. These are my people. My family away from my family, the girls that make it possible for me to have dentist appointments and hair cuts and bring me chai lattes on bad days and take long walks and short runs with me. I spent Mother's Day with Jen and Anne because Tim was on call (as were their guys). I spent Father's Day with Laura and Nicole because Tim was on call. They're my people. My other family.

So, Rochester, I actually value you now. I don't hate you. I kinda sorta like you, maybe even love you, because you've changed me for the better. You, and the people here, you're all about perseverance. And I hope we can spend our last year here appreciating all the bizarrely oddball things about you and our crazy lives.

And the fifth years? Ladies, you did it. You did. And I bet most of you were a little out of sync with Rochester too, when you first arrived. And I bet leaving now breaks your hearts. Because your personal words, whatever they may be, they now include Rochester's word. And while I'm sad that this chapter is ending, I know you will all be OK because this place left its mark on you.  I know you will all persevere.

Not least because you survived five Minnesota winters. Everything after this? It's cake, baby. Eat your hearts out.