quest for a faerie child

how?

Portland is a city of bridges, a beautiful city filled with bridges.  It is divided east and west by the Willamette River, which runs straight through the middle.  If you want to get to the west side, you have to cross a bridge and vice versa.  It borders Washington state to the north and the border is the majestic Columbia river.  If you want to get to Washington, you have to cross a bridge.  Consequently there are bridges everywhere and several of them are quite stunning.  I heard a presentation once where the speaker mentioned there are something like fourteen bridges in the Portland metropolitan area.

Don't ask me to recall them all, though.  Even though I have lived here ten years this summer, coming up with the names of all fourteen would be a feat.

Up until this weekend, my favorite in Portland proper was the Fremont bridge which is really a highway bridge, in addition to one that crosses over the river.  It soars over the city, connecting I5 with the 405.  I have always loved driving over that bridge, though I rarely have the opportunity to do so.

However, there is a bridge which has always intrigued me by the name of the St. Johns Bridge.  It is truly spectacular, crossing the Willamette at the north end of Portland and looks like one of those bridges which was probably built around the turn of the century.

Yesterday, we decided to head out to Sauvie Island.  I had it in my head I wanted to can pickles this year and Sauvie Island is a community of farmers on a small island in the Willamette.  If you want farm fresh produce without going all the way out to the Gorge, you head to Sauvie Island.

On the way there, you pass under the St. Johns Bridge.  When I mentioned to Moose the fact that I had never actually crossed on that bridge, we decided to do so on the way back home.  It was beautiful.  I fell in love with that bridge the moment I drove over it.  It sits up extraordinarily high, dizzingly high.  I peered down below as we drove and thought to myself, "wow, it is a long, long way down to the river."

I kept thinking about how gorgeous that bridge is for the remainder of the day and decided I love it almost as much as I love The Bridge of the Gods out in the Gorge, and definitely more than I love the Fremont.

That is, until today.

 This morning, I heard from a co-worker that a former co-worker of ours had passed away last Wednesday.  I was stunned.  She is close to me in age with a son between the ages of Rowan and Maximus.  I recall when she was pregnant with him.  We spoke a great deal during those months because I had recently had Max and was pregnant again with Rowan.  To hear she had passed away was shocking.

Then I heard she had committed suicide.

Shortly thereafter, I heard how she took her life.

She jumped from a bridge.  The St. Johns Bridge at 10:15am last Wednesday morning.

From the moment I heard this, I have been in a state difficult to describe.  I didn't know her all that well and in fact, had barely seen her since she left work several years ago, now.  But, I have been overwhelmed the entire day.

When I heard what had happened, my mind took me to a terrible place.  A place where I see her jumping from the bridge over and over again.  I can't tell you why I keep going to that place, but when left with enough free time in my thoughts I am there right again and then my thoughts go to her son, her terribly young son and her husband.

And I am filled with this sense of despair.  How bad it has to be in order for a mother to contemplate leaving her pre-school ages child...

You see, I have been to the black darkness at times in my life.  I have been down so deeply, I almost didn't think I could claw my way back out.  But, I did.  I always did and I did it in those times without any help.  I did it on my own.  I have never been down to that despair since I gave birth to my children.  I left that tendency towards depression behind long ago.

Long, long ago....

In all those times, through all that darkness, I never once seriously considered taking my life.  Every once in awhile I would have this vague fleeting thought, "If it got really bad, I guess I could do that..."  But as we all know, that is not truly a suicidal thought.  There is no planning involved.

No.

My co-worker left for work that morning, called into work and said she was going to be late because she had missed the bus.  She never showed up.  At 1pm, her husband called to notify work what had happened.

And now she is gone and her child is motherless and I can't stop thinking about it.

I came home from my own work day and hugged all three of my children so very tightly and wondered how in the world someone could ever leave their child.

how?

we always prevail...

Our house.  I sometimes wonder what people think when they come upon it for the first time.  The body is a dark purple and the trim is orange.  I used to insistently call the colors of our house by the names I chose when I went searching for that perfect combination of something striking, yet fun.  The names of the colors are ripe fig and orange marmelade.  I would insist when Moose described our house as purple and orange, that it was actually "ripe fig and marmelade".  Do you know how pretentious and ridiculous that sounds?  Can anyone truly visualize ripe fig?

I am going to say, no.  Hence, I threw up my hands a while back and finally gave in to the truth.

Our house is purple and orange. 

It is surrounded on two sides in front by a picket fence of the same colors and the third side borders our neighbors 8 or 10 foot tall side fence, built I am told, to keep anyone on our front porch from being able to look at them when they are eating on their side deck.  I can't say I really blame them. 

At any given time, there is a hodgepodge of children's play things strewn haphazardly across the fenced portion of our yard, on the sidewalk, in the space between sidewalk and street.  A small-child sized play/slide structure also shares that space. along with a raised bed built out of remant pieces of granite in varying sizes, sculpted together with mortar and stones, which James did last year when he was going through his "tiling" phase.  To truly describe it is difficult.  Eclectic, might give you an idea....

On one side of the fenced portion of our yard, another remnant of James' tiling phase is the mortar and tile walkway with no particular pattern to it, winding its way through the yard.  The tiles were laid more as a result of whatever he could pick up from the habitat for humanity resale store and while there isn't truly a pattern, there is something of a symmetry to it that is at once interesting to look at, as well as somewhat offputing.   This side contained our mostly failed vegetable garden of last year, which I have since moved to a different area.  Now it contains ornamental plants, an extraordinarily large rosemary bush (read: more like a tree) and a suffering lavendar.

And more children's toys.  Always the toys.

On the front porch, a very old and tattered native american-style rug covers the majority of floor space.  An old lazy-boy type chair Moose and I bought for $50 before Max was born, provides the only seating.  There's a double stroller and the wooden shelving, which used to hold Max's dialysis cycler and supplies back in the day.

And the other side of the yard contains a huge rhodedendron, long since grown into a tree and a chicken coop fashioned like a small red barn with a six foot run attached.  There are three two month old chickens peck, peck, pecking and cheep, cheep, cheeping inside. Lola, the cat, prowls around.  Sprawls around is probably also a great descriptor.

The driveway holds no cars or vehicles of any type.  We've sprawled out into the driveway and it now contains a long raised bed, where the majority of my vegetable garden can now be found. It is the only space on the property with truly unobstructed sun from about 11 am or noon till after 6 or 7 at night.

This is our house from the outside.  During the late spring and summer, we, hold court on the front porch, the yard.  During the late spring and into the summer, the sounds of my boys riding their tricycles up and down the sidewalk is a constant.  The sound of their laughter, their screams, their fighting, their bear and tiger-like growls, fills the air.  It is music to me. 

Probably less so for our neighbors.

I know I have mentioned this numerous times previously, but Portland is truly spectacular in the summer and even though I am not quite sure yesterday's temperature of 71 degrees would qualify it as "true" summer, it was brilliantly sunny and warm enough to spend the entire day on the front porch and within the confines of our front yard.  Which we did.

As I rocked my daughter to sleep on the front porch for her naps and finally for bed, I listened to my boys chattering away.  The fact that they hold entire, full-sentence conversations with one another, never ceases to amaze and delight me, especially since it was not altogether long ago I despaired Max would never speak like a normal child.  Recently, I was reading back over old blog entries and I came upon one where I was worried because Rowan's speech was developing slower than I would have liked.  I was convinced it was because Max was behind and Ro is so highly imitative, that he would only mimic the way Max spoke.

I still believe this was true....

It no longer is.

I marvelled as I sat on the porch, how distinctly sublime my life seems at these moments.  We have come full circle once again.  Was it really last summer that my primary worry was money?  Did I really spend the entire summer obsessed and worried about paying our bills?  Did I find myself having to do yoga every single day as a means of taking my mind off of financial issues?

The answer is, yes.

But once again...we've made it through the darkness and the light has begun to shine upon us once again.  We prevailed.

We always prevail...

 

because it just feels good...

It is Friday.  I am sure this is obvious to everyone else and I am sorry to state the obvious.  But you see, it is not so obvious to those of us with lives as crazy as a circus on steroids.  Somehow I convince myself life is going to inevitably slow down, that the cycle of neverending tasks, appointments, work, caring for three children, is going to miraculously cut me some slack and allow me to take a break.

I am here to say it never happens.

Ever.

And honestly, I don't know if I would even have any clue how to handle a normally paced daily existence.  Lately I've been dealing with the ever travelling Moose and what that means for our household.  And when I say ever-travelling, I mean he has been on the road for a total of over seven weeks since the end of February.  

 It's not all at one time.  

Sometimes it has just been four or five days.  But he just returned from a sixteen day trip and less than a month ago, he was gone for something like twenty.  I will tell you, what you think you will never be able to handle is almost always doable.  If you had told me six months ago, I would be single-parenting my three kids for almost two months this spring, I would have told you you were crazy. 

But, I have done it.  And if I do say so myself, I have done it well.  I've handled car troubles.  Twice.  I've handled Max crises, including a three day odyssey in the hospital.  I've cared for our three chicks, our three children, our cat and our dog.  And I've maintained my mostly normal work schedule.

Yes.  I've done it all.  But, don't label me super-mom.

I've had help.  Moose's company has been paying directly for an oncall nanny service for the majority of these trips and I am so unbelievably thrilled with the service that I find myself wanting to reach through the phone and kiss Paul, one of the owners of the service, everytime he tells me they can do whatever crazy schedule I have had to come up with to balance everything.  I guess because I am not paying for it myself, I keep forgetting these people are actually getting paid to help me and that they aren't doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.  I generally only end up using them when I do actually need to be at work, except that I do allow myself 1 day of what I call "sanity-relief", where I have someone come in and I use that for "me" time.

I could not do this without them.

Max is going through what is termed "acute kidney rejection".  It sounds bad, doesn't it?  It's definitely not good, but it isn't as bad as it could be.  Acute kidney rejection is treatable if caught early enough and hopefully his was.  It is likely a result of the immunosuppressant dance we've been having to perform in order to keep what I secretly call the burger-king virus under control.  Burger-king because the actual name of the virus is the BK virus.  It pains me that I immediately associate BK with a fastfood restaurant I refuse to even step foot in or drive-through, as the case may be. 

But I digress.  I've posted about this before.  I posted about it a year and a half ago when it reared its ugly head.  It's an insidious little virus which could be the demise of Max's kidney.

Only time will tell and obviously a great deal of time since we've been dealing with this little bugger for a year and a half and only just now are we seeing the rejection we always knew was a possibility.

As I sat in the hospital with Max during the days and with all three kids at night, I had moments to reflect on life with Max.  This was not the worst.  In fact, the intense worry I've felt at various times in my relatively short time with Max in my life, was just a shadow of its former self.  I can't tell if this is because I can now put things in a perspective I used to find difficult, or if I am somewhat deadened to the spikes of worry that used to invade me time and again, or if I am just able to take what the doctors say at face value and realize this whole situation is only mildly concerning.

Regardless.  I've come a long, long way, baby.  We all have. 

I met someone when we were in the hospital.  Another mother.  Another mother who is dealing with not just one very sick child, but two and no, they are not twins.  And no, they do not have chronic kidney disease or anything renal related.  She struck a chord in me.  I think we recognized in each other, a kindred spirit.  Someone else who understands the yawning, gaping fear, the stress, the fact that noone else understands, no matter how much they empathsize with you, no matter how much they love you.

I don't know if that burgeoning spark of a friendship will sustain itself, but one thing it showed me is that I have a wealth of experience to offer and that there is something truly satisfying about offering that experience and offering a listening ear to someone when they are in need.  It also showed me that I should try to find time to offer myself in that way, either through some type of support group or as a volunteer, regardless of how crazy my own life is.

So, even if we can't find the time to nurture this relationship with each other, I think I need to investigate how to do something for others.

Because it just feels good.

It does.

 

There is nothing quite like sunshine and relative warmth on a spring day in the pacific northwest.  It speaks of the promise of summer, of days where rain and its inevitable threat are the furthest things from ones mind.  We drink up the sun on these days, coming out of the cocoon of our homes to welcome it, worship it, will it to stick around with everything we have inside us.  Everything comes out of the woodwork; people, insects, the first shoots of directly planted seeds.

Today is one of those days.

Today I rocked my baby to sleep on the front porch, with my energetic boys bounding like crazy up and down the sidewalk, screaming to their hearts content.  Our street, so unbelievably busy on Friday and Saturday nights, is wonderfully silent and peaceful on weekday afternoons. 

Our front yard is a haven and soon it will also be home to the three baby chicks we brought home this weekend.  For now, they are ensconsed in the makeshift brooder we setup in the basement.  They peep, peep, peep all day and night.  They sleep.  They eat.  They void.  They peep.  They sleep.  Every day I tend to them, add fresh pine shavings to those they have trampled, change their water, give them new food, check the temperature of their temporary home, pick them up and hold them close, willing them to love me in the hopes they will produce the loveliest of eggs when the time comes.

The process is incredibly peaceful and satisfying in a way uncomparable to tending to mere household pets.  These chicks will sustain us, hopefully.  These chicks will provide for us in exchange for our loving care.

I have wanted chickens for years now. 

This spring we are finally beginning to see a break in the financial misfortune, which had befallen us last year.  While I cannot say we are above water, we are at least tilting the other direction in our desperate attempts to achieve equillibrium once more.  Moose has been working and travelling for work a great deal, which means there is money coming in.  Since the end of February he has spent a combined total of six weeks away from us and while it is difficult, we embrace the influx of money it brings and it is the excessive travel paving the way for my dreams of chickens.

My children are thriving and thankfully never really knew or understood the dire nature of the situation in which we found ourselves.  Somehow, we seemed to have weathered the storm.  We are coming out of it better prepared, better educated and with the firm commitment to continue the austerity plan we put in place last spring. 

In the almost six years Moose and I have been together, we have weathered so much.  Our bond is strong and as he says, "forged in steel."  It is hard to see anything that could break that bond.

 

Cooking: It does a cluttered mind good.

I have boundless energy this Tuesday morning.  Make no mistake, a fair portion of this is self-administered by means of my old friend, caffeine.  However, much of it has to do with the fact that I am 3 weeks into the elimination diet and am feeling fabulous.  Oh and there is also the small matter of our daughter sleeping from 630pm straight through the night for.the.first.time.ever!  In fact, she was still sleeping when I left the house at 6am.

Thank you god.

Or perhaps I should say, thank you Aurora.

And I needed that uninterrupted sleep like you cannot imagine.  One area of my life is disintegrating right before my very eyes and I am a ball of stress when it comes to that.  And dude:  I wish I could discuss what has me wound so freaking tightly. 

But alas, I cannot.  Unfortunately, the possibility of prying eyes has me keeping my mouth shut and my fingers off the keys.  It would be so very helpful if I could just spill it out all over this blog, but I am going to refrain.  Suffice it to say that my trust has been shattered yet again and it is bringing up issues and thoughts and feelings I'd thought I had packed up and moved to the proverbial storage shelf 8 years ago.

Apparently I have not.

Apparently, I can still find myself wandering around my house, my stomach in knots, holding imaginary conversations of things I so want to say to people in my head.  I am hurt and angry and feeling like a small child once more.  I also don't know who I can trust besides my husband and my best friend.

This is unfortunate because I am certain they are going to soon tire of my unyielding need to process what is happening and I don't speak aloud even 1/4 of what is spiraling around in my head at any given moment.  I have a hurricane of emotion spinning inside of me just raging to get out and storm all over everyone and everything.

Instead of doing that, I am throwing myself into anything and everything to keep my mind off the elephant in the closet.  Last night, I started making candy for Moose at 830pm to eat today.  It worked.  As soon as I started measuring out brown sugar and butter, preheating the oven, laying out cookie sheets, the incessant gnawing feeling in the pit of my belly began to subside.

I foresee a great deal of cooking in my future.  A great deal of cooking and cleaning and walking, all to clear my mind, my thoughts.

Cooking.  It does a mind good.

first you must accept

Dear Diary,

You’ll have to forgive me if this is a bit disjointed.  I have a newborn, who in typical newborn fashion, wants nothing more than to be permanently attached to me these days.  We were doing well for a short period of time with a bit of ‘alone mommy time’, while said newborn would swing in a swing.  But as of yesterday afternoon, this seems to have become a thing of the past.  This probably has everything to do with the fact that as of yesterday afternoon, I had come to the conclusion that it was time to venture into the writing realm once more.  I began composing in my head and aching to just have a small period of time in front of my laptop.

18 hours later and this has been my first opportunity.

Such is life with a baby, though.. right?

Perhaps a bit of catch-up is in order.  I tend to not do that in my blog, preferring to allow the ‘catch-up’ to happen more organically.  However, I am going to make an exception for this post because the fact of the matter is that so much has occurred and is occurring, the jist of which is what is causing my unyielding need to write.

And so… here is the down and dirty of the last several months.

First and foremost:

I’d like to welcome my daughter, Aurora Bella, into this narrative.  She arrived a week late on September 27^th at 12:15pm, weighing in at 8lbs, 13oz and 20.5 inches.   And up until she actually emerged, I was fairly convinced her name was going to need to be Finnegan John.  I’m pretty sure this is a result of some misguided belief that because everything else in our lives is tanking, there was no way in hell the universe would see fit to actually provide me with that which I have been obsessed for some time.

I was wrong, though.  She is a girl and up until yesterday, a very quiet, unobtrusive and basically crying-free, girl at that.

Despite my best attempts (read:  trying every known natural induction method known to man: including, but not limited to:  walking hours up hill and down, taking stairs two at a time sideways, nipple stimulation, acupuncture, spicy food, sex, etc) and despite the fact that I spent the last month of my pregnancy in some extended form of pre-labor, I did not go into labor spontaneously and instead, had her via my third caesarian. 

At the time of her birth, my husband had been without work for over 3 weeks and continues to be.  You might recall from earlier posts how I stupidly mentioned that the only thing it would take to send us right over the edge and send us right into a true state of poverty would be for one or both of us to lose our jobs.

Bingo.

He did not actually ‘lose’ his job, but the work at his consulting company ran very dry and has continued in this manner ever since.  On top of all of this is the fact that his company still owes him money, to the tune of thousands and we have not seen any of it.

As a result, we are months behind on rent with no means of paying it moving forward unless work through the consulting company magically appears or a new job presents itself.

You know that saying ‘between a rock and a hard place’?  That’s us, multiplied by about  1 million. 

There was a period of time, before Aurora, where it looked like a job was on the horizon, a job which would require a move north to the Seattle area, a job which would allow me to disconnect myself from the work force and focus on being a stay at home mommy, but that particular job has not yet come to fruition and I don’t know if it will.

So, I am looking at having to return to work in about two weeks.  This is, by the way, before I will even be technically released to work after having a c-section, but yanno, I have no choice in the matter.  We do what we must to survive and I am still the insurance provider and I am still the only one in the family who continues to bring money into the household, not that the money does anything except keep our utilities turned on and provide us with a very small amount of groceries.  It doesn’t even fully pay credit card payments, which makes for joyous and unyielding phonecalls with creditors.

But hey… we are doing the best that we can.  Hopefully, beginning next week, there will be some unemployment coming in.  Make no mistake, it will not even cover our rent and car payment, but it will be something, right?

This is the unfortunate reality of our situation.  It is, I believe, worse than it has ever been for us.  And believe me, it is quite a shock, give than last year we made more money together than we ever have.  This year we have made less than half what we did last year and our overhead increased dramatically, as well.

I try to let go and tell myself that somehow we are going to get through this.  I try not to obsessively try to control everything I can and everything I cannot.  I try to tell myself that I should enjoy this small amount of time home with my new daughter, my husband and boys, but honestly…. That is so very difficult when you are a position where you walk down to New Seasons to browse (not buy) so that you can grab a free sample dixie cup of the amazing coffee they put out for customers to enjoy… just to taste good coffee because you can’t afford to go to a coffee shop.

It is difficult when you are in a position where your husband will, during leaner times of the month, wait for you and your kids to eat before he does, where he eats the leftovers and is losing weight to the point where friends who haven’t seen him for awhile, ask if he is ‘ok’ upon glimpsing him for the first time in weeks or months.

It is difficult when you are desperately attempting to breastfeed and not fail like you have with your previous two children, because there is no way in hell you can afford formula.  The stress of not being able to afford anything but breastfeeding is probably not the best way to ensure that your breastfeeding relationship goes well, though I must admit… it is going well so far.  Thankfully.  But, I live in fear that things will go awry as soon as I return to the workforce.

The one bright spot in all of this is that our children are not yet old enough to really understand the impact of this.  They have no idea that they are getting a toy from the dollar store because that is all we can afford and sometimes we can’t even afford that.  They don’t understand that we don’t have cheese or crackers as a snack today because we can’t afford to buy them or that we continue to have Max’s Ensure-like, big boy milk delivered from Apria because it is covered by insurance and allows us to make sure that even if we don’t have any milk for Rowan, we still have the canned formula/milk we can give him.

I swear, if I weren’t living this way, I wouldn’t believe it was true.  But, believe me… it is.  Things are just that bad right now.  

I am sure it will turn around.  I believe that it will.  I have to believe it.

But even after Moose gets a new job, it is going to be a very, very long time before we can dig out of this mess and it is more than likely that the new job will not be in Portland, but in some other city in some other state, which will present itself with a whole host of other issues to overcome.

I am a bucket of joy today, am I not?

Make no mistake, I do really believe things are going to be ok.  I do believe we are going to claw our way out.  But, sometimes you just have to acknowledge the deep well of despair in which you find yourself before you can focus on the positive…..

First you must accept, before you can focus on hope.

oh these rituals....

We are firmly entrenched in the rituals of our summer days.  The four of us or eight of us, depending on how you want to look at it, move through our summer days, living each one as we did the day before.  The only nod to one day being different from the next is whether or not  I head out in the late morning to work, or if I stay home.  Otherwise, the days blur together, run together in a haze of sunshine and heat and the surreal nature of the weeks before you are expected to give birth.

While some might find this boring, we tend to be a very ritualistic family.  There is a comfort in the overall structure remaining constant, even if the individual activities alter from day to day. 

The alarm goes off at 5am every day of the week.  This alarm used to get me out of bed.  These days, I roll over with no small amount of difficulty and turn it off and there I remain until either an overfull bladder antagonized by the little baby girl head pressing upon it forces me up and out of bed or I hear the boys beginning to stir to a point where I can no longer ignore them (read:  screaming and roaring at each other at the top of their lungs, to the point where I know this is echoing onto the street below).

Moose generally gets out of bed with the bleating of the alarm and leaves me to listen to NPR through my drowsy, I-hardly-slept-at-all-last-night-you-can't-really-expect-me-to-be-awake-yet-can-you haze.  If I'm on top of my game, I've set the coffee up to brew at 5am.  If I'm a slack, which is happening more and more these days, I've left it for Moose to take care of.

Eventually, I do get out of bed and pour myself the modicum of coffee I allow myself to still drink, which is about 1/4 - 1/2 of a cup, get dressed and head upstairs to get the boy wonders up and out of bed.  Sometimes there are baths.  Sometimes there is just a good deal of silliness as they say 'nooooo' to every single t-shirt I pick out until I finally give up and give them three choices.

This always works, by the way.   And why I do not do it from the outset, I'm not sure.  I think it is because I am too groggy-headed upon first waking to have my game plan set.

Giving Max morning meds and dose of water, overnight diaper changes, attempts at potty-going, NPR listening, dressing, choosing shoes, changing bedding on beds, gathering laundry:  all this occurs before we had downstairs to truly begin the day.  The other very important thing which must be done is to decide what we are going to do.  For Rowan, this inevitably becomes the chanted mantra of, "bus, bus, bus, bus...."  For Max, "Big park" or "Pump Park, or "Kid Park" or "School" can all be heard falling from his lips when my question of "What should we do today?" is uttered.

Lately, we've taken to preparing breakfast and eating it on the road.  Generally this means cereal for Rowan and a flour tortilla slathered with homemade refried beans and a tiny bit of cheese, melted, rolled up and cut into pinwheels for Max.  By on the road, I mean either at Piccolo park (aka Kid Park) or in the stroller as I try to get my exercise in as early as possible and we head towards one of the other various parks and usually a store or two on the way.

The goal is to be out and about as much as possible before I either have to work or before it gets too hot to want to be out in the world.

In the late, late morning, usually between 1030-Noon, Moose takes over for the rest of the day and the day is mostly my own to nap-through or work-through or cook-through or organize-through..... at my leisure.

Lately, in the middle of the night when late pregnancy insomnia holds me in its grasp, I find myself thinking about how our life is about to change drastically and dramatically.  This little structure we've built, which works oh so well right now, is likely to experience a huge shake-up as soon as I give birth.  I'd like to believe I'll be able to birth Aurora naturally and that a long, protracted "C" recovery will not be necessary.  But, you never know. 

If the latter is the case, things are going to be tough for a bit.  Not that they won't be tough anyway, but being limited in your ability to lift things and/or climb stairs is, quite frankly, going to be a bitch.

For now, I am doing everything in my power to ensure that natural delivery.  The midwife gave the ok to exercise to my heart's content beginning at 35 weeks, which is Tuesday.  Apparently, I want those contractions happening.  We need to get things moving in the right direction. 

And maybe I am just kidding myself that a natural birth will make things easier on us....  but I can continue to hope, can't I?

my children are screaming at the top of their lungs in their bedroom and yet all I want to do is settle in here in front of the laptop and write to my heart's content. Perhaps at some point, my need and desire to write will correspond to the times in which I am actually able to do so.

Until then....

Getting them up and ready for the morning is the name of the game. Baths, breakfast, attempts at some semblance of walking and a park trip are on tap before work rears its ugly head, yet again.

baby things on the brain

It is 8pm on a Sunday night and I am desperately trying to find some time to write.  The words have been moving around in my head all day, things to expound upon, ideas to elaborate, thoughts to discuss.  The truth is that these days, I have grand plans in my head of all the things I am going to do each and every day.  I contemplate them before I go to sleep.  I awaken thinking about them.  I am a planner.  I like to plan out my day, plan out my activities with the boys.  However as I was saying, these days I am lucky to get one quarter of them completed.

I am ambitious to the extreme.

I am not an idle person.

But yet, my body is just really not in any position to keep up with me.  If I am honest with myself, it is not really in any position to be keeping up with my boys, either.  I find myself losing patience with them quickly when their sweet little boy natures cause them to move like molasses as they try to do things themselves.  This makes me feel horrible as soon as I find myself snapping.  I do not mean to snap.  I do not mean to hurry them along.  It's just that my back is killing me or my lower abdomen feels like it is going to burst and I just can't stand a single minute longer.  Not one more minute.

Not.a.minute.longer. please.for.the.love.of.god.  hurry.up.my.lovelies.please!

I realized something that broke my heart this morning, too.  It is that I fear my 4 and 5 mile walks with the boys, up and down the hills in SE PDX need to officially become a thing of the past until after I deliver.  What am I even saying.....?  I couldn't even stand a 2 mile walk today.  I again felt just like I did on Thursday, when I thought I was going to pass out from the pain.  It wasn't during the walk, mind you.  It was after we got home, left in the truck to go to the store and returned.  I could hardly walk.  I felt hobbled.  I had to lie down with a heating pad for an hour before I could start walking around the house.

I have no idea why this started out of nowhere....  but it is time for me to except it, I guess.  My assumption that I could continue these walks right up until I deliver was, I suppose, a little pipe dream.  And this saddens me deeply.

These walks of ours are meditative for me.  They bond me with the boys as we look at flowers and trees, bushes and houses, herbs and cats and dogs.  They know our routes and tell me where to turn and where to go.  Today Rowan saw sunflowers, one of the flowers we've been working on and started pointing wildly, screaming "sunflowers Mommy!!"  I was so unbelievably proud of him....

I guess I should try and remember that between the two of them, they weigh a combined total of close to 65 pounds.  Add another 20-30 for the stroller and I'm pushing 80-90lbs of dead weight up fairly steep hills, lifting the stroller and the boys up and over curbs, etc.  Perhaps it is a little much to think I could continue to sustain that level of strain.  It would be different if I were just walking, myself... I guess.  Right?

I am heading into heavy nesting syndrome, too.  I find myself wanting to scour my house and yet as soon as I get it in my head to start, I feel as if a nap might be a better idea.

The only thing I find myself really up for is sitting on our front porch and knitting or holding the new 5-6 week old kittens we got this weekend, which we needed like two holes in our heads, but which are so damn cute I can't even stand it.  Sibling sisters who look so exactly alike that it took me a good 30 minutes of studying them on my lap before I could figure out how to distinguish Pandora from Ophelia and vice versa.

Tiny, little mewling babies.  Itty bitty little all-gray sweeties with the most striking green/gray eyes on each of them.  The only way to tell them apart is that Pandora is a just a tinge darker than Ophelia and has a little more of what I would describe as a wicked face, even though she is the more timid of the two.  Otherwise, even down to the little patches on their nose, they look just about identical.

Let me tell you a little secret:  if you are going to get a kitten, you would do well to get two siblings.  They entertain each other when you can't.  They sleep together and keep each other company.  They are wonderfully, beautifully sweet together.

These are incredibly young, but were from a foundling litter and the people offering them for free did not want to let them be separated.  They had other, older kittens but Moose and I feel in love as soon as we held these two.  So, home we came with them and they make a sweet addition to the menagerie we seem to be building.  I am not exactly sure what we were thinking, except that we've been wanting a kitten for Lola for some time now and this is the first time I came across a beautifully painted, clapboard wooden sign offering:

"free kittens to a good home (we decide!)"

Apparently we look like a good home, what with our twin-looking boys, my huge pregnant belly and my beautiful husband.  We appeared like a good home.  We smelled like home....

And now we are home to babies, babies everywhere.

We have baby things on the brain.  Can you blame us?

preterm - schmeeterm

At this very moment in time, there is a sweet corn stock simmering on my stove and a plateful of delightfully white and yellow kernels I cut from the cob sitting, covered on my kitchen counter.  I have grand plans to make a corn risotto ala glutenfreegirl and words cannot express how badly I am in need of a lovely cooking adventure.

The only problem in this little plan is that I am suffering with a great deal of pain, the origin of which is unclear to me.  If you asked Moose, he'd tell you I have overdone it and that I need to take it easy.  But, I honestly have a hard time believing that is the case. I've been doing the same amount of activity throughout the majority of my pregnancy.  The walk I took yesterday to drop Max off at school was less than the walks I normally do and yet I knew something was not quite right within blocks of starting out.

I continued on, though.

I was contracting a great deal more than I normally do in exercise.  The abdominal pressure I've been feeling for several days began to double and then quadruple.  My back was bothering me.  By the time I was on my way home with Rowan, I decided I was going to need to work from home instead of going in that afternoon.  By the time I had to drive to pick Max up, some movement was causing me to have to catch my breath due to the pain and yet I was not contracting in a rhythmic manner.  More so, it seemed as if my belly was just in a constant state of contraction.

I called my midwife upon returning home and decided to come in to L&D to have her check me out.  She told me to try one last thing of relaxing in a bath and seeing if I could get get things to calm down.  I didn't do the bath, but I did lie down with a heating pad on low on my abdomen for two hours.

I felt more able to walk around afterwards and didn't feel like I was going to pass out or stop breathing, so I decided to continue to stay home.

This morning, I'm having similar issues when I move around.  A trip up to the hill to drop off a urine sample for the Maximus and then a stop at the store is all it took to have me feeling like I'm heading into some form of preterm labor.  Again.

What in the hell?

Seriously.  I know I've been bellyaching to anyone who will listen that I am so done with this pregnancy and that my due date can't come soon enough.  But, I honestly really didn't mean I want to drop the baby this weekend.  I would like her to continue baking a little bit longer.  37 weeks on the dot would be absolutely perfect.  33.5 weeks... not so much.

Despite the weirdness going on with my pregnancy of late, I was still determined to cook today and this is why the gorgeous aroma of sweet corn and basil is wafting from the kitchen in wave after wave.  I just keep telling myself, to work in stages and if I need to go lie down for a bit, do it.

My family certainly thinks I should.

In the words of Maximus when I went down to the basement just now to check on all my boys, "Mommy, go sleep!  Mommy, go bed!  Mommy, out!"

In the words of Moose, "Mommy, take care of baby!"

In the words of Rowan, "Mommy!"

You need to visualize wildly pointing fingers from everyone as they proclaim the above and then you get the full picture of what I am up against...