tinyPterodactyl

A week and a day ago, my grandmother, Vera, had a stroke. Every time I try to find the words to describe this woman, I fail. Aside from my mother, she is the most important individual influence in my life; from her, at the very least, I know that I have gotten many of my ideas about pride and about work, and from reflecting on the relationship between my her and my mother, I've developed most of my ideas about the necessity of forgiveness, and about the failures that are an intrinsic part of parenting. Most of all, from her I learned about strength, and strong is also the primary single adjective that I come to when thinking of her. She raised her daughter as a single parent in a day when this was hardly done. She provided for that daughter, and for that daughter's daughter, too, by dedicating herself to her work. She survived two bouts of cancer, and did so without - at least as far as I ever knew - feeling sorry for herself. She learned to dance after her first retiremen...

For almost 11 weeks, we thought we were going to be parents a second time around. (Or rather, we knew about the pregnancy for about 8 of these weeks - gotta be accurate, right?) I still don't know how to talk about this, really, but I've found that I'm thinking about this set of experiences all too often, and sometimes the way for me to move past something is to write it out. Maybe that will work here. We'd started doing that almost surreal work of re-imagining our lives with another individual around; just as we'd grown accustomed to our particular threesome, we learned it was to be a foursome - and this news was met with equal parts excitation and bewilderment. At least on my part. As I found myself increasingly giddy with this prospect, I also experienced a new self-doubt - what if this pregnancy were rougher than the last one? What if I wouldn't be as lucky in getting the birth I wanted? What if, what if... these are the musings of a mother-to-be, and I ...

So I'm one of those people who needs an overarching concept, idea, or goal to introduce any semblance of discipline into my life. I spent a lot of my twenties (the late ones, even, not so much the early ones) drinking more than was tasteful (or affordable, even), smoking, eating a lot of chocolate, indulging in all manner of tasty things, and so on. There was certainly an overarching concept at work here: that's delicious, I want more. There was not a lot of examination of how these things were making me feel. Even the pragmatic arguments against these practices fueled my special brand of decadence; when smokes in NY went to nearly $10 a pack for non-rez prices, I justified this as showing particular commitment to my hedonism, budget and lungs be damned. (I'd also like to note here that I'm not griping about any of these practices per se, but rather my relationship to each of them.) Various things over the years have led me to quit drinking (though I'll toast ...

One of the things that we've really struggled with is how to communicate the choices that we are making with Luka in our own home, with his kind and generous, certainly well-meaning, but not necessarily on-board , grandparents/family/etc. This is a particularly tricky situation, and I honestly don't know how to handle it even after a year+ of practice. We try to avoid plastic any/everything in our house, and are firm believers in the 10% toy & 90% kid formula (for more info on that, take a look at this excellent explanation of what this means) for toys. We eat mostly organic food, and we use our small toy budget to select high-quality, safe, and long-lived options. So, we have a collection of wooden blocks (which my husband likes building with at least as much as Mecha-Lukazilla likes to smash those creations down), many things that Luka's technically "too young" for right now that he will grow with and has already found novel ways to play with explore ban...

Ok, so, it's a few months since my last post, right? Having a kid, procrastinating like crazy on my diss, getting a full-time job, have kept me pretty busy. Did I mention that the kid is uber-energetic ? As well, as I've learned, the interwebs are inundated with mommy blogs, and I'm not sure how much I want or even have to contribute to this phenomenon. At the same time... I've just recently become a fan of Mama Natural and have been a longtime fan (and old school associate, too, back in the dark days of Logos ) of Orangette . The former's recent query about announcing births (and my complete inability to remember how I actually tried to let everyone know, after the botched "funny" attempt via Facebook), and the latter's actual announcement made me realize two things: 1) I am forgetting things that I thought would be unforgettable. - and - 2) I'm so excited to see how an old friend (and now-fave blogger) writes about her own experiences ...

Luka was “due” to get here on Dec. 30th, but our midwife made sure we knew to expect him, as our first baby, to be late. Still, when I had to go in to the hospital for some testing on our due date (I’d been having relatively high blood pressure readings for a month or so, which had my midwife concerned, and then a migraine earlier in the week led her to want to make sure that I wasn’t preeclampsic), I suppose we were hopeful things would quickly and (at least mostly) naturally take their course.

I got married a bit over two months ago. My husband A. and I put together the entire wedding * ourselves (with some incredible generosity on the parts of his mom M. and my maid-of-honor Josie); * in a little over three months (I'm not pregnant - we're just the sorts of folks who, once they've decided to do something, do it); * on a shoestring budget (no, really - we spent about one-eighth of the national average, and that's including my strange and beautiful 1930's-ish platinum and sapphire engagement ring, the same-era weird platinum wedding band, and A.'s neo-50's white gold & diamond blingtastic ring). More than anything, we wanted it to reflect the little things that we like to think might represent us. I'm a would-be textiles junkie, and A. has a long history in paper printing, so we put these skills to work making beautiful (and time consuming, oh my lord, how many days they took!) fabric-and-paper invitations, complete wit...