A Spring in Our Steps

Spring has invigorated our chickens. They seemed to be fine during the snowy winter but the warmer weather has made them more active and perky and the longer days have increased their egg production.





We are finally FINALLY getting green eggs. Our chickens were supposed to start laying sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Henny Penny (may she rest in peace) started laying right after Lewis was born, if I remember correctly, so sometime in September, and then we started getting eggs from at least one other chicken. One of our chickens is supposed to lay green or blue eggs so for months we would eagerly check out the nesting boxes to see what might be there, only to find just brown eggs. As time passed, we started to lose hope on the colored egg issue. Then, finally, at the end of FEBRUARY, we found our first green egg! This means that our Ameraucana hen hasn't been laying this whole time. Slacker. And I am rather surprised that there is such variance in when these hens started laying; they were all the same age to within a few days of each other.

But now! Now that there are more hours of sunlight, we are getting lots of eggs, one nearly every day from each chicken. Mrs. Benedict (pictured up there in the nesting box) lays smaller brown eggs, Drumstick lays big brown eggs (she was the second one to start laying, after Henny Penny), and Ella lays large green eggs. Supposedly within about a year year their eggs will get larger but they will lay less frequently; then they will be HUGE, because they are already as big as the biggest ones you buy at the store.



This spring Grace is playing soccer at one of the city rec centers here. She's been asking to play soccer for quite a long time now but I missed sign-up deadlines and games were at inconvenient times and so forth until this spring. Her team is made up of kindergarteners and they play other teams of kindergarteners meeting all at the same time. Her team was assigned their uniform colors and they have dubbed themselves the Penguins. This whole team sport thing is new to me, as the closest I came to a sport growing up was ballet and running cross-country in high school. I think she is super adorable in her little cleats. They were significantly outmanned in their first match but in the weeks since then they've played teams more on their level; Grace has even scored goals! These small people seem to have the best luck when their approach is kept very simple-- kick the ball as hard as you can in the right direction and then everyone run after it.

This past weekend was soooooooo busy but also so wonderful. Rob's parents came in town to visit and we had an Easter church extravaganza which included me playing piano AND our church's big resurrection party AND a baby dedication for Lewis. Easter is becoming one of my new favorite holidays since we moved here to Salt Lake; celebrating with our church community here is such a gift. We did this song from David Crowder's new album this year, and I am really loving it now. We got up on stage with all the other babies and their families and read a Bible verse we picked out for him and then people who we love prayed for him and us.



So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover's life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of.

Philippians 1:9-10

In the afternoon, we had a HUGE PARTY up in the neighborhood where our church has its office. My friend Becky has lovely pictures of it all her beautiful blog. There was beautiful food and warm sun and a bounce house for the kids and a couple baptisms and lovely togetherness. The weather was amazing, and the view, and the experience of being with people we love as we celebrated resurrection and new life for all of us.

Springtime and the Living is Easy

Spring has come in fits and starts to the Salt Lake Valley. We have had such balmy warm weather with blue skies and wafting breezes and backyard picnics, interspersed with spring storms racing through the mountains bringing snow and cold rain and getting the fleece jackets back out for a few days. I don't mind the waffling weather one bit; I know that summer will arrive in all good time and meanwhile these back-and-forth days are lovely, each in their own way.

One of my very favorite things about the advent of warmer weather is being able to wear skirts with bare legs and sandals-- my very favorite way to dress. So easy, so comfortable. This does also mean the beginning of pedicure season, which is kind of a pain, although also sort of nice. I feel conflicted about all the rituals entailed in our society's feminine beauty norm. On the one hand, it takes so much energy and time and it is problematic to think of your body's "natural state" (whatever that means) as unacceptable. On the other hand, self-care is good and these rituals provide a framework for caring for your own corporeal self. And sparkly toenails!

Spring has been achingly lovely but our enjoyment of it has been besmirched by illness. We were very lucky all through the winter but we've had a string of colds and stomach bugs around here lately. Violet has been hit the hardest, as she always is. Grace, in contrast, almost never gets sick. When Grace was a toddler, I was so smug about how she never got sick. "Oh, it's because I breastfed her for so long. And look at what healthy food I feed her!" Then Violet came along with the same length of nursing and the very same food and she gets sick much more frequently. Grace just has some kind of immune system of steel, I suppose. Anyway, it's been since my dad's last visit, so... over a month of various little viruses, shared amongst us to one extent or another. Right now Violet is getting over a cold and is in a TERRIBLE grouchy mood, and I am in the throes of it with a nasty cough and laryngitis and feeling like crap.

In other health news, I was just diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I had Graves' disease in my early 20s, the autoimmune version of hyperthyroidism. I never had bugged-out eyes but I was losing a bunch of weight and was jittery and exhausted and my heart raced all the time. I saw an endocrinologist who had me on thyroid-suppressing drugs for about 5 years, gradually tapering off until I was declared in remission. That endocrinologist always told me that patients like me usually end up going hypothyroid later in life, and well, that time has apparently come. My thyroid has decided to give up the ghost and quit working. I had an annual check-up with my midwife last week and she checked my thyroid levels like I always do at check-ups because of my history. They've been in the normal range for almost a decade now off any drugs, but this time they came back VERY hypothyroid. It's probably the autoimmune version again, although they haven't checked for the thyroid antibodies yet. I have been feeling rather tired and losing the baby weight has been slower this time than after my other pregnancies, but I just attributed those things to having a new baby + two other children, being a few years older than after my other pregnancies, etc. I started on the thyroid hormone drug (you just take in pill form the hormone that your thyroid would normally make) this week and I will be pretty happy if suddenly I am full of energy and get super skinny without having to work very hard. On the other hand, I am now probably facing taking a pill every day for the rest of my life, which is kind of a bummer. Not in the grand scheme of things, I know, as spring and a joyful baby and warm weather and Holy Week would like to remind me.

Better Living Through Chemicals

My hair smells like mulch.

Grays are increasingly creeping into my hair. I am but a youthful 33 (almost 34, actually-- June birthday) but my hair is really starting to show some wiry silver strands. The last time I got my hair cut, my stylist said I was about 5% gray right now. I am very ambivalent about covering my gray hair; I vacillate regularly between wanting to embrace the gray and being a silver-haired Emmylou-Harris-type by age 40 or so and wanting to color it. I've done many various things with the color of my hair since I left home for college (highlights! red! blue! pink! really red!) so the idea of swearing off color forever seems challenging/depressing to me. On the other hand, I have never really maintained any one coloring plan for any length of time (I tend to flit from one hair color to another with the attention span of a chicken, with periods of ignoring my hair color between) so the prospect of being forced into regular color maintenance because of encroaching gray roots is also unappealing. Then there are the issues of cost, time, and the horrible horrible chemicals. I don't know what I'm going to do.

In the interest of perhaps avoiding at least the horrible horrible chemicals, I picked up a box of henna at Whole Foods recently and tried it out Sunday night. The particular kind I bought is just ground up henna leaves (the leaves? I think so?), along with gloves and directions and whatnot. You mix the henna with boiling water and let it sit for a long time, then apply it to your hair. I had a hard time getting the consistency right. For most of the time I was trying to use it, it was the consistency and color of poop. It did not smell like poop, fortunately, but it did not have what one would call a pleasant smell-- grassy/earthy, but in a bad way, like composting mulch or something. Applying this poop-like substance to my hair did not go particularly well; I had trouble getting good coverage and saturation. Then it started to dry out before I really had it on my hair, into tiny crumbly brown bits. I ended up with all this stinky organic sludge matted into my hair, crumbling around me in the bathroom. Several days out from the giant mess in my bathroom, I do have a pleasant reddish tone to my hair and the grays are blended away but the application troubles were just too much. Also, it is fading VERY fast so one would have to use the henna quite often to keep the grays blended in. ALSO also, my hair still smells bad, especially when it's wet.

So now I have learned the valuable lesson that if one would like to change the color of one's hair, it's really better to use horrible chemicals. I'm being a bit facetious, of course, and I know there are varying levels of horribleness when it comes to hair dyes. I think I've decided that the MOST natural/safe option does not really work for me. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

All my adventures into natural/green/healthy living have shown me that most of those things do really work, often better than the conventional counterparts. AHEM-- cloth diapers, cloth wipes, ditching paper towels in favor of microfiber cleaning cloths, quitting shampoo, cloth menstrual pads (TMI! TMI FOR EVERYONE!), vinegar for cleaning glass, oil-cleansing method for my face, and so on and so forth... There are some horrible chemical habits I haven't quite been able to kick, though. For starters, toilet bowl cleaner with bleach. Yeah, not so good for the environment. Sometimes I read about other people's options and think about trying them. But then I don't.

Another one for me is conventional deodorant. This is one I've really wanted to work and have tried all kinds of options for. I've made my own with coconut oil and baking soda and cornstarch, I've bought stuff on Etsy, I've tried the kinds at Whole Foods... I find that either a) they don't work well for me odor-wise or b) they irritate my underarm skin in a bad way. I think it's the baking soda; it totally works for odor but my skin cannot handle it. I think I'm going back to horrible-chemical-filled deodorant for a while.

Speaking of the word "chemical", Rob and I like to laugh and laugh and laugh when I buy something that claims to not have any chemicals in it. WHAT IS IT THEN? Some kind of existential nothingness? I understand what they are getting at with that as a marketing phrase, but anything made of matter is a chemical. If it is a solid, liquid, or gas, then it is a chemical. Water is a chemical. Baking soda is a chemical. Too many physics and chemistry classes for us, I guess!

Space, the Final Frontier

With each month that passes since Lewis' birth, I feel like I'm slowly, gradually waking up a little bit and gaining a little more space in my mind and my day and my house. I am somebody who does not do well with clutter and busy-ness and crowdedness, whether that's in my physical surroundings or my schedule or my interior life. For the past several months, my house has been filled with random newborn accoutrements that don't really have a designated space and my daily life has been crowded with needs and demands and the tyranny of the urgent. There hasn't been a lot of space for reflection and processing; one evidence of this is the fact that I've blogged maybe 2-3 times a month for quite a while now. I don't apologize for not blogging (not least because there really is nothing more annoying than a blog post saying, "SO SORRY I HAVEN'T BLOGGED") but I do observe that I feel most satisfied/centered/self-aware when my blogging frequency is more like 6-8 times a month. I am not a scrapbooker, I don't really journal much anymore, but I do really like to write and I benefit from thinking about our life and processing it and getting it down in some way before it evaporates into another moment lost to time. Life has felt a bit more open and spacious lately and less like an impossible obstacle course I am white-knuckling my way through, so hopefully I can return to a habit of writing and  reflection.

It is the season of Lent now, which has helped me carve out some openness and time for contemplation. Although I have spent my entire life within the Christian community, my corner of it is not big into the liturgical calendar and I have never observed Lent in any way before this year. I've felt an interest/attraction toward observing Lent for a couple of years now, mostly because Easter always sneaks up on me. I think that my experience of Christmas is made more meaningful and substantive because we spend the month of Advent getting ready and anticipating it; I mean, even people who don't believe in Jesus at all spend weeks anticipating and celebrating his birth in some ways. Easter is arguably a more important holiday to Christians but I've never spent any appreciable time thinking about it ahead of time or mentally preparing to celebrate it. "Maybe I should," I said to myself. OH WAIT-- THAT'S CALLED LENT. So for my first year of observing Lent, we had pancakes for dinner on Shrove Tuesday, I am reading a daily Lent devotional by one of my favorites, and I am fasting from sugar. Traditionally, one would fast from meat, dairy, eggs, AND sugar during Lent (hence the pancakes, for using up all your dairy and eggs and whatnot before Lent starts) but that seemed a little much for my first time out. I have said "no" to a lot of sugary things in the days since then, only having sugar on Sundays (when it's traditional to break one's fast-- this is how you get 40 days of Lent between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday; the Sundays are sort of not considered Lenten). My American evangelical self understands the value of the devotional reading more than the value of the fasting, but I will admit that every time I say "no, thank you" to a dessert or sweet snack I am reminded that our celebration of resurrection and new life is coming.

I've been opening up some physical space around here as well. Lewis has outgrown the bouncy seats so they've been passed on to people with new babies who can use them, the infant car seat that I never know where to keep is about to be retired in favor of the bigger convertible car seat that always lives in the car, and I've been selling outgrown cloth diapers and our semi-crappy single jogging stroller and the like. (I think that our nice stroller has ruined me for cheap strollers forever; there is such a huge difference in quality and how pleasant it is to use.) Just yesterday I did a big reorganization of my part of the closet. It was a mishmash of clothes both too big and too small for me; I had been adding things willy-nilly and it was just all very confused. I went through and got rid of everything too big, then removed everything too small that I had been thinking, "Oh, I'll just keep this here because I'm sure it will fit soon," and put it out in a bin in the garage. Hopefully, all the smaller things WILL fit soon but I couldn't see what I had to wear right now. I gain a LOT of weight during pregnancy (about 60, 40, and 50 lbs for my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd pregnancies) and that is a LOT of different sizes to shift through (and OH SO MANY BRA SIZES) as I get back to normal. Whatever normal is, at this point. I have been so many different sizes over the past 6-ish years that I sort of don't know. I do know that my closet looks lovely and organized now, if somewhat empty, and that everything in there does fit me right now. One thing I have realized over all these pregnancies and subsequent weight losses is that I don't need as many clothes as I think I do. I aspire to the spare, well-edited, functional wardrobe ideal hanging in a spacious closet in a lovely organized manner. Right now I think I'm only really lacking in "functional".

Six Months

Lewis is six months old this week and has been here for an entire half a year, as impossible as that may seem. He is such a happy baby, so full of humor and joy and cheerfulness at the world around him. He has four teeth, two still-blue eyes, and many delicious chubby rolls of baby fat. It rather boggles the mind that he has grown to his current self ingesting nothing but breastmilk and a smidge of baby Tylenol; we've made two little attempts at feeding (scrambled eggs once, pureed apricots once) that have not gone super well and I think I'm going to give him a few more weeks before trying again.



He is such a big, strong baby. I don't think we are just projecting some societal sense of maleness onto him; it is pretty much empirically unquestionable that he is both big for his age and a bit advanced in gross motor skills. He weighed 20 lbs at 4 months and had just moved up into 12-18 month clothes then. Now at 6 months, he weighs pretty much the same and is still wearing the same size, but he has gotten much taller and the arms and legs are not at all long on him anymore. He might spend THREE WHOLE MONTHS in this size of clothes. A friend recently commented that he looks like he is growing into his body, and I think that's true; his proportions are shifting from the long torso and shorter curled-up limbs of early infancy to the longer (albeit chubby) arms and legs of later babyhood. It is a bit of a relief to see his growth start to plateau out. Otherwise carrying him around would have become immensely arduous and there would not be a diaper anywhere that would fit him by the time he is 2!

And as for strength, he's been rolling from back to front for quite a while now. He has been pushing himself up into upward-facing dog for a few weeks and has been somehow wiggling himself around on the floor for about a month. You know-- he's not really crawling but somehow he rolls and wriggles himself so that you put him down in one spot and you find him a few minutes later across the room. Just this week, he has started pushing himself up to his hands and knees, belly off the floor, and will rock back and forth. Right now this most often results in him face-planting on the floor but we are looking at honest-to-goodness crawling very very soon. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! And baby gates! Ugh. He is less advanced when it comes to sitting, although I'm sure that won't be very far behind either.



Every night when we change him from his clothes into his pajamas, he laughs and laughs and laughs, with a gurgling chortle that comes from his belly. Apparently it is the most hilarious thing ever, although only at night-- changing the other way in the morning from his pajamas to his clothes is not funny at all. It is a gift every night, a unlooked-for gift of joy and beauty that takes my breath away. Much like him.