Farewell, Blog

Over the past year or so, I've been feeling more and more like it is time for me to close out this blog. One big reason for this is that I'm working now, and that means a) I am writing more in other ways and find I have less of that need to empty out what's in my brain (even though I'm doing science writing, not anything personal) and b) I have less time total, as well as less free time that I can/want to use sitting at the computer concentrating and writing, seeing that this is a good description of my job. Another big reason is that as our kids get bigger, I feel differently about writing about their lives. When they were tiny babies, sharing about my life with them felt natural; now, I am more aware of their ownership of their own stories, and how the job of telling their stories belongs to them and not to me. I think it's possible to write about my experience of life, including parenting, in a respectful, appropriate way but it feels time to call this blog finished. I started writing this blog right when Grace was born and Lewis turned 2 this fall, so I've begun to think of this whole blog as a record of the baby years of our family -- the seven or so years where our lives were wrapped up in these new, tiny lives who were joining our family. I don't expect our lives to become un-wrapped from our children, of course, but we are moving into a new season of life.

I wanted to get all these posts and pictures and everything into a format in the real world somehow, so I decided to declare this blog finished as of Lewis' 2nd birthday and put together some books with all the writing and photographs. I never did traditional baby books for the kids, so I got copies of these for them, as well as us, and hopefully it will be something that gives them a glimpse into the early years of their childhoods.



I did these books through Blurb and they turned out BEAUTIFUL. I sort of used their slurping blog-to-book thing they do, but I had to manually do the formatting to get it to look the way I wanted. It does blow my mind a bit to consider how much work is in these books, between the original writing and then the putting them together in this form. Making these books was not a quick process.



So that is that! I have started a Tumblr, to give me a spot to write when I feel like it. I don't plan for that to be a record of our family or anything, but rather a place to write in a shorter, more random form. So far it seems like there's a lot of food things related to Lewis' health issues. I also have another Tumblr that is just random, interesting things from around the web. You can also find me on Twitter (or Pinterest or Facebook) but not here any longer. Adios, Blogspot!

Two Years of Lewis

Today is Lewis' birthday and he is two entire years old. We went to the farmers market to eat lunch and play on the playground, we opened presents from our generous family, and soon we will have some delicious cake with singing and candles. I am so thankful for this sunny, joyful boy, and I am so happy to be celebrating a new year of his life.



He is talking up a storm these days, putting words together into sentences and working so hard to communicate with us. The changes in his verbal skills are so fast and furious; already some of the sweet/hilarious mispronunciations are falling by the wayside. For a long time, he called Violet "Butt", which I admit we thoroughly enjoyed. He has added some more syllables to her name now, so it is more like "Bioyet" -- closer to accurate but sadly not as funny. He does still call Legos "WAY-gos", so that's something.

We have experienced some kind of potty-training miracle with Lewis. About six weeks ago, we were at Chipotle for lunch one Sunday and he said he wanted to go to the bathroom. He pooped in the toilet at Chipotle, which was the first time he had used a toilet EVER, and things have been going quite smoothly ever since. He is not accident-free or anything, but he is super eager and cooperative in all potty matters. Earlier in the summer, I had said to myself, "Wow, I probably have only one year of diapering left EVER," thinking that he would potty-train next summer right before he turned 3. I guess I was wrong!

Lewis is the first of our children to potty-train before he weans or grows out of a nap, which has felt different and odd. He's pretty much grown out of baby-wearing as well at this point; the baby carriers are sitting seldom-used in his room where he sleeps in a twin bed and there is no diapering station set up anymore. It's pretty hard to wrap my mind around being nearly finished with the cloth diapers and baby slings and high chairs and breastfeeding and baby beds and all that; all that has been such a big part of my life and my identity for the last 7+ years. Lewis is even starting preschool this fall; he'll go Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the same place that Violet is going to pre-K.

Lewis got his first haircut this summer. He had been looking pretty straggly with crazy/uneven curliness going on, but I kept putting off doing something about it. I was worried that the little kid hair place I usually take the girls would make him look really conservative; I like longer, scruffy hair on little boys. One day, Rob had an appointment to get his hair cut and on the spur of the moment, we asked the guy who cuts Rob's hair to give Lewis his first trim. The vibe of that guy is such that I did not worry about Lewis coming out looking too conservative :) and it turned out really cute.



Lewis has been on an elimination diet for a couple months now to try to figure out his various health issues. We went to an allergist that Rob thinks really highly of to do a bunch of food allergy testing; he didn't have a positive skin test to any of the commonly allergenic foods but unfortunately those tests aren't a perfect way to figure out what foods are troublesome for someone with eosinophilic GI disease. If someone has an IgE-mediated allergy to a food (which is what those tests test for), it is more likely to be a problem for eosinophilic GI disease, but it's not a sure thing and it's not always the only foods that are troublesome. Anyway, we started by taking wheat, dairy, egg, and soy out of his diet. One of the very first mornings, I gave him a little container of coconut milk yogurt and he had a classic allergic reaction to it, right there at the breakfast table. It felt really discouraging, because I thought that I had come up with something he could/would eat and then KABOOM. NO. We went back to the allergist to confirm that yes, he has an IgE-mediated allergy to coconut (which is really rare, it turns out). It's possible that coconut is the ONLY thing that he has an issue with, which would be great; I did cook with coconut oil and milk a good bit, so that could have been the source of the problem. We are staying on the whole elimination diet, though, (since we had already started it) to make sure we figure out what the problem is. Since we started the diet, he has not vomited once and his gagging/coughing/choking has drastically improved. We had a repeat swallow study (swallowing more barium, yay!) last week and it showed that he is not aspirating liquids anymore, which is such, such good news. It's likely that the combination of the diet and the reflux medication has let the damage in his esophagus/wherever heal so that he can feel enough to swallow correctly. So now we will start reintroducing some of these foods again (aside from coconut) to see if he can tolerate them. Since eosinophilic GI disease is not the kind of thing where a problem shows up immediately when you eat a problematic food, we'll do one food for a month and see if he has problems. We're starting with eggs for a month; we'll see!



So that's the news with Lewis on his 2nd birthday. He has brought so much happiness to our family, showing us who he is today and who he is growing up to be. He is our only child to get my eyes; Grace's are true blue like my parents', Violet's are deep brown like Rob's, but Lewis' eyes are the changeable grayish/greenish/blueish color of mine. The magic of knowing a new small person, with all the unique particulars of who he is, is no less the third time around. I am so full of thankfulness that he is here in the world and with us.

Happy birthday, sweet boy.

Midsummer Blur

Spring has passed into summer in a haze of medical drama, family/children's activities, work, and trying to stay up on laundry and making dinner. The solstice has come and gone, my hemisphere is tipping away from the Sun, and I realize more as each week passes that these are the blurry years, a whirlwind of three small people and two jobs and two schools and a house and piles of laundry. I'm content -- happy, even -- but I seldom catch my breath.

In some rather unfortunate twist of medical bad luck, very soon after I wrote that last post about Lewis in May, Grace got really sick. It was an unprecedented level of illness for our family, all the more unnerving because Grace usually gets the least sick of anyone in our family. When we pass a virus around, Violet and I tend to get the most dramatically ill while Grace will be grumpy for a day without any actual symptoms. She came home from school with a fever one afternoon and then her fever stayed very high (often over 104°) for several days. She wouldn't eat and would barely drink, medicine wouldn't bring her fever down, and she was disoriented and confused. Her fever got a bit lower after a few days (102° or so), she had a positive strep test but then did not get better on antibiotics, and we ended up being concerned she had something really bad because of some of her other symptoms. We were within about a day of admitting her to the hospital when her fever FINALLY dropped to 100° and lower. In hindsight, the best anyone can guess is that she had some crazy virus (that none of the rest of us got? I still am not sure that makes sense...) but whatever it was, I am just glad it ended without any worse outcome than Grace losing some weight and missing a week and a half of school.

Soon after that, Violet had her last day of preschool, with a party and opportunity for me to reflect how well her time at the JCC has gone. I am very thankful for her teachers and the professional help we've pursued, as well as her own amazing self; she is in such a different place than she was 9 months ago. She still does not have a diagnosis or label, and it's looking likely that she won't have one, but I feel very good about the help we've gotten through the Children's Center and the change we've seen in Violet. We'll be back at the JCC for Violet's pre-K year in the fall, and then I don't know what we'll do. BECAUSE SHE IS READING. (Or is very close, at least.) She is about a year ahead of where Grace was at the same age reading-wise, and as she doesn't have the people-pleasing personality full of empathy and maturity that Grace has, I feel very uncertain about regular kindergarten. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, I suppose.



At the very end of May, Lewis had his procedure at the hospital. On one hand, everything went smoothly and safely and the doctors and nurses were all fabulous; on the other hand, GAH I never want to do anything like that ever again.



We were at the hospital for about 5 hours total, less than 2 hours of which he was under anesthesia. They did a great job at the children's hospital being sensitive to the kids there and making things easy for them; this picture shows him in his little hospital gown and his hospital car that he got to ride around in from one place to another. He was pretty grumpy by the time they actually took him back for his procedure because he was so hungry and thirsty (from not eating/drinking for so long) but in general he was content. He came out of the anesthesia calmly, and then he nursed pretty soon after waking and was pretty easily comforted. He seemed out of sorts and sleepy the rest of the day, but he wanted to eat, didn't seem to be in pain, and didn't throw up or anything. I was a bit of a mess at the hospital (crying when the nurses asked me what would comfort him if he was in pain, etc) but really, it could hardly have gone any more smoothly.

The ENT said he saw a lot of inflammation in his airway consistent with him aspirating but did not find any reason why he is aspirating (no clefts or other anatomical problems). Our GI took biopsies and they showed that he has moderate reflux damage in his esophagus and eosinophils in his small intestine, which is like a food allergy thing. Neither one of those seems like it's the big explanation for his aspiration that we've been looking for, but we're trying to move forward and figure out what to do next. Last week, we had a feeding evaluation with a speech therapist (who it turns out are the people who do feeding/swallow therapy). I was expecting that this would be the beginning of swallow therapy, i.e. fixing all this, but the therapist concluded that he does not have any oral motor problems that they can address with therapy. This came as a surprise to me and felt kind of frustrating; it's good news that he doesn't have any oral motor problems but I was thinking the swallow therapy was going to be the thing we did to fix everything. Apparently not. We do have some things we're trying (new kinds of cups, thickened liquids, etc) and we're headed to see an allergist (OH, THE IRONY...) next week to see if we can figure out any food issues he has. He is still vomiting pretty frequently, and he still does a lot of coughing/gagging; we can maybe convince ourselves that it's started getting better since we started the reflux medicine? I don't know.

I thought I was coping OK with all of this, but in the week after Lewis' hospital thing, I lost my voice, had all kinds of GI misery, and got two migraines. It was totally stress; these are all the quasi-psychosomatic things my body does in times of high stress. Life needs to CALM DOWN. Also, I need to figure out how to cope with stress.

At the beginning of June, Grace had all her festivities to end her time in 1st grade. There was a school-wide fun run...



And a big 1st-grade performance (Grace is one of the ones in red on the front row)...



And then walking off to her very last day as a 1st grader...



And now we are deep into summer. Our CSA is bringing us lots of beautiful vegetables, Grace is on a swim team at the JCC, and we have turned on the air conditioning in our house. Violet is going to a social skills group at the Children's Center over the summer. It's pretty interesting, actually; it's like a preschool environment with crafts/games/songs but all the activities are specially designed to develop the children's peer-to-peer interaction skills. She's the only one in her group without an autism/Aspergers diagnosis, but they are all about at the same level verbally so it works well. The clinicians in the group are students getting their masters in speech therapy up at the university here, and the two that Violet has in her group are amazing. And then Grace is doing some science camps at the natural history museum and Violet is doing gymnastics. Lewis is learning new words every week, frustrating me with his unpredictable napping, and giving the best hugs. It's all going by in a blur, but it's a blur of the amazing, tangled, messy, and beautiful.

Little Lewis, Heading to the Hospital

I briefly mentioned in my last post that we've been dealing with some rather serious health issues for Lewis (who is 20 months old now, as a reminder) lately, so here is the TL:DR version.

Gradually over the past 6 months to a year, Lewis has developed a coughing/choking problem. The cough/choke sometimes turns into a cough/choke/gag, and a handful of times it has turned into a cough/choke/gag/vomit. It has gradually been getting worse; I think the first time Rob and I looked at each other and said, "That's weird," was about 6 months ago. We've noticed it when he's eating and drinking, but sometimes also at other times. It's worse when he is sick, and it has gradually been getting worse overall so that he's actually gagged and thrown up a few times in the past month. (One time, with a bunch of french fries at a restaurant-- SARCASTIC YAYYYYY...) It was those occurrences that finally motivated me to call the doctors and get this figured out. We started talking to our general pediatrician and also asked a friend we go to church with who is on the pediatric GI faculty at the U (who also writes for the Biologos Forum!) what he thought. Our GI started Lewis on reflux medication (because it seems like it might be reflux-related?) and sent us for a swallow study a few weeks ago.

The swallow study is where they watch you swallow foods of different textures and thicknesses mixed with barium via some kind of X-ray imaging; they can see if you are having problems swallowing, which is turns out that Lewis is. He is swallowing liquids into his lungs, apparently all the time. During the swallow study he sometimes swallowed liquids into his lungs without coughing, so it looks like he is aspirating even more often than he is coughing/choking. (During the swallow study, he aspirated with EVERY swallow of liquids, actually. He is swallowing solid food with more success.)

Aspirating, it turns out, is very bad and it is something of a mystery as to why Lewis is as healthy as he is, why he has grown so well, why he hasn't had pneumonia, why he breastfed without any big problems, etc. The most likely scenario is that he has been doing this since birth (he hasn't had any strokes or brain injuries that would make him start swallowing incorrectly) so it is indeed puzzling. One factor in his favor is that he has been breastfeeding since the beginning. It turns out that aspirating breastmilk isn't that bad for you; it doesn't easily grow nasty bugs to give you bacterial pneumonia and it isn't irritating to the lung tissues. I am once again so thankful that breastfeeding has worked out for us and our babies; we likely could have been dealing with all these health issues when Lewis was a tiny newborn instead of a strapping, healthy toddler if it hadn't. I don't minimize my own preparation and commitment in making breastfeeding work, but some of it really is out of my hands, and I am so thankful. I'm actually REALLY thankful right now because we are not supposed to give Lewis any liquids but breastmilk, not even water, until we get this sorted out; water in your lungs is irritating and there is a risk of him getting pneumonia from it. He had been down to nursing just a few times a day but I'm trying to get my supply back up and Lewis to nurse more frequently. I will admit that we haven't totally cut him off from water, because he is finding it upsetting when he feels thirsty. It's a risk, but as Rob keeps pointing out to me, he has been drinking water for a year without anything really bad happening. It is stressful, though.

So now we have to figure out why he is aspirating. One possibility is that there is something anatomically wrong (like a cleft or a fistula or a hole or something), another possibility is that it's really terrible reflux or something similar (it turns out that you can get reflux so bad that you lose sensation in the back of your throat and can't coordinate your swallowing), or another possibility is that he just plain never learned to swallow correctly, for unknown reasons. The positive here is that there is a way to fix any of those problems: surgery or medication or feeding therapy or some combination of those. We went to an ENT surgeon recently to talk about all this. They put a tiny camera up his nose and back into his larynx, which was strangely non-upsetting to him. He wasn't sedated or anything, just sitting on my lap. He squirmed when it was going through his nose but he sat there, totally calm, once it was back further (because he can't feel anything back there?). The ENT couldn't see any huge/obvious anatomical problems but he did see a lot of irritation and inflammation like he has reflux. The uncertainty is if the reflux is the original cause of the whole thing or a result of another problem.

Some of you who know me in real life might remember that WAY back when he was 6 months old and we first started feeding him solids, he had some swallowing issues. When we first offered him any foods, he would gag while trying to swallow and then vomit up everything in his stomach. He did that for about a couple of weeks, then figured out how to choke the food down, gagging but not vomiting. A few weeks after that, he figured out how to coordinate his swallowing enough to eat solids pretty normally, and we went merrily on our way, thinking he just had a strong gag reflex and he figured things out. But did he? Or was that part of what's going on now? We still don't quite know.

The next step is that Lewis has to have an outpatient procedure where our GI and our ENT will check things out in more detail. They have to put him under general anesthesia (aaaaaaaaaah...) but I guess it's not exactly a surgery because they are just looking at things? From our end, the experience will basically be like an outpatient surgery, though. They will do an endoscopy and a laryngoscopy (i.e. they will look at his esophagus and his airway in detail) and hopefully we will know where to go from there. If there's something anatomically wrong to fix, we can fix it. If not, we will do feeding/swallow therapy. In the meantime, we keep him on the reflux medicine (which he has been on for a couple weeks now and maybe Lewis is choking/coughing less? I don't know...), he gets to nurse as much as he wants, and we hope and pray that he continues to avoid pneumonia. His procedure is scheduled for May 30, three weeks from now.

We are feeling a bit surprised and shaken by all this, as Lewis has never been sickly or seemed vulnerable health-wise. We are definitely dealing with some stress and anxiety about the situation, but we feel confident in our doctors, the children's hospital here where Lewis will have his procedure, our support structure here in Salt Lake, and the care of the One who loves Lewis even more than we do.

Spring Has Come, At Least For a Few Days

It is so warm! We have had our first 70° days within the past week and have been soaking up the balmy sunshine, at least until the chilly weather returns. (Which is tomorrow, it looks like.) We went to the zoo yesterday and although I don't necessarily recommend going to the zoo on the Sunday afternoon of the first warm weekend of the year (so, so busy! we are at the end of our year's membership at the zoo and I have never seen it like that), we had a fun time. The girls rode the carousel two times each. They like the carousel better than the actual animals, which seems like a failure of some kind on our part?



It's been a nice spring for us. We had Passover...



And then Easter...



And I am having a good spring as far as body image and feeling at home in my embodied self. For starters, I have been exercising very regularly. Since Violet started preschool at the JCC in January, I have been able to put Lewis in the hourly childcare there and work out more frequently than I have in a very long time. Just doing that really has helped me feel better, physically and mentally. And then I have seen actual changes in my body from this on a shorter timescale than I would have guessed. Influenced by Rob and his Crossfit ways and all the hype about Paleo everything, I have been focusing just on strength training. Strength training is like MAGIC, you guys. I'm doing classic weight-lifting things with barbells (not machines) and I've got to say I've never seen any exercise change my body so quickly. And the exercise itself is not burdensome, which is very helpful. I wouldn't say it's my idea of a fun time or anything, but it is infinitely more pleasant than trudging on an elliptical forever or step aerobics or running or things like that. I lost 2 inches around my hips last month, my rings all fit again, people have commented on my face looking thinner, and most of my pre-Lewis clothes fit now. Interestingly, I have not lost much weight since the beginning of the year (that whole muscle vs. fat thing, I guess). We'll see if I eventually do lose weight or change size more, but to be honest, at this moment I don't care very much. I feel better, and I look better.

When I go to the gym, I shower there while Lewis is still in the childcare (because trying to shower at home without another adult to watch him is still AWFUL). Showering in the locker room there has been another body image epiphany for me. There are other naked women in there and it turns out that WE ALL LOOK PRETTY NORMAL. It turns out that women, even women who are exercising at a gym, come in various sizes and ages and shapes and that's totally OK! We're all OK! A nice epiphany.

I've been wanting to get my nose pierced for a while and I had been holding it out as a reward for getting back to my pre-Lewis weight. Lately, I've been thinking that that maybe isn't the healthiest way to go about things. At some level, I don't really control the number on the scale; I control the choices I make about food and stress and sleep and exercise, but it's a complicated physiological equation that translates that to my weight, and my weight per se isn't really what I want to spend my time focusing on. If I want my nose pierced, maybe I should just go get my nose pierced. So I did.

Here's an inside-the-car selfie (about a week post-piercing), complete with toddler photobomb, for you to see the result:

 

It's been about 10 days with the nose piercing now and I really, really like it. It's been healing well (there have only been a couple instances of a child bonking my face -- OW) and I feel like it looks really "right" on my face. A bunch of people haven't even noticed, which is rather hilarious (people are not thinking about me as much as I think they are), and I've seen a few people do double-takes and visibly think, "Did Julia always have that?" And then a few friends have said that they're just surprised I haven't done it before now. I am so happy with it, which contributes to my general positive body image this spring.

Less welcome this spring, we are dealing with some health issues for Lewis. We are still in the midst of tests and procedures and appointments and figuring stuff out; it has happened sort of fast, from our perspective, but on the other hand, it seems to be explaining some weird stuff that's been going on with him for months. I'll write more soon when we have more actual information about what's going on. Short, preliminary version: he has some kind of swallowing problem and is aspirating liquids, and we need to fix it. Fixing it will involve either surgery (aaaaaaaaaaaaaah...) or swallow/feeding therapy. UGH. It's definitely serious, but right now the things that need to be done seem pretty clear-cut and obvious. Hilariously, when they gave me the info on the possible swallow therapy, it was for the exact same therapists that I had just taken Violet to for a speech/language evaluation. "BUT I WAS JUST THERE..."

18 Months

Lewis is 18 months old now, halfway through his second year of life and closer to his 2nd birthday than his 1st birthday. This second year of life is so amazing; everyday he opens up to the world a little more, learns a new word, and is a more busy, animated, joyful toddler.



I got rid of the booster seat in favor of the Kaboost recently because I just could not face cleaning all the disgusting crevices of the booster seat anymore. It's a bit of a struggle to convince him to stay in his seat instead of running around the house at mealtime, but he is getting there. If the food is a special favorite of his (the breakfast sausage we get from our local pork guy, or watermelon, or anything sweet I deign to give him) he will gobble it up with concentration; if the food is not so interesting to him, he will often hop down pretty quickly to explore the world. Despite this, I am glad to get one more piece of plastic baby crap out of the house. This time around, I am not keeping much of anything. All the clothes go to other families right as he outgrows them, and I am gradually clearing out all the infant toys and cloth diapers and so forth.



I am not feeling sad right now about Lewis getting so big and outgrowing so much baby paraphernalia; I do not feel nostalgic for the high chair or the jumper or the bouncy seat or any of the other various baby items I have passed on to other mamas as we have finished with them. Part of this is that he is still nursing here and there, we are still deep in the throes of diapering, he still sleeps part of the night in our bed, and so forth; there is still a lot of sweet, cuddly baby in him at this stage. (Although if he follows the same pattern as his big sisters, he only has ~6 months left of nursing and ~1 year left of diapers-- mind-blowing!) The other part of this is that he is so amazing right now. I love this second year of life, with all the language learning and exploring and engaging with the world.



The language explosion is just amazing; it seems like he is literally learning a new word every couple of days. He says "nana" for banana, "baba" for apple, night-night, nurse, go, shoe, and funny versions of all of our names. I think his latest word addition is "AH-ter" for water. Another recent one is dog; for the first three days, he pronounced it as "DERRRRG" but then he shifted to a more normal pronunciation. Whenever he closes a door or puts something away or throws something in the trash, he lets out a complacent, self-satisfied "there!" Both of our girls as toddlers said "uppy!" when they wanted to be picked up, but Lewis has gone with something more like "upf!"

I will pick you up as much as you want, amazing boy.

Seven Years of Grace

Last week Grace turned seven. Seven! Seven is starting to feel like a big number, like a big grown-up girl, like she is emerging from the world of being a little kid into graceful girlhood. She is our full-of-grace Grace.



Rob was away in Haiti for her actual birthday on Wednesday, as well as her birthday party on Friday. We missed him but we managed to have a fun time celebrating anyway, and then we had yet another birthday celebration the day he got back when she opened her presents and we had one more round of cake and singing. We had her birthday party this year at one of those indoor bounce house places and invited friends from school and church and just around town.



I do so love a fun invitation. I love beautiful cards and lovely paper products and invitations and such; these were designed by a helpful, nice seller on Etsy and then I had them printed on postcards. We did a pretty big party this year (again? I seem to keep throwing these giant birthday parties) because it seems like a good age to still have big, inclusive parties with both boys and girls, and also because it didn't change how much the party was going to cost to invite a ton of kids. I imagine we will be shifting toward more intimate parties as she gets bigger and more immersed in her own social world, but I was full of joy this year to see her run around with a gaggle of friends of every type.

I feel a lot of shifting in what it means to be Grace's mother, and even writing about her here feels like something new to navigate. This post on Grace's birthday is my 300th blog post and writing here feels different now than it did when she was a baby. I've seen other mothers who write online say they aren't going to share as much about their children as they get older, and I will admit that I didn't quite get it and maybe rolled my eyes. I am starting to feel the same thing, though; it becomes more obvious with every passing day that Grace is her own person and her story is all her own, not mine.



Who she is today is less wrapped up in who we are together as a mama/little-person pair. We made each other in a very real way, she shaping me no less than I have shaped her, but she is striking out in the world, a world that I think should be staggered by how empathetic and smart and beautiful and amazing she is. Her usual partners for walking to and from school happened to all be unavailable one day this week so we decided she could walk home by herself (well, actually, with the mass of other children walking home along the same streets, but by herself in that none of them were charged specifically with walking with her). She has her own voice and her own future and her own hopes, and I am so happy to get to be here in the thick of who she is becoming.

Sending Someone

We are getting ready for Rob to leave on Saturday for Haiti. He'll be gone for 10 days and will spend his time doing medical training for local medical staff. I am excited for him to go, but of course there is the specter of extended solo parenting. He'll be gone for both Grace's actual birthday and her birthday party next Friday, as well as Valentine's Day, so you can see how I'm really suffering for the gospel here.

There is a city in Haiti called Gonaives, and there is a slum in a trash dump outside Gonaives called Jubilee. We have a friend (who we went to church with here in Salt Lake) who moved to Jubilee about a year ago. Her name is Grace and she is a nurse; in Salt Lake, she worked as a pediatric neurology nurse at the children's hospital and now she runs a primary care clinic in Jubilee. The clinic is part of a holistic effort in Jubilee to transform the community that includes a school for children, a trade school for adults, clean water, and so forth. Our church here is involved in a long-term relationship with Gonaives and Jubilee and this year a handful of people are going on this trip to do medical training and otherwise serve the people there in various ways, the local Haitians and the Americans who live there full-time. Grace and another nurse work at the clinic along with a handful of local nursing assistants; they are the ones who Rob and the other medical people from Salt Lake are going to be training. If you're interested in seeing what life is like is Jubilee, you can read Grace's blog; if you're interested in keeping up with the group Rob will be traveling with, they are going to update this blog while they are away.

Rob has gotten vaccines and sprayed his clothes with anti-mosquito stuff to fend off malaria while I have pondered how exactly I am going to take a shower while he is gone. (Ideas? I seriously cannot wait until Lewis will sit still and watch TV for 20 minutes while I get ready.) Rob has put together training on the immune system and pediatric development and so forth while I have pondered catching up on Downton Abbey while he is away. Rob is packing shorts and T-shirts and it will more than likely snow while he is gone. He will eat Haitian spaghetti and I will make vast quantities of macaroni & cheese for the kids. He is going and we are sending.

Congratulations, This Week

I would like to extend my congratulations to this week, our first week after the holidays back to work/school/everything, for totally knocking me sideways and kicking my butt. Grace was back to 1st grade and started a gymnastics class, Violet started at a new preschool, Rob started working at two clinics instead of one, I tried to get my working hours back up to their normal levels, and somehow I also thought it would be a good week to schedule various dentist and doctor appointments. I think it would have been a lot for even a normal week, but we were all out of practice for our normal lives so things were a bit rough.

One thing that seems to be going well is Violet at her new preschool. After Violet's first appointment to do evaluations and see if there are things we should be doing to help her, we decided that it was time to pursue preschool for her again, and to try for a more traditional, structured preschool environment. I called around and discovered that the Jewish Community Center (where Grace went to pre-K) had just had a spot open in Violet's age group for MWF mornings THAT VERY MORNING so we decided to go for it. So far she is loving it; she is excited to go and sad to leave, she asks about going on non-school days, and she says it makes her happy. I've been talking a lot to the teachers about where she is right now socially and behaviorally and I feel really good about them. They are saying that she often protests transitions (no surprise there) but otherwise they think her first week went well.



The downside to the JCC is that it is pricey by Salt Lake standards, partly because you have to be members to enroll at the preschool. The upside is that then you are members at the JCC! They have lots of really nice programs including a lovely gym and wonderful childcare for kids Lewis' age, so now I am working out at a gym again-- hooray! I shall lift many weights and become buff and strong.

I need to figure out how we are going to feed ourselves dinner on weeknights this semester. We have something scheduled every evening Monday through Thursday that interferes with either Rob or I being able to cook a "real" dinner by an hour reasonable for children who start their bedtime routine by 7pm. By "real" I mean cooked from scratch with ingredients that require being chopped, not super-fancy or anything. I find that that almost always takes about an hour, and I don't think an hour is too long to spend on a weekday dinner but we just literally don't have that kind of time on weekdays. So what to do? Become one of those people who does almost all the cooking on the weekends? Heavy use of the slow cooker and do everything earlier in the day? Hope that we will somehow get better at navigating weeknights? Dinner is one of the ways in which this week did a stellar job of prevailing against me.



It has been snowing heavily since late yesterday and I am thankful for this because a) it is super beautiful and I love snow and b) I think it will encourage us to hibernate this weekend in a much-needed fashion. I drove around a lot today in the blizzard-y whiteness; it took me the better part of an hour to get Violet to preschool, I put my anti-lock brakes to good use, and I passed many cars stuck in snow or bonked into signs or whatever. I've used up several days' supply of fight-or-flight hormones driving around so this weekend I need to exercise my hermit tendencies.  Hopefully a weekend of hiding out and being lazy will allow us (me?) to approach next week with less blankness and more energy than I feel right now.

Soon 2012 Will Be Behind Us

I love these liminal days between Christmas and New Years, especially when they are quiet and peaceful like they have been for us this year. The twelve days of Christmas start on Christmas and go until Epiphany on January 6, and these days do feel like feast days, like holidays, even like holy days of rest and family and celebration, in many respects. I've been thinking about the year ahead of us and what might come, and the year that we are leaving.

• This winter has already given us more snow than we had all last year. The skiiers and snowboarders are so happy! Maybe I'll try the snow sports again in 2013?

• I saw one movie in a movie theater this year. Maybe in 2013 I will go all crazy and try for two!
• I re-joined the world of paid work after four years away and I am VERY happy. I like thinking about astronomy and education again, and it is very nice to be paid for thinking such thoughts.
• Robert and I celebrated our 10th anniversary; we have been married a decade.
• I read about 15 books, give or take, which is not very many by my lifetime standards. Grace, on the other hand, read probably 50 books, from just the summer when she really started reading independently until the end of the year. (Hers are SO MUCH EASIER than mine, though-- really, I swear.)

• I have had moments of fairly intense grief at the state of the world; there was the election and the stomach-turning "discourse" surrounding it, there was the shooting at Sandy Hook (which happened pretty near where we lived in Connecticut, to children who were in the same grade as Grace, and which just knocked me over with its horror), and that was just in the last two months of the year, in my own country.
• This past growing season was amazing here in Utah; there was so much abundance at the farmers markets and our CSA and even just friends' yards. One set of friends have an apricot tree that was just ridiculous this past year; I lost count of how much jam I made and even did liqueur.

• I played piano at church, I drove Grace to ballet, I helped run my local MOPS chapter, I went to my once-a-month Friday-night book club, I went to yoga and Pilates, I went running, I half-heartedly tried to eat healthfully.
• I did not leave the state of Utah once, although we did explore some lovely parts of our state through the summer and fall. Maybe I will venture further afield in 2013.
• Lewis turned 1, Violet turned 4, Grace turned 6, I turned 34, and Rob turned 36.
• We replaced some windows, had some painting done, and moved around where all the children sleep. I always have grand house plans and it felt so great to put some of them into action this year. Maybe we'll finally xeriscape this coming year?

• Violet started preschool, Grace finished kindergarten, Grace started 1st grade, then Violet left preschool in not-ideal circumstances. We are about to start the preschool adventure again with Violet in January at a new place; I'm full of uncertainty and hope about it.

That's probably a pretty sensible way to approach the entire new year, isn't it? 2013 does not make us any promises but I turn the page to a new year with hope for the days ahead.

Merry Christmas!

Truly He taught us to love one another;

His law is love and His gospel is peace; 

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,

And in His name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

Let all within us praise His holy name;

Christ is the Lord,

Oh, praise His name forever!

His pow'r and glory evermore proclaim!

His pow'r and glory evermore proclaim!

Four Years of Violet

Yesterday was Violet's birthday and now she is four years old. When she woke up yesterday, we wished her a happy birthday and told her she was four now but she didn't believe us; it took a good number of minutes before she wrapped her mind around the fact that this long-awaited day had finally arrived, that she could stop explaining that she was still three, that her day of presents and cupcakes and celebration was upon us.

We had such a fun day. We opened her presents in the morning, then had a bunch of friends over in the late afternoon for a joint Robert-Violet birthday party (as he turned 36 on Friday) with snacks and cocktails and cake. This might well be the last year that we'll do a joint party like that, and I am so, so thankful for the people we live life with here who came to celebrate these two people that I love so much. I just love throwing parties; I love having a house full of laughing, loud people and kids running around pulling out all the toys and good food and drinks and so forth.




It has been a hard year for Violet, and for us as we work through how to help her and how to be her family. I did not see this coming a year ago at her third birthday, although in hindsight, who she is now is just who she has always been. There are aspects of life that are such a struggle for her, and so on Monday we finally had our first appointment with a therapist-type person to do some evaluations, to see if we can figure out where to go from here and what to do to ease her struggles. And oh, how I want to ease those struggles... Just plain because I love her but also because she is amazing and beautiful and wonderful and I so intensely want to untangle that amazingness from her struggles so she can flourish as she walks through life. Violet is so creative and bright and focused, so full of imagination and intelligence and a crazy long attention span and radiance.





Happy birthday, beautiful. May this new year of your life see you thrive and blossom, see you full of joy and peace.

Advent

Today is the first day of Advent. Last night we got our tree up, the 10th tree that Rob and I have decorated together. Violet was nearly apoplectic with excitement about the "jewels" we hung on it and Grace tried to hang every ornament at her own eye level. Lewis tried to grab every ornament off within his toddler reach.

My observing of Advent has changed a lot in the last several years, and I am so thankful for the people and churches and organizations that have helped me to make changes and in the process to find peace and joy and meaning in this season of the year. I first saw a video for Advent Conspiracy when I was hugely pregnant with Violet in 2008. I literally sobbed, partly because I was a hormonal crazy person, of course, but also because I was hungry and thirsty for a different way to observe Christmas and Advent. The narrative our dominant culture gives us about how to observe Christmas is not sustainable or healthy or good for us as holistic human beings or OK.



There is a better way to celebrate this season. There are better gifts to give, and a better place in the world to make for all of us.


The light has come and is coming.
The darkness cannot overcome it.

15 Months

Lewis is 15 months old today and he is such a toddler now; the baby in him shrinks every day and is replaced with more and more little boy.



He has graduated from just being a walker to climber extraordinaire. If the chairs are not pushed all the way in to the dining table, he will climb to the top of it in no time at all. He also can climb to the top of our upright piano, and is getting quite steady on the stairs as well. He loves to empty drawers and the house is often littered with the contents of kitchen drawers, the book basket, the toy bins.



He calls me "mama" now, and he will hold pretty much anything up his ear and say, "A-yo? A-yo?" An actual phone, a block, the cherry pitter, just his hand. He is starting to copy our intonations when we say certain things, not quite ready to say the actual words yet but still learning to connect with us.



This has been a month of big transition for Lewis as we have moved the girls upstairs to their new bedroom with bunk beds and have moved Lewis into the room downstairs that the girls have been sharing since we moved into this house. (Yes, I admit it; Lewis slept in our room for over a year.) With a tiny baby, I always sleep better with the baby in the same room as me, and I like not having to really get up and go anywhere for night wakings. With Lewis, we went hard-core hippie and just accepted that he was going to be in our room for a good long while, not even decorating a nursery. Somewhere around the one-year mark, some hormonal switch in my brain flips and then I WANT THE BABY IN ANOTHER ROOM. It happened with both of my girls (who had nurseries, but didn't really spend much time in there for their first years) and it happened again with Lewis. In the past few months, I have been SO SO READY for him to move out into his own nighttime space and the week of Thanksgiving we made the big move! It has gone really smoothly and he has been doing very well transitioning to being in his own room at night. I know it will be a while before he is there the whole night through, but even just sleeping on my own for the first chunk of the night has been great for me.



I feel like my sleep has vastly improved since we moved Lewis to his own room and I am happy about it, but an era in his life has ended and he will never be that little baby who sleeps in our room again. Realizing how fleeting Lewis' present self is makes me want to soak up who he is right now and imprint on my memory forever his cheeks, his lips, his funny shrieks, his toddler waddle, his chubby hands. I don't want to miss any of who he is and who he is becoming.

Still Feeling Thankful

I've been contemplating our autumn and how much there has been to be thankful for. Both sets of grandparents came to visit, it was a harvest season full of bounty and deliciousness, my astronomy writing job is going well, and we explored Utah outside of our own city more than we have before.



We left the girls overnight for the first time with our friend Haley and Rob, Lewis, and I went up to Park City for a little mountain getaway. We stayed at a really lovely hotel (fancy hotels are SO NICE; that is a very creative thought of mine, isn't it?) and rode up a ski lift to do a little hiking and had such a fun time. It blows my mind a little that it won't be that long before we could leave ALL THREE CHILDREN with friends and actually be away just the two of us.



Riding a ski lift in summer or autumn is my new favorite thing. Grace and I did it again during our visit from Rob's parents when we took them up to one of the ski resorts. That was a LONG ride, over an hour roundtrip including the little bit of walking we did at the top, and it was amazing. It's crazy to realize that this is all covered in snow now; maybe this is the year I will give skiing or snowboarding another try. ALL FOR THE SKI LIFTS. Seriously, they are the best part.



Not that the scenery is too shabby in the city itself:



Seriously, you guys, Utah is amazing. That is just the view on one of my running routes from our house.



This was my most productive year yet for preserving, and also the year that might convert me to finally labeling my jars with what they contain. I have enough jars this year that I'm not entirely sure which jam is which. I also might try to do some non-sweet foods next year; I've realized that I pretty much just did jams and fruit and apple butter and that kind of thing. Considering that I'm trying to shift away from eating sugar regularly, this might not be the best plan for me. Oh well, the girls like it and it all makes good Christmas gifts. And it is SO SO SO FUN.



We had a fun Halloween, with our sweet birdie and fairy. (Gotta love hand-me-downs, right?) I wasn't sure how that bird costume was going to turn out while it was still in process. When I was sitting there cutting out those feathers from my bins of fabric scraps, I was pretty sure she was going to look like she was wearing a quilt. By the time I'd gotten about halfway up sewing them on in layers, I felt more OK about it, and the overall effect with the mask is good. I did show it to a few friends without telling them what it was supposed to be to ascertain if it was obvious, or just crazy looking. And then I never know what to do with all the candy; maybe we'll become one of those buy-back-the-candy families.

Our autumn has been full of things to be thankful for, but it has been hard too. Life with Violet is hard right now. She is amazing and beautiful, creative and super smart, but she is so frustrated so much of the time, and coping with life does not come easily for her. We did decide to give her a break from preschool for a while and that has helped, and we also decided to get a professional perspective on what kinds of changes we should make. That's still a few weeks off but I have hopes that it will help. And then Lewis is, well, a toddler-- a normal piano-climbing, drawer-emptying, house-trashing toddler. It's a challenging convergence of intense needs that has me struggling, I admit. At the same time, I am fiercely thankful for this season of my life. It's flashing by like autumn rushing into winter.

Hello There, Bloggy Blog

• Last night for dinner we had this pumpkin-coconut-kale curry thing for dinner that I ate over spaghetti squash. It was Squash Inception!
• There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the girls about dinner, even though I gave them rice into of spaghetti squash. Why do I feed them such terrible food?! Don't I love them?! This is in contrast to the night before when we fed them Costco pizza (I had been sick with a stomach bug and didn't feel up to cooking yet) when they sat there in serene happiness, cleaning their plates and asking for more.
• For Lewis, I picked out chunks of pumpkin and slices of chicken from the pot and rinsed off the curry sauce. As one does.
• I am working! Although actually not that much this week, between our babysitter being out of town and me having that stomach bug. Recently I have been working on questions about tidal effects in the Solar System and spaghettification.
• We have a parent-teacher conference for Grace tomorrow and in preparation, her teacher has asked her to come up with an intention for the rest of the semester, like in a yoga class. I think her intention should be to get ready in the morning quickly and independently; she thinks it should be to learn to go really fast on her scooter.
• This week is also parent week at her ballet class, which means we are allowed to go into the class and sit and watch. She is taking ballet at the school associated with Salt Lake's professional company and it is kind of hard-core. They all wear the same leotard and are required to have their hair in a bun and aren't allowed to wear earrings or nail polish. I'm not sure if she'll want to stick with it beyond this year but she likes it, being the rule follower that she is, and I like that everything is in good taste and non-skanky.
• We are going through a tough time with Violet, mainly preschool-related. She's been there since January and seemed to like it pretty well at first, but things have been going downhill. Now she says that she doesn't like school, doesn't want to go, school makes her sad, etc. Her teachers sat down with me recently and we had a hard-to-hear conversation about how she doesn't participate with the group, sits off by herself a lot, has pretty drastic trouble with transitions between activities, and often turns non-verbal and withdrawn when she's upset at school. MY HEART. We're still processing, trying some new things, and thinking through our options-- give her a break from school for a while? get some kind of professional help/opinion/evaluation? try a different style of preschool that would be a better fit for independent Violet with her long attention span, maybe Montessori? push through at her current school? I don't know. I do know I broke down crying while describing her current struggles during a visit to a Montessori school last week, so that's awesome.
• And Lewis? He has moved from the high chair to sitting at the table, he says "nigh nigh" when it's time to go to bed  and "allo" when he puts a phone to his ear, he gives wet open-mouthed kisses complete with "mwa!" sounds, and I really really really want to get him into his own room at night. We have to move the girls upstairs to their new room first, so we are still in process on that. I did buy bunk beds yesterday, though-- hooray!

One Year of Lewis

One year ago today, before the Sun had risen, Lewis had arrived here in the world after a much longer labor than I would have predicted. And then he was here, his beautiful amazing self was here, on the very morning that Grace started kindergarten and our family changed and grew and became what it is now.


Lewis' Zeroth Birthday from Julia Silge on Vimeo.

And now Lewis has made his first trip around the Sun and we have spent the past year seeing him get gorgeous and big, opening up to the world, becoming everyday more who he will be. I love newborns, I love babies, and when I watch that video, I feel absolutely in love with the tiny squashy newborn Lewis was and so happy for one-year-ago me to get to hold his curled-up body and kiss his wrinkly old-man fingers. But there is so much joy in the future of one-year-ago me too, as the newborn in that video turns into this gorgeous happy baby who is toddling around the living room right now.



He is walking, just within the past two weeks or so, and stomps unsteadily around the house like a cheery drunk person, arms waving, little diapered butt hitting the ground when his balance fails him. It happens so fast, over just a few days, the transition from not being able to walk to it being the preferred method of locomotion. He still occasionally drops to all fours for his super-fast waggle-butt crawl, but its days are numbered. He says "uh oh" and "dada", with an occasional "mama" that he doesn't quite use appropriately yet. He claps his hands and says "yayayayayaya", and he waves goodbye, repeating either "nana" or "dada" while waving (apparently there are no "b" sounds yet, and no long "i" vowel sounds either). He still has just the eight teeth he's had for months now, apparently believing in the "all at the same time" school of teething. He likes to eat fruit and cheese and books (all paper, actually) and sticks. And dirt. And rocks too, if we're being honest. I did finally put all the crayons up high so at least they're not a regular part of his diet anymore.



He is a joy to be with and his presence in our lives is a gift. Today my parents are coming in town; we'll have a party with cake and a few presents and grandparents. I am so glad to be celebrating this milestone.

Happy birthday, my delicious blue-eyed boy.