Windows

I have been noticing windows this week. Squares and rectangles with light pouring in, raw and bright, the way that new spring light does.

I’ve been noticing the way windows frame a view, just so: six small squares of pine and red maple sprouting tiny buds through the glass in the solid cherry wood of the front door; a triptych of blue mountains and bluer sky where my four orchids sit in clay pots on the sill, some blossoms dry now, like ghosts still clinging to sapling slender stems.

Today the afternoon light splashes through glass. It makes the walls yellower and my mood softer, even without enough sleep. Where I am sitting I can see the mountains from the window, but not the meadow where surly, possibly, a white-tailed doe is standing on slight legs, her warm nostrils flaring, among a mess of winter-dead grass.

We are always looking through windows, always seeing a view.

Two days ago, DH had a down day. He read the charts and made the wrong call and all afternoon he was tossed upside down in a bucket of hope, and I could hear him thudding his fist with frustration into his glass-topped desk, expletives filtering through the wall like parentheses, and I watched a squirrel scrabbling uselessly at the dining room window. The squirrel was trying to climb the slick glass to reach the bird feeder where fat sunflower seeds tempt nuthatches and grosbeaks. Eventually, after much commotion, it fell to the ground; forced to nibble at the fallen shells and millet seeds the birds had scattered and pecked.

Two days ago I spent the day indoors, looking out of windows and feeling listless and limited by the smallness of Sprout and the amount of effort it takes to bundle him into tiny warm things: woolen socks and a hand knit blue hat, and a fleece jumpsuit into which I must stuff his arms and legs like small sausages. I’d spent the day inadvertently waiting for something to happen, waiting for the view to change, for something sweet, for delight to find me here in this house were the walls sometimes feel very close and the rooms very small. And when DH came out of his office I turned to him like a little girl, my face wide-open, grinning like he was maybe holding a billowing cloud of cotton candy on a stick. And he just looked at me.

He looked at me in a distressed, tight-jawed way, and said “Right.” And “Mmm” absently to whatever I said and I knew he had every intention of spending the rest of the afternoon pacing in the dark rooms of his mind analyzing whatever it was he had missed or done wrong at work, curtains drawn. And I bit my quivering lip and rinsed the dish I was holding.

Disappointment, if it could have a taste, would be the taste you get at the back of your throat when you jump into a pool, expecting the splash and the plunge, but forgetting to hold your nose. Or it would taste like burnt toast; or getting the popcorn flavored jellybean instead of the lemon one when you pick a yellow one out of the bag. Whatever its taste, disappointment was there on my tongue with the many bitter words I didn’t say and swallowed instead.

It was arranged civilly: he would work out while I would continue to watch the boys; then I would be free to go on a run, solo. We used the fewest words possible, as if they were heavy things we did not have the strength to hoist about. We looked in opposite directions, my ponytail to his cheek; the back of his muscled calves running up the stairs as I turned to face him.

Under the imaginary table in my head I was kicking myself for doing it again: for expecting something, unnamed and remarkable from him at the end of a day.

Do you ever do this? Expect the world from the one you love, when the world is already right here, and you are already in it?

I could feel tears at the back of my eyes. They spring up now, often and unbidden, a symptom of the tiredness that has begun to inhabit my body, making the skin under my eyes transparent and dark, and my heart quick to ache.

But, after much clattering of plates and flatware I realized that the only thing I could change was my view. I desperately needed to get out of the house. Right then. Right that minute when the sun was still high and the breeze would bring the scent of warm mud and possibly skunk cabbages in thawing boggy places.

So I sent the little guy down to the basement gym with a collection of Matchbox cars to hang with his Daddy, and I patiently nursed Sprout and then burped him and dressed him in the multiple small layers of fleece and bootie and hat, and then pulled on rubber boots and a jacket and strapped the baby to my chest.

Of course he cried. Of course there were those two minutes that felt like a hundred hours when I tried to get him into his fleece jumpsuit and all of his limbs were like rubber and his face was squished into a wail of discontent, and my body was suddenly awash with heat. But we both survived and I made it out the door, suddenly furious at everyone and everything and muttering under my breath. But then, looking down at my shadow, backlit by bright sun, I could see heat waves rising up around my shoulders and head, and I had to throw my head back and laugh. This is the crazy I am right now. Heatwaves. Out loud muttering. Mud boots. Mood swings.

And instead of just going to collect the mail as I had intended, I kept walking. I climbed the neighbor’s stile and jumped down onto the springy earth on the other side, and then walked down the trail through muddy places and over a small stream and then up, up into the woods along a creek bed where the snowmelt babbles and sings. Along the trail coyotes had gone before me, leaving their unmistakable canine prints in the mud, and a piece of sheepskin snagged on the bark of a hickory. The neighbor’s lambs are born every February, and one or two almost always end up being carried off despite the barbed wire and the barn doors and the three fierce lamas who stare anyone down and chomp impatiently at the air with their buckteeth.

Further up the hill, I saw the rest of the sheep’s wool, along side the stream: a soft blanket of death and feasting. No lamb after all. This was a full-sized sheep, carried here on one of those full moon nights when I woke to hear the yapping and felt the familiar prickle of goosebumps on my arms.

As I hiked I found the answers, scattered like last year’s fallen beech leaves on the snow. I realized that what happens with us is something that must happen to many people who fall in love first, then become parents, preoccupied with the sudden demands of need and responsibility.

It’s easy to forget that once we were each other’s only only, and while we are not now, our hearts still long for this.

Once we gave each other full attention, French kisses, boxes with small gifts and colored ribbon, handfuls of wildflowers, photographs, mixed tapes, late night movies at the theater, sandwiches, new books, back rubs, curiosity. Now, the hours in the day are not enough and like the coyotes, we’re both hungry for our share of time. Without intending, it’s easy to become absent, distracted, distant, disheartened. And so there we are. There I am.

I realized I was not mad at him for his dark mood or his down day or for having to watch the baby after I had already done that all day long, or for the dishes in the sink. I was not mad at all, I found, when I opened and closed the many crammed drawers of my heart.

Instead all I found was a kind of loneliness. A hunger. Not for just anyone. For him. For us the way we were, before this. Shit. It’s so easy to let it slip. You blink, you have a baby, you dig into the present of your life, the clock’s hands go round and round, and zip, it’s gone.

An hour later I was back. The rhythm of my body had long ago lulled Sprout into a deep grunting sleep, and the rhythm of climbing and stumbling through almost knee-deep snow on the North-West side of the mountain left me newly bright eyed. But they were gone.

I could see his blue truck was missing from the drive as I crested the hill above our house and for a minute I felt the disappointment flip flop about in my ribcage the way a stunned bird does when you scoop it in your palms and hold it, after it has flown unexpectedly into a windowpane.

“You deserved it,” I whispered. “You were the one who left without saying where you were going.” And it was true, I had, and I did. And it wasn’t really his fault I expected him to be my moon and stars that afternoon. It was mine.

But then there he was in the driveway—the boys had been driving up and down the road looking for me. On both of their faces smiles bloomed like sunflowers when they saw me at the door.

“Let’s go into town and get dinner,” he said.

Time spent moving, sweating, had had the same affect on him.

So we went for pizza at a little hole in the wall place where kids in hugely baggy pants were playing pool and a juke-box was mounted on the wall and the pizza crust was thin and crispy. I had root beer, and we sat by the windows, and Bean was preoccupied with watching the fire trucks and hatchbacks and delivery trucks that passed by on the street. And so, unexpectedly, DH and I had time to talk.

“A friend of mine at work is getting a divorce,” he said, holding the pizza like a taco, folded, pepperoni and cheese dripping out the side.

“He said it’s partly the job, and partly they’ve just grown apart. They’re taking a week apart to think it over, but I told him he should really taking the week with her, without the kids, to remember what they had in the first place.”

Next to us a family of four had almost finished dinner. The father got up and left the restaurant at a run. His family waved to him as he ran by the glass, on a mission to get something. Grinning.

When the mother and two girls finished eating they cleared their paper plates and walked out into the night.

I could see them through my reflection in the glass, lit by the yellow streetlamps, looking in the direction the man went. Then after some deliberation they walked the other way.

DH said, “It’s so damn easy to forget, to get distracted. Like you said the other day, you really can loose it all like that, without really noticing.”

The man came back. He burst into the restaurant panting, expectant. Saw the empty table where they had sat, then turned slowly to leave. Outside on the corner he stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. Then walked off.

“It really is,” I nodded.

We kept talking. The baby slept in the crook of my knee. I licked cheese from my fingers and shared sips of root beer with Bean who found a new love: calzones. He was busy dipping pieces of cheesy dough into marinara, a saucy smile spreading ear to ear.

The lady and the girls came back to the corner outside the restaurant. They looked up the street again, then stood there, shifting in their jackets, saying words I couldn’t hear through the glass. Finally they turned and walked in the same direction the man had gone, and I caught myself hoping desperately that they would find each other and laugh instead of being bitter or snapping at one another in the dark beside their parked car.

“Oh! They missed each other twice,” I said.

DH turned to look, then smiled and reached across the table for my hand. "You're always noticing that stuff," he said.

And I couldn’t help but grin. Because somehow, right then, we had exactly the same view.

Learning Curve.

Learning Curve. There are days when I feel like cloudy water in a glass. Days when I feel spilled and lonely, and the color of the sky and the color of the melting snow is like cement, perpetual and repeated as far as the eye can see and all I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep.

There are days now, when I feel utterly incapable as a mother of two. There is certainly a learning curve to it, and the curve is steep and scrabbling.

Today is one of those days. Stir crazy. An open jar of nutella. Going to pick up and Bean up at preschool with Sprout in tow. Thus far all efforts to take both boys anyplace by myself have gone disastrously. Sigh.

Finding my way to here

Photo by M.Brott The days soften. The scent of mud reaches our nostrils thawing beneath lacy layers of dirty snow. Icicles fall. My body is adjusting to eating scraps of sleep. In the middle of the night a headache fills the space between my temples, thrumming and groaning like some hungry wild beast, but in the morning there is just the window, the pale light, the rumpled sheets.

There is an hour then, between five and six when the light is changing from gray to yellow and the tall birch outside the glass is filled with birds, that I curl my body around Sprout, milk drunk after nursing. His head smells like honey; like rain on a summer afternoon; like something that is mine.

We lie like otters and dream. DH’s breath is warm on my neck. My feet press against his shins, heat traveling between us under the tangle of covers. I will forget so soon how this heat takes me by storm in the middle of the night; how I am suddenly drenched with sweat, thrash at the sheets, shove my ankles akimbo over the edge of the mattress. I will forget how my fingers blunder with snaps, milk soaking through my shirt; and how, sitting cross legged on the bed changing Sprout’s diaper in the mostly dark, my core muscles feel non-existent like my middle is composed of anemones winnowing in the gap between my ribs and pelvis.

Then, invariably Bean comes in just as morning is unclenching its late winter fists and the cardinals are marking their territory in scarlet song. Bean is a long-legged colt all of a sudden. He is full of giggles and kisses and knees. He comes in dragging his raggedy blanket and shimmies under the covers. Then the bed is a boat, a space ship, a racecar. We stagger to catch up: hot water, espresso, fried eggs.

***

In the late morning I pull on my chocolate polka-dotted rain boots and go outdoors with Sprout strapped to my chest. The snow is melting. Bean is carrying his hammer. DH has an armload of freshly cut two-by-four planks. We’re heading up the hill, our little family of four, through the woods where the ground is spongy and the snow is sometimes deep.

At the top of the hill, as far back in the woods as our land goes is an old tree. A sugar maple, struck by lightening, hollowed first by fire, then by termites. It is the perfect tree to hide in for a small boy. Bean calls it his “fort.” Last summer I would hike up with him and hoist him into the cool dark of the hollow trunk where leaves made a soft resting place and light filtered down in long dusty motes from above his head. Now, newly independent, he wants to be able to climb in himself so we bring wood and nails to hammer a rudimentary latter to the trunk.

Our pet goose follows us up the hill, and Sprout, tucked into the Bjorn on my chest makes whispering coos as he sleeps. He wears a blue and green hat like a little gnome’s.

The nails sing as they are driven into the wood. Ping, ping, pang, pong, pong. Some bend, encountering knots. The trunk is old. Only a few limbs will have bright green buds and leaves this year.

Later we cut across the snowy meadow past the sleeping garden, following the melting tacks of deer to our neighbor’s house. They are running sugaring lines today, drilling holes for spouts. The sap is running. We cup our hand under the spiles and taste the liquid. It is clear and cold and faintly sweet.

*** I go back to my notebooks from this same time during the early weeks after Bean was born and before, and am struck by how I’ve changed.

I was just twenty-seven. Living in the suburbs. Commuting. Newly married. Every day l imagined a parallel life. Me in a little bohemian flat somewhere above a grocery on the Upper West Side. Thrift store teacups and lampshades, a futon mattress on the floor, nights spent in smoky cafes, up headache late by choice. I was always hankering for a life I believed was more exotic than my own. There was always escape route folded in my back pocket; the bags of my heart always packed and waiting at the door.

This should come as no surprise.

I come from restless women. My grandmother fell in love with her cousin, and, forbidden to marry him, left England on a steamer, broken hearted. She met her husband on that voyage: a German farmer from a good family, and though they traveled around the world together on a honeymoon that lasted fourteen months, sipping tea from brass bowls in Tibet, and drinking camel’s milk in the Egyptian desert, she never really allowed him, or the life he had to offer, to measured up.

I can picture her at the kitchen window looking out at the red dairy barns tucked into the softly rolling Appalachian hills, rinsing plates and resenting every one. She wore stockings and pea coats, when neither was practical; drank afternoon tea from china cups; wrote hundreds of sonnets. Hers was a life of sighs. Before she died she burned most of the poems she had written.

Before Bean, before here, before this, I could never picture myself settled. Houses terrified me. Staying put terrified me. And it was a terror I had learned by heart, handed to me in the blueprints of how to be inked by my mother and her mother before her.

My mother, never quite content, always moved where my father asked her. First to a cabin high in a bowl of the Rocky Mountains where she hung my diapers to dry in subzero temperatures, then carried them indoors, flat as boards to thaw before the woodstove. Then to a house on the hill among dangerously flammable eucalyptus in the Los Angeles suburbs where the Santa Anna winds would make the carpets ripple, and smoke from wild fires obscured the San Adres Mountains. And finally to a low ranch with metallic floral wall paper on a winding macadam road in California wine country where the grass was green in January and dead by April. The seasons were Rainy or Dry, and in spring tractors would spray yellow clouds of pesticides onto the grapes.

Somehow deep within my bones I memorized this message: houses were discontent. Settling meant just that: settling for something, for something less. I distrusted the process of committing to growing a life and growing a family because I assumed it would make me like my mother: restless with regret for a life she had never had and could never quite imagine.

But somehow I managed to say yes to it, despite the bucking of my heart. I have a good man, and maybe this is partly why the terror has gradually been dissolved by joy. Knowing I was like a spring-broke filly always threatening to run, DH promised, and promised again: we can go anywhere, and will if we need to. This place is just for now, for the time being.

But in the time being, I have begun to spend the time, being.

*** It is early evening and upstairs DH and Bean are napping. Everyone is trying to catch up on sleep whenever they can around here. Bean spent the night at his grandparents and didn’t go to bed until nine. When he came home today his huge eyes were glassy and the skin below his eyes was pale and almost purple. When he looks tired like this I want to scoop him up and tuck him into the pocket of my heart. My little boy.

On the couch, I sit with my legs up, Sprout on my chest, his fuzzy head pressed to my chin. I am smitten. Even in the moments when his crying makes me crazy I am smitten. I had no idea this would happen. This love. This wild contentment.

5 days:: due date

The late winter sun shines through the windows with tangible heat. It makes geometric patterns on the floor, shining through the slats of chairs and the mullions on the windows; it refracts through the glass jar on the table filled with fragrant eucalyptus and tiny purple flowers; it dapples the rumpled sheets where Sprout lies in the buff, his feet curled up behind him the way he was for so long in the womb.

On the couch, three loads of laundry, fresh from the dryer, a snarl of unfolded cotton. On the floor, the riff raff that has fallen off the logs stacked by the woodstove. People’s boots leave wet tracks by the door. This is a life. This is my life, now, these moments like light shining through a jar of amber syrup.

I try to let everything be. I try to let it all be despite the fact that it creates a turbulence in me: a voice whispering your life is out of control. Whose voice is this, yammering softly at the back of my head?

The morning is quiet, even with both boys at home today—a first. Bean goes out to play in the snow. I watch him from the window—lanky, even in his blue snowsuit. He carves a tunnel in a mound of icy snow, then drives a digger through. When he comes in, I foam milk and drizzle molasses over the top. He gulps it, all grins, his bare feet tucked up under him on the stool.

When I look in the mirror my eyes are pale blue. They get this way when I am tired. They are the color of the sky outside: a milky late winter sky awash with sun, snow thick on the ground but melting steadily in a staccato of drips from the eaves. Below the bird feeders this morning I encountered another set of eyes: a doe’s with soft brown fur. She stood, lured by the black sunflower seeds fallen to the ground. For her, the winter is long. For me, the nights are. Sprout nursed for an hour in the early morning, then fussed while the sun rose. Sleep became a fracture in the dawn. A hairline figment of what I'm used to, but here I am.

I watch her swivel her ears, then dart away, startled to see me behind the glass. In the mirror I startle too, getting used to a new silhouette, my stomach returning to its former shape, softness bulging where the firm hard curve of my belly was, swollen with Sprout. I hold him to my chest and already my mind can hardly slip backwards to the hours of his birth. How is it possible that this babe, this bundle of tiny limbs and sweet breath and little hiccuped sighs and porpoise whispers was in my belly just five short days ago.

Every night is still different, sleep sewn together in fragments, but it is peaceful. This baby boy is calmer than Bean, and I am calmer too. We navigate the nighttime softly, and in the morning I awaken feeling like a thousand piece puzzle shaken in a box, but I am somehow still contained. The nights don’t terrify me like they did in the early days with Bean.

It’s the small things that make the days whole. The extra effort to be tender towards each other even when we’re feeling fragmented and sharp. I reach for him in the dark; he pulls me to him at the bottom of the stairs, kisses me full on the mouth hard, and with unexpected passion, the baby between us. I come up behind him when he’s rinsing plates at the sink, press my belly into his back, wrap my arms around his muscles.

Now it is night. The house windows show us ourselves. The firelight is orange. Sprout fusses intermittently as DH walks him around the living room humming. Bean and I sit at the dining room table. He is drawing fireboats, talking as he does so, around him a sea of markers and snippeted papers.

A day. A life. This is us, right now.

3 days

Sprout is three days old. It is snowing outside, and has been all night long, and our house is tucked into a snug blanket of silence and whiteness.

He is beautiful, and when he smiles in his sleep his dimpled grin makes this tiny world of mine explode with sparklers.

I am delirious. The second night with him was rocky.

He cried for the first several hours of the night, uncomfortable, gassy, something—a squeal uniquely his own, like a baby dragon. There is a learning curve to all of this for both of us, even if it is the second time around, and it took half the night to figure out what he needed.

The tiredness didn’t hit until yesterday morning. Then it was massive. Tiredness in my bones, my muscles, my ligaments.

I have always wished that people would write about their first week home with a new babe, because it is such a fragile, isolating time. You wonder, invariably if anyone else goes through the same things: the stupendous heights of new baby love, and the rocky catapults to below low . I’ve always wondered what it is like for other people. I imagine, now that I am in the thick if it, it is not because they don’t intend to write, but because the tiredness takes hold of their fingers, and the moments become wrapped in a protective bubble of forgetfulness.

I don’t want to forget.

I want to write even though the tiredness feels like an animal in the room with me: large and soft and voracious. I want to write so that I can remember what these moments are like: new, and precarious, with snow falling in huge fat flakes outside.

I go to do something, the intention in my brain firing at normal speed; and then I arrive at the place where I intended to be and have no idea for a moment why I am there. I nearly put the half & half into the freezer this morning, having randomly picked it up while trying to get ice. It made me laugh out loud into the quiet of the house. This is the silly crazy of sleep deprivation that so up-ended me with Bean.

Sprout is asleep on the couch, tucked into a corner, dreaming, wearing a hat his big brother wore, and in it, the two look so the same.

I am sitting in my favorite place: the dining room, where windows go on three sides. It is here, in front of the windows, that I have hung bird feeders, and during snowstorms especially, the birds come steadily to peck and flutter, and for some reason this makes me unspeakably glad. The blue of the jay’s feathers is cobalt bright against the snow. The cardinal, so red. The finches, small flecks of yellow and brown, that arrive by the twos and threes to split sunflower seeds.

Birds in the snow, like the orchids blooming on the living room windowsill, fill me, even when I ache and am beyond tired.

Yesterday I was so tired I couldn’t sleep. The difference between doing this the first time around and doing it a second is that there is a resident four year old in the house who sounds like a herd of energetic hippos as he moves from room to room following his Daddy about as they do “projects.” Even when he is being quiet, he stirs the air around him like an oar dipped into the smooth surface of a pond. His little self eddies out and fills the space: exuberance, thundering feet, the sweet high music of his voice.

Yesterday all this noise made me startle over and over again so that I was neither awake nor deeply asleep, as I tried to nap in the morning. Some internal tuning shifts with giving birth, so that every noise filters into my brain differently. I am always on the alert for Sprout’s breathing, his slightest whimper, his smallest sigh. When I sleep next to him, I breathe in synch with his breath, and the rhythm of us breathing together is like the complex jazz score and anything else, any other sound, disrupts this and makes it harder to sleep.

It isn’t like I am just tired. Not like the tired you feel at two months or three months when the babe stubbornly won’t sleep and you wake up feeling like a hologram of yourself but you can still laugh. This is a different kind of tired that originates in my organs, my muscle tissue, my sore, sore body. Everything hurts. And where adrenaline made the first day and the second a soporific rush of moments; the trauma of labor catches up. My body is stunned.

Finally I asked DH to rally the in-laws to take Bean on an excursion yesterday, then handed him Sprout and toppled into a torpor-like sleep, my head buried under pillows to block any noise from filtering into my jagged-edged brain.

This is something we’re doing better: communicating what we both need. Making it about the needs, not about the emotions that bubble up, misguided and inaccurate.

It’s so easy to fall into a place of reaction when you’re this tired. When your mind rolls around like a marble in a jar it’s easy to misconstrue and point fingers and generally become a monster. I remember this from Bean. I remember how DH and I would crash into each other’s emotions in the night, become frustrated, snap, and it would leave us feeling both fragile and alarmed.

This time both of us expected the inevitable tears, the inability to make a decision, the tenderness, the enormous, fragile need for sleep. This time we talked about it ahead of time, earmarking patience for when the riptide of hormones began to yank me under.

And he has been amazing. Steadfast, tender. Sometimes he is distant, matter of fact, all muscle and action and I want to suck him in close as though I am a starfish extending the membrane of my heart around his heart.

But I also know that he is riding his own rollercoaster. The provider instinct in him is in overdrive now.

Today as he gets back from dropping off Bean off at his grandparents, the house is suddenly full with his noises: doors opening and shutting as he fetches an armload of wood; the clunk of his boots as he knocks snow off; the sound of metal on metal as he lifts the stove lid and adds wood; espresso being ground. His jaw is set. In his office, the charts are up on his monitors, graphing the volatility that is the stock market of late.

Outside the chimes that we hung on the lilac tree in summer make their metal music in the wind. Juncos and chickadees and nuthatches gather in its branches. I nurse Sprout, then bring him to the table and nestle him in a laundry basket next to me where he sleeps, his arms above his head.

I love him. I love him unimaginably, and feel almost surprised by this sweetness especially when Bean climbs into bed beside us and my love for him makes my heart flutter. Next to Sprout, his legs and arms seem remarkably large. He nuzzles in, nudging next to Sprout and me, our cheeks together in the first light of morning.

Bean already loves his brother. He has yet to show any jealousy, and instead has been full of tenderness and sweetness—running to get us diapers, asking a thousand questions, trying to memorize every contour of his brother’s face, every function of his small body. “I love you,” he said softly last night at dinner, perched on a chair next to me, looking down into his brother’s briefly open eyes.

Every day is different. A wonderment, a thousand sighs and tears and laughs.

He's here...

The little Sprout is here. Born at 10am on Friday. 7lbs 14oz, 20 inches.

I am currently attempting to remember the fine art of one-handed typing.

It makes everything so much easier to have already done this once. People probably told me this, but I somehow I didn't hear them. Things are so much easier this time.

DH and I both get all the little signals and whimpers and coos. Together, we're a rockstar baby-caring team this time around. We're not shattered by the urgent sound of newborn crying or the gas or the poop. We know things will be okay, and because we know this, everything seems so much more enjoyable. This is not to say I wasn't entirely shocked (and had forgotten completely) by the vast number of diapers a newborn produces in a day. Holy poop.

But also, the little guy seems to be remarkably mellow; perhaps because he got to hang out on my chest wrapped in warm towels for nearly an hour after he was born--before he was even weighed. Maybe all that snuggle time with mama made him a chill babe. That, and the fact that he weighed a good pound more than his brother at birth.

Labor itself was so much shorter--7 hours all told (compared with Bean's 24.) And even though the actual giving birth portion of the program hurt like hell (Worlds Greatest Understatement. No drugs.) I felt much less traumatized afterward, and we went home the same evening after being given the green light from the doctors.

(Perhaps more on that in a separate post. I am a little peeved at doctors right now. And I am totally convinced they are out convince women into thinking they are going to be incapable as mothers. The attending pediatrician asked, after conceding (unwillingly) that there was no reason we needed to stay at the hospital, if I had had any trouble breastfeeding last time because really, I should consider either spending the night at the hospital or picking up formula to supplement with on the way home, just in case I didn't produce enough milk. Um. Right.

With Bean I was scared shitless by all of this, and it totally made me doubt my instincts. With Sprout, I just shrugged. Tried hard not to roll my eyes. And of course he's been a champion nurser and the sweetest little peach. My boobs are the only ones who have forgotten what it was like to have a full time job. Ouch.

All in all I am smitten. He has a dimple when he sleep smiles in his right cheek, and eyelashes as long as Bean's were--but totally different eyes and nose. He smells yummy. And I'm not pregnant. And suddenly, food tastes divine. And Bean is the best big brother ever.

Today seems to be the day

Heading off to the hospital now...

Bean is 4

He's four, and going to be a big brother any day now. It kind of takes my breath away. Instead of a letter, here are his responses to an impromptu interview done on his birthday. *** Favorite color: purple, pink, blue, red Favorite candy: chocolate, all of the candies at the candy store downtown. Favorite game: Scrabble, my circuit board. Favorite food: Macaroni with nothing else (what he means by this is "no veggies". Favorite fruit: mango Favorite piece of clothing: My “I’m with the band” shirt. My Hawaiian shirts. My pink striped shirt. Favorite music: jazz Favorite time of day: morning Favorite time of year: Summertime—because I get to go out with nothing on. Favorite meal: breakfast and dinner Favorite kind of chip: potato chips Favorite animal: platypus Stuff you don’t like: I like everything. Except I don’t like broccoli and I don’t like tomatoes Some letters you know how to write: I A B E W R O V U Y C T L M What’s your brother going to be like? I don’t know Mommy. I haven’t seen him yet.

*** 4 Year old thoughts:

“Every day people ride a rocket up to the sun to check it out. They have a hose that goes way, way, way inside the earth. It pumps up liquid that turns into fire to start the sun if it needs starting.”

“Thunder foxes come when it is night time and it is thundering and lightening. They are so big they can pull Daddy into the water and blow a house down, but they only blow houses down where nobody lives.”

***

He draws diggers and cranes and people with ten fingers and suns with green dots in the middle because “that’s how it looks and when you look at the sun. When you see the green dot you have to look away.”

*** For his birthday he requested pancakes for breakfast; having Daddy help him build stuff on his circuit board; a camera (he begged for that one for months!); 'fancy' drinks with dinner; and a shark cake. Bonus: his aunt & uncle sent him a remote control car. Yeah. The boy is spoiled. But it's his last birthday as our only. And he was giddy and full of wonder and delight all day.

Still pregnant & bumbling

In case you were wondering. Feeling the soporific effects of sunshine. Also feeling rather hippo-ish and bumbling. I napped for about 3 straight hours this morning after a ridiculous night of waking up a zillion times. Woke up feeling entirely out of it and have been sort of stumbling around the house ever since.

I am trying to get some code sorted out. I moved servers over the weekend, and now photos won't post...yet. When everything's in order again, I have so many yummy photos of Bean at his birthday to share.

38 weeks & babbling

So you guessed anywhere from next Wednesday to the following Friday, huh? I'm totally for the 20th. I also kind of hate anyone who even dared mention a date beyond the 25th, because seriously, if I have to wait until the 27th or 28th, I will gradually begin banging my head on the wall and forget my name. I am so ready. Bags packed. House cleaned. Baby clothes washed. Oh, and have I mentioned? Really ready to have my body belong to just me again.

Tonight it dawned on me that holy shit, there's an entire body in my belly. A baby. Okay, 'dawned on me' might be a titch dramatic. But really, something about being pregnant has never quite fully saturated my brain. It is such a bizarre state of being.

Some people take to it, I imagine, like platypuses to water. Or whatever. But I just don't.

There's a bit of that surreal-ness that has lingered too in becoming somebody's mama. It's not an identity that I've just slipped into. I still never have the coolest snacks at the playground, or know what to say to Bean's teachers when I pick him up at preschool. I love him beyond the stars and moon, of course. I love hanging out with him, listening to the way he puts ideas together, to the way he giggles. I love everything about having this kid in my life--and can imagine how amazed and thrilled I will be to get to know this second little person who has so determinedly picked me, now. But still. Sometimes it just feels so utterly weird that he's totally dependent on me. That he's my kid. Mine.

Sometimes when this feeling strikes it's like I'm watching myself from somewhere else.

Me. 38 weeks pregnant. Waiting.

***

On a completely unrelated topic I've begun to notice that I expend a lot of useless energy doing things twice--rather than just following through on the first go round. I take the laundry out of the dryer and leave it sitting on the couch instead of folding it right then and there. I bring in the to-go cup from the car, but skip putting it in the dish washer. Little stuff. But then later I'm playing catch up, putting stuff away where it should be. Do you ever find yourself doing this? It's some sort of weird head game I play with myself. But it's got to change.

There is no way I'm going to survive having two if I don't become more efficient.

So. What I want to know from you is: how are you efficient? What are your top 2-3 time and effort saving daily tactics? How do you get your life done without feeling like your life is doing you? And especially, how do you do this with more than one kid?

Possibly pregnant forever.

I am feeling like I might never go into labor. The baby's head is lodged in my pelvis. Sleep is a joke. Time for some entertainment: When do you think the babe will arrive? Day? Time? Weight? Length?

He's due the 25th. Closest one to guess will get a pretty postcard in the mail when I've recovered. Ha! That is assuming I will EVER give birth. *Grumbles to self.*

Advice, please

Birthday party goodie bags. Yea or nay? Bean is turning 4, and aside from the fact that I am utterly dumbfounded by this fact, we have actually pulled off inviting a few friends to come play with him at our local lake aquarium for an afternoon. On Valentines day, because his real birthday is on Monday.

So anyway, we invited 5 friends and all five have said they're coming, but they've also not formally called and RSVPd. Additionally several have bigger or littler siblings who may or may not be coming. If it weren't for the siblings and the iffy RSVPs I'd be okay with doing goodie bags... but with the current situation I'm not sure what to do.

I miss the days of good old fashioned parties where kids came, played, at cake, and the birthday boy opened presents, said thank you, and everyone went home. Can I re-institute this, or would that be completely uncool.

I so need your help, Internets.

Unscheduled time

In the back yard animal tracks zig-zag the snow like hieroglyphs spelling secret messages of those that came before. The air is bitter cold. The windchill much below zero. But the light is perfect and golden against the snow; the shadows purple and long, making zebra stripes of light and dark at the edge of the woods. The light makes all the difference. Even from indoors, the light makes things golden and dappled and suffuse with goodness. On the picture windowsill indoors I'm keeping orchids. On the counter in the kitchen cyclamen. They glow. Hot pinks, decadent and delicate. They make me smile.

All week things have been making me smile. Making a mobile for above the baby's bed; walnuts and honey on toast; a new notebook for February; bringing a carrot cupcake to Bean when I pick him up from school; actually finishing a book.

Like unpacking summer clothes, I've been unpacking myself from the strange cramped quarters of stress that had taken over my days. I have a sense of humor, patience, and the ability to remember things. All this is remarkable, really, since before this week I felt like a deranged robot, going through the motions of every day, always on the verge of tears, exhausted beyond the point of... anything.

For the first time in years, I'm kind of in the mood for Valentines day. Maybe I'm just looking for a reason to celebrate.

Yippee

Done with work. Done. Soo happy.

Last night, beautiful dark snow squalls. Leaving work, it looked like a rainbow rinsed of color in the sky above the door. An arch of gray and white, the first fat flakes hitting my tear stained cheeks.

This morning, blue skies, blue jays plump against the cold in the lilac tree by the feeder, golden light on the bar branches.

Eating Irish oatmeal, cream and strawberries & making lists in this notebook.

Numbers

Yesterday was my birthday. I am 31. This terrifies me somewhat. Friday is the end of my work week--and the beginning of my leave. This excites me. Next Tuesday I'll be 37 weeks. Full term. Not sure what to think about this. I am on auto-pilot until then. Wishing I could just hit fast forward. Photo by M. Brott.

This love

Bean is sick. Since starting preschool it's been a nonstop barrage of sick all winter--for him, for me, for everyone in our family. It makes my heart ache whenever he's sick. I want to just wrap him up, snug him into a pocket like a kangaroo; keep him close. Right now he's next to me on the couch breathing faster than usual, eyelids heavy. My little boy. ***

On the way home he looked out the window at a passing church. "Who lives in that castle?" he asked.

"That's not a castle," I replied, "It's a church."

"What do they do there?" he asks, earnestly, his question empty of irony.

How do you answer this to a four year old who hasn't gone to church? It's not that I don't want to bring him--it's that I haven't found a place that feels right, that feels free and expansive and generous and un-dogmatic.

I grew up with so much faith in my house--my father was a minister in fact, in a small esoteric church whose brand of Christianity was at once both utterly progressive and utterly archaic. Religion saturated everything my family did in some way: from church on Sunday among a forest of adult knees and elbows; to the way we celebrated holidays, or said grace over meals, or prayers before bed.

On one hand this certain web of faith held me, buoyed me up, carried me through childhood with a certain cyclical rhythm that was satisfying and uncomplicated. On the other, it made me feel like a pushpin stuck into a map. You are here, this is the way--the right way--possibly the only way. Rigid, certain, definite.

As an adult, it didn't quite fit--nor did anything else. I feel closest to God in the middle of nature; when the sky is the color of melon and ice and opal; when the grass is wet with dew; when, sitting very still, I am witness to wild animals speaking to each other or shooting stars falling.

"They talk to God," I answer.

Bean is quiet for a moment. Then he says, "Do they see God there?"

"No," I say. But then I change my mind. "Maybe they do."

Who am I to say? Who is anyone? As Rumi says, 'There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth."

Bean nods. "God is in all of the churches."

Now it is my turn to nod. "You're right," I say.

"But I can't figure out if God is a he or a she," he says almost as a question. Then after a moment. "I think its a she."

I exhale. On the telephone wires above a faded red barn, pigeons, silhouettes against the paling sky. "I think you're probably right," I say.

*** We listen to Feist, side by side in a pale circle of light. His fever climbs. He falls asleep. All I want is to stay home with him tomorrow, to hold him close. He is fitful. Wakes. Turns to me, eyes glassy, lashes long. "I love you," he whispers.

This is the part you can't even begin to convey to someone who isn't a parent. This, this breathless wonder, this enormous love.

35 Weeks

I am enormous. Every time I bend over the baby resists with a sharp kick. I can feel the outline of his little feet, his rump, his determined knees. Because real estate in my belly is at a premium, he's taken up residence under my ribs. My groin ligaments feel like spaghetti. It seems beyond improbable that I have five more weeks. In theory. I have this gut feeling (no pun intended) that he'll be a couple of weeks early, like his big brother.

In the meantime everything feels like it's been taking place in slow motion. Everything takes effort: putting on winter boots, painting my toes (yes, I still can), vacuuming. Mostly I am counting the days--9 to be exact--until I am done with work. I am eager to be on leave. Eager to be home, nesting, puttering, blogging regularly. I know I've been a terrible blogger. I miss it, but I feel like I'm on energy saver mode, trying to get through these last couple of weeks at work where twenty-two kiddos are trying to devour me daily.

I need distraction. What are some new blogs you've been reading? Or some favorites (not already listed on my sidebar.)

Morning light.

Wondering:

Why are people compelled to say things like: "You had better enjoy the last few weeks with just one, because two is not the same. It's so much harder."

Looking.