Here & Now

Well, it's here:  Alice's first birthday. One year ago last night my thoughts were "Reallyreallyreally wishing we had just gotten another puppy, dammit/I hate everyone."  One year ago today I was more like "What's my name again?"  

But here we are now.

A few months ago I said, "Oh, I just love this age.  She's so fun."  And Luke laughed at me and said, "You say that every week."

But it's true and completely bizarre.  Every day seems better than the last, but I still look back on her little squishy baby pictures and start to tear up because that tiny baby is gone.  And I'll definitely miss her as a one year old, so here's a little snapshot of Alice at a whole one year old.  

She started taking a few steps at around 10 months, but she's really gotten it nailed down in the last couple weeks.  Everything lower than 3 feet off the ground is at her mercy.  I caught her clinging to the kitchen table top with her little fingers and swinging back and forth this week.  So there's that.  

She is pretty proud of her ability to click pens and will stop at nothing to snatch a stray and trot away with it.  Whatever lucky babe gets her handmedowns will have more than a few shirts with mysterious pen scribbles on the belly.  

Her favorite foods are peas, bananas, avocados and raw(!!!) rhubarb.  Actually, she just really loves food.  Her word for "food" is "NOMNOMNOM"  and it's obnoxious but hilarious.  No idea where she learned that.  

She can wake up sooo crabby, but as soon as I take her outside:  peace.  She inspects rocks and tries very hard to catch ants with her little pointer finger.  She would never come inside if it were up to her.  

 This kid has not met an animal yet that didn't make her squeal with joy.  I'm not sure what it is, but she loves them.  Roger is still not sure how to respond to his adoring fan club of one.

There are plenty of not-cute instances like when I busted her for playing in dog puke (gag. omg gag.) and the diaper bombs and the teething.  Or the late late nights that turned into mornings, and we all gave up on sleeping, drank a pot of coffee, and got on with it.  

There's plenty to shudder about thinking back on the first year, but it all is completely eclipsed by all of the millions of perfect moments. Her little arms when they reach up for me and her toothy smiles make it all so worth it.   

 

(Okay, Jen, let's wrap up this sappy sappiness.)  

We love you, sweetheart.  Thank you for making me a better person by pushing every last one of my limits and making me laugh out loud everyday.  I can't wait to learn more about you in the years to come.  

Baby Boy You Stay On My Mind

If you can't say it with Beyonce...

Perhaps someday this blog will not be a mash up of unrelated events.  But today is not that day.

Let's get this party started with just one more discovery we've made since having Alice:

All boy babies are boys, and all girl babies...they're also boys.  At least to 99.9% of people we meet, that's the case.  To be fair, Luke is a hater of most everything pink and is too practical to spend our money on baby clothes that couldn't be worn by potential future baby boys.  That and we've made an agreement to do our best to not raise a Malibu Barbie, so Alice's attire is usually a combination of a mini-farmer and an auto mechanic.  

But really.

Would you look at those flowing locks and high cheek bones?  C'mon people.

I'm done hemming and hawing and have officially bit the bullet (or should I say...bit the Apple?), jumped on the bandwagon (or should I say...Apple wagon? No? Fine.) and ordered an iphone.  Yes, yes, welcome to this millenium Jen. Gone are the days of Target employees cheerily asking me if I'm using the Cartwheel app and having them apologize (why? ) when they spot my little chunk phone.  I am looking forward to having a smallerish camera when I'm on the go and I sure am ready to toss my antique gps to the curb, but I've dug in my heels until now mostly because I'm afraid of morphing into a smartphone monster that has to post a pic every time I visit Chipotle or will start scrolling when a conversation gets dull.  So here's my open invitation to slap the device out of my hand if I become my own pet peeve.  Please and thank you. BUT this is also a plead for help.  What apps can you not live without?  They must be 1. Free and 2. Free. You know what our interests are.  Bodybuilding apps need not apply.

Speaking of climbing on bandwagons, we've also just decided to do whole30 in January.  I'm not too worried about it because we've both done Paleo for a few weeks at a time in the past, but it's not easy.  My love/love relationship with mac&cheese and all things Culvers was maxed out during my last trimester, and it's finally time to pull in the reigns.  We're waiting until after the holidays because we're not that good, but I'm looking forward to cleaning up our act around here.

Alright, it's already taken me 3 days to get this out, and Alice just woke up from her big old 6 minute afternoon nap, so I'll wrap this up with a shot of the gang:

Happy Monday, y'all.

Just a year.

A few months before our wedding, my mom bought me this journal and said I would really appreciate my daily thoughts in the years to come. Yeahokaythanksmom.  Wrote in it a few times, neglected it for a while, blahblahblah, but then I finally got into a routine of writing in it every night before bed...and man, now it's hiLARIOUS.  And kinda eerie how those freak outs that I was SURE were going to be the end of me, well, we survived them and I had already forgotten about them until I was reminded by that silly little book.

So what was my one sentence from one year ago today? 

"I'm pregnant."

Yes, one year ago, I took not one, not two, but three pregnancy tests.  And cried and laughed and cried again, because there was no way a tiny human was growing inside my body.  We were living in a giant cloud of WTF and I was in a panic of how a little Lee would fit into our circus of doctor appointments and job-hating.  

And yet, here we are one year later. 

 

More stylish

More educated

Better drivers

More cautious while playing in lightning storms (kidding)

More photogenic

And all around more loving people than ever before.

Onward and upward. 

;)

Parenting Experts

Hi, how are ya?  

Nothing incredibly exciting to report here (like never), but I'll toss some unrelated photographs and tidbits on this here blog for future little Lees to see that yes, we did have it all together when Alice was a baby.  Thank you very much. 

Let's start this party with an homage to our new favorite object:  this play mat.  It entertains both baby and Roger alike and is generally loved by all. 

(3 minute time lapse....)

Until it's not.  


Last weekend Luke and I had the privilege to be involved in the marriage of two of our very favorite people.  It was a beautiful day and all went well, with the small exception of my assumption that a very full, newly pumped bottle would hang out just fine in my bag of clothes (except for the dress!!! Thank you wedding gods!!) and definitely not completely empty onto everything.  Laughlaughlaugh.  Jen made a hasty decision between between risking smelling like milk all the day long or rinsing out her pre-pregnancy sized faux Spanx, whipping them around the bathroom to dry them off, and sliding into those sweaty-feeling undergarments.  She went for the not-milky look.  Tell no one.  

Oh, just a glamour shot of a drooly angry baby.

We took Alice and our nephews to the park last week, and I was feeling wild and asked Luke to take a picture of us tan and photogenic lovelies.  Never again.  I believe Luke's response to my asking how the pictures turned out was "Well, your eyes look like black holes."

More drool. More photogenics.

We've fallen back into the black hole that is NEEDING coffee in the morning.  All 3 of us.  Everyday. Forever.

And here we have an adequately caffeinated (kidding, not at all caffeinated. put away your citations, breastfeeding police) Alice mischievously slithering out of the shot.  

That little rascal.  

The end. 

Happy weekend! 

Hello Alice

Yep, we had that baby.

Want to hear the nitty gritty details?  Of course you do.

First, take a look back at my last post.  Multiply the puff even more, and you've got one irritable beluga that was stopping at nothing to get that kid out.  After days of more tea chugging and stair climbing, I woke up on Sunday morning feeling things were finally starting to kick in.  We were giddy waiting for real contractions to pull themselves together (fools, silly fools) and spent the day trotting around the house cleaning and packing.

Evening rolled in and I was starting to wring my puffy hands and wonder if maybe I was wrong, and this baby would continue headbutting my bladder for another 10 months, so Luke suggested a car ride.  I grabbed Luke's 1998 Power Rangers beach towel to throw on the car seat in case my water broke, and we headed out for the worst roads.  Luke put on a brave face about his towel's perilous situation.

Well, what do you know, the unamusement ride worked.  We went home and I let Luke go to bed for a few hours while I paced the living room in the dark.  Contractions finally felt like they had some sort of pattern, so I settled in to start a-timing. They were fairly far apart for about an hour, at which point I elbowed Luke awake because uncomfortable loves company.  I breathed through them and focused on relaxing - a little sucker confident that I would have that peaceful birth promised by all the magical books I inhaled during pregnancy.  I happily monitored the clock, determined to stay home for the prescribed 2 hours before dashing to the hospital.  But nope, we soon realized my contractions were lasting for about 2 minutes and were only a few minutes apart, which were accompanied by shaking uncontrollably.  We decided we needed to leave rightNOW and tossed our carefully packed bags in the Subaru.

By this point I was freaked out at how quickly everything was moving along, but I had the stupid hope that maybe this baby was just going to be here really soon?  Right?

Five minutes in the car and three contractions later, we were at the hospital.  The nurse noted my shaking and said "Oh, she must be in transition", checked how far dilated I was, and informed us that I was either completely dilated, or my cervix was tilted backwards and my body thought I was in transition, but really I was nowhere near done...it was the later.

Wait, what?

I declined an epidural (again, like a fool) and we enjoyed a grand twelve hours of what felt like one monster contraction.  No amount of Jacuzzi tubbing, birth ball rolling, or back rubbing helped. The sun came up, and I finally pant-begged our midwife to give me anything at all that would help.  I was 1000% sure I was going to die right there with my stage-frightened cervix as the worst laborer in history.  The absolute very worst.

I was given a shot that allowed me to finally lay down and even snooze for a few seconds between each contraction and forget the one before it, but without lessening the pain. Each time I popped my head up and asked Luke, "I thought this was supposed to make it feel better?"  and fell back asleep again.

Sleep finally became impossible again, and the midwife informed me that I was ready to push.  Oh and that there was a medical student that would like to watch the delivery, and was that okay?  After confirming that the student was neither male nor from Amery (good thinking, drugged brain), I gave not a single care, that poor girl came in to witness my theatrics, and we got down to business.  It wasn't peaceful, and it wasn't pretty, but our baby girl finally came out at  11:27 on Monday morning.  How those blissful, serene natural births are possible...I can't imagine.  Most of the ordeal is hazy now (thankfully), but I do recall quite nastily snapping at Luke "STOP SAYING PUSH. WHAT DO YOU THINK I'M DOING???" and...
Luke: "Oh, the baby has lots of hair!"
Jen: "Just get it out."
That guy deserves a medal. A big one.

Good lord.  Enough with the drama already, get on to the baby! Alice Elizabeth was a solid 8 lbs 12 oz and 21 inches long and screamed her hairy little head off for the first hour of her life.  I spent that hour staring at her in shock that after all this time, there really was this tiny human living in my body.  And it is strange how quickly after labor you don't care about the mini hell you just went through - seeing that little person instantly makes it completely worth it.  They're tricky, those babies.  I apologized to everyone in within ear shot (which should have been the entire building...possibly town) for being a monster and we settled in to cuddling and letting our families know that we were all very much alive and well.

Or maybe just alive.

As for the rest of the month...

This little lady met Roger, gained a pound, learned to smile and has settled into a routine of happy chirping at 4 in the a.m. each and every day.  

Any attempt at a public outing leaves me feeling like I have "New and Obviously Clueless Mother" stamped squarely on my forehead, but I love this new life and already wish she would stop growing so fast.   

Lessons learned?  I sincerely admire and idolize anyone who has given birth, dads deserve a lot more credit than they are given, drugs are super, and I can't wait to do this all again.  

Let's do this.

Welcome.

 To our 1970's time capsule - where these colors really do exist as upholstery options, but we're feeling just fine about them since they're
1. already here.
and 2. will fall prey to plenty of canine/baby shenanigans in the next year anyways.

Oh yeah, and I'm still pregnant. 

We celebrated our 2 year anniversary last week with a real fancy breakfast (eggs! scrambled!) and a quiet night at home. True to form, Luke was thrilled at the suggestion of a photo shoot to capture the day, and Roger paused from back flipping off the couch long enough to grace us with his presence. 

The line between "Oh, it'll be fun to finally see this baby." and "SweetJesusgetoutoutoutNOW!!" has officially been crossed, and I'm all over long walks and raspberry leaf tea and whining  pleading emphatically with this child to make an earthly debut sooner rather than later.  And yep, still a week until the "due date", but any other pregnant lady who has been doled out the cheery, "Oh, you'll just have to wait!  Just a few weeks longer at most!" at a puffy 39 weeks in the middle of summer...you know.  

It's a weird feeling hoping to jump into a ridiculously painful ordeal, but since we're heading that way anyways, I'd rather skip these days of fake labor with clenching and pinching that usually only makes me stop and blink a few times at the worst, but is annoying nonetheless. Please and thank you.  

Alright, alright, so pregnancy is not THE WORST THING EVER.  I already know this baby is going to be so worth all the swelling and cramping and crazy-ing.  I just need to let the minutes until we meet tick by peacefully without strangling anyone.

This past year has been more challenging than I could have guessed, and never would I ever have thought I would agree to moving back to Amery, but we're here and happy and almost a family!

Chin Up

I started this blog with the purpose of keeping some form of an archive of our lives...however mundane it is. Use that free will and judgement to click away just as fast as you can when this becomes too meep mop. ;)

 I'm spending the afternoon sifting through the boxes we shoved in a bedroom upstairs, deciding which half-read novels and sketchbooks from freshman year will make the cut joining us to our next home.  While I'm oh so excited to move out of this house with its gangs of mice and leaky windows, I can't help but fall into my usual moving process of:
1. Thinking I'm really motivated 3 months before moving day and plotting to toss or donate every last thing I don't NEED for survival.  Simple living! Easy moving!
2. Being stopped by Luke because, well, maybe we want that other toaster?
3. Getting overly emotional and sentimental about every last scrap of everything and pack nothing.
4. Cram it all into unmarked boxes 2 days before the lease is up. Slowly pick things out of the boxes for the next 10 months.

I'm rolling up on #3 right about now.  It's a problem, I know. BUT I have to say that this year is more than a little different than its predecessors.  I can tell my hesitation is coming more from an unwillingness to process anything beyond what we're dealing with already, so I'm going to go right ahead with a little blogging self-medication to get myself moving again.

There are a lot of things I remember my dad saying to us regularly while we were growing up.  The standard, "Keep your hands in your pockets." was threatened whenever the parents were feeling brave and allowed a walk through a cutesy gift/art shop together.  It mostly worked.

But the ones I've been thinking about lately are "Life isn't fair." and "It can always be worse."  Holy harsh, right?  I know I thought so, all those times I was SURE justice had not been served to my obviously much more naughty and less well-meaning brothers. (ha.)

At the time, these phrases were the equivalent of "Hey, tough shit." and a dismissal of my feelings.  I've been in a serious badittude lately, alternating mostly between barely-contained panic and frustration that God has obviously forgotten about us, but I think I'm finally starting to get it.

I mean, really, sometimes I just laugh and shake my head at how ridiculous everything has become so quickly.  Only a year and a half into marriage, my husband was diagnosed with a disease that has no cure and the doctors have no explanations for.  The symptoms are so horrific that no one likes to talk about them, so most people we try to half-explain it to think Luke has a bad stomach ache once in a while.  I guess the hands in the pockets trick has been useful recently - even the obviously misguided jokes bring on a murderous response in this little wifey.  We've managed to keep him upright by adopting a super strict diet, but our success is bittersweet, knowing it comes at the cost of travel, nights out with friends, nostalgic holiday treats and family gatherings.  Hand this to a guy who watches cooking shows every night, and the loss on his face is seriously heartbreaking.  Slap on a surprise (but very much wanted!) pregnancy, a move away from a town we adore, and a complete change in occupation for both of us from where our degrees would suggest, and you've got a situation that is sticky at best and suffocating at the worst.

Haven't clicked away to greener pastures yet?  But isn't this just the absolute worst situation a person has ever been in that you've ever ever heard of???

Nope. It's not. Not even a little bit close.

It absolutely can get worse, and my frustration that we don't "deserve" any of this is a joke.

I've been with one guy for over 8 years who I still think is the most patient, caring, smartest, hilarious and handsome man I've ever met.  And he likes me too, so that's pretty great.  One of the very few things I've been sure about my life is that I want to be a mom, and I'm lucky enough to have a healthy little baby squirming around in my belly right this minute.  No matter who this kid turns out to be, I'm already completely obsessed and in love, and I can't wait for June/July so I can finally give him or her a big kiss and cry big ugly happy tears all over everyone and everything.  So many couples try and try to conceive without success; I can never take my pregnancy (or the back pain. or the heartburn.) for granted.

And yeah, Luke's diagnosis has been really hard, but I've grown a ton from it, too.  When relatives used to talk about their ailments, I would nod and pretend I got it and was sympathetic.  I didn't.  I still don't, I'm sure, but now I know how maddening it is to go in for appointments multiple times a week, frantically try to get a hold of doctors to get a prescription refilled, and watch your loved one suffer.  I appreciate the new perspective, and I hope that someday it might help me to bring a little comfort to someone else.  And the diet?  Oh poor me, I have to eat responsibly raised meat and super nutrient rich vegetables whenever I'm with Luke.  My poor baby isn't getting the pizza and ice cream I would quite honestly give an arm to have, and I've been gaining just the right amount of weight so far for us both to be healthy.  We've had more than a few people scoff at us for being "hippies" for how we eat, but I don't even care anymore.  We're blessed to have the resources to find these great healing foods, and I'm not about to apologize for that.

I should credit my mother a bit in here too. Since I'm in the parent quote kick, her stand-out phrase would have to be something along the lines of, "Go get some old towels and a bowl of water!  I have a sick cat/dog/bird/bunny in the garage!"...But her mantra whenever I'd run to her with my rants and whines was, "God doesn't give us more than we can handle."  And it's true.  God hasn't forgotten us; He just knows we're strong enough to deal with this.

So that's what I know for now.  I'm sure I won't be sunshiny cheery from this moment on, but it's worth it to step away from the empty boxes and realize that it's not all so bad. Obviously.