May 16: When I drove up to the house at 7:45 last night, I expected to hear wailing as I walked in the house. Instead, there was a happy dad and boy and a sleeping girl. Bryan said that Sylvie took the bottle I left…guzzled it’s small contents and really wanted more. But other than a little unhappiness, she rested in the Baby Bjorn and then went to sleep.
And I had a lovely time getting my hair done. Having not been away from Sylvie for more than about 20 minutes has been just fine, but it felt so luxuriant and free to sit in a salon with my hair all foiled, reading a magazine and overhearing salon chatter.
Then after we put the kids to bed, Bryan and I sat and chatted for an hour or so. And unfortunately rare occurrence these days.
Andrew has just curled up next to me and said, “Hi Mommy Fox, I’m your yiddle cub all curled up in our cozy den together.” So cute! “Will you play with me, Mommy Fox?” I’m off to tickle my cub!
Serious lack of chocolate
May 15 (3pm): Sylvie has been asleep for about 20 minutes. And my core is re-centering. I do have one major problem, however. I need chocolate. Really, a lot, I do. I should have an emergency stash set up for just such occasions of half-day baby crying jags. On the other hand, I probably would have obsessively eaten it all before noon today. That’s actually why I do not have any chocolate on hand. My bags of chocolate chips were disappearing way too fast, so I decided I couldn’t be trusted with them any more.
I wish I had a root cellar or a trap door like you’d find in a 100-year-old house in New England. I would have a fireproof box full of dark, imported chocolate. I’d tiptoe down the the basement, move burlap sacks and shove aside an old trunk to open the trap door, and then, viola. Chocolate heaven.
OK that’s it. I’m making brownies.
Silence – OK, crying
May 15: I sat down to write that there was finally a still over the house. The echos of crying are flowing out the windows. But then I hear a familiar,”Wah, waaaah, hic hic hic hic whaaaa whaaaa…”
Sylvia has been crying since about 10 am. It’s now 2:21pm. That’s a long time. And she’s pretty inconsolable. Doesn’t matter if I hold her or bounce her or stand near white noise. She won’t nurse. She arches her back and wails. So around 1pm I gave her Tylanol. And about 20 minutes later she fell asleep. For 10 minutes at which point Andrew was yelling and woke her up.
I just gave her a massage, and she stopped crying while I was rubbing her. Then I covered her up and left, but she’s crying again. So I’ll try continuous massage to see if that keeps her happy. It would make me happy.
I have an appointment to get my hair cut and highlighted in two hours and thirty-seven minutes. It’ll be my first time away from the little girl. Keep Bryan in your thoughts. Something tells me that it won’t be an easy time.
OK, off to rescue her from herself. Poor sweet pea. I hope she’s not getting sick.
A handy girl – She’s 3 months old!
May 11: Today was Sylvia’s three-month birthday. Happy Birthday sweet girl! It’s hard to believe how strong and capable she is getting. In fact, tonight at dinner, she reached for a toy and pulled it off the table. In the last week, she’s been working hard to get her hands and her brain to work in sync. She’s getting better and better at moving her hands toward an object of interest…but it’s still pretty rudimentary. What an amazing thing to watch her little body develop! Once she figures out how to control her hands, watch out world!
She’s also seeming like she’s getting the hang of this life thing a lot more. She can anticipate things: for example, walking into her room sometimes results in her crying because she thinks we might be trying to lay her down in her crib (she’s probably right). Also, saying something soothing while walking into the room where she is crying in her crib can quiet her because she’s getting where she can anticipate that she may get picked up soon.
She doesn’t mind being dressed and undressed nearly as much as she did a couple months ago. And she’s now strong enough to stand in her little saucer for quite some time. What an amazing baby! She’s been hard at work, learning how to operate in this big world.
The other night, she slept for six hours. A miracle. She normally wakes up after about three hours, and Bryan apparently went in at that point and soothed her and she slept for another three hours. That means I slept for six hours straight. Oh heaven.
She’s laughing more and more, and her dimples are so cute I constantly want to eat them. She hates her car seat as if it is a torture device, and she also thinks strollers are evil. Being held is just the way to go:) Thank heavens for slings and carriers!
She loves looking up at mobiles, and she loves kicking at chimes. When you blow on her face, she smiles. Every time I change her diaper, I kiss both her knees and her tummy and tell her they are kisses from her grandma. She blows lots of drooly bubbles from her sweet tiny lips. And she still gets the hiccups pretty regularly. She doesn’t seem to mind them.
Her face lights up when her big brother walks up to her, and she’s already a pretty tough cookie to be able to withstand his loving ministrations. What an amazing three-month-old! I want to slow her down and speed her up all at the same time. I feel very, very lucky to be her mama.
Kitties turn eight
May 11: As a general notice, our cats turn eight years-old this month. I decided long ago that their birthday would be May 10. So we sang to them. And gave them some kibble. Happy birthday Bowser and Spooky! May you enjoy many more years of sleeping in the sunlight, curling up on us on chilly winter nights, and kneading my head until you draw blood (Bowser). You are now middle aged, rotundish felines. And we love you.
You can see early pictures of the kitties on our old website here.
First Mother’s Day without my mom
May 11: Days like today really make me address some of the sadness that I carry around now that Mom is gone. It’s almost like I’ve found ways to store some of the hurts – nicely folded and put in printed hat boxes on a shelf in my heart. Then a day like Mother’s Day comes along, and I need to open the boxes up and shake open the contents. I felt really sad this morning that Mom couldn’t see her grandkids. It’s a hurt I don’t think about all the time, but today it just felt newly sad and unfair and so so hard that my mom of all people doesn’t get to enjoy her grandchildren. She would so love Andrew. And she’s stroke Sylvie’s soft, firm cheeks, and her heart would be so happy.
So I’d just like to put out there again for the record that this all is just very unfair and not fun at all.
Growing up, Mom had us believe that Mother’s Day was about grandmothers. When we were young, I don’t think we did much for our mom on Mother’s Day. It was all a part of Mom not asking for acknowledgment for herself. So I feel like she really, really deserved to get some payback for all her hard work in the upcoming years as she watched her kids flourish.
I think the things that make me the most sad about Mom not being her are
- having her miss out on my kids – and on other potential grandkids in the future
- having her miss Maretta’s wedding and watching her and Kyle start their life together
- her not getting to finish raising Joe and (to a slightly lesser extent) Maretta
Yup. Those are the points that are really hard for me to accept. There are all sorts of reasons why I miss her and why I want her back for me, but those are the reasons that I want her back for her.
Bryan and I took the kids out to the cemetery today. It was my first visit there since the burial. Dad had been by earlier with some daisies. On the way there, I told Andrew where we were going.
Me: “We’re going to the cemetery where we buried Grandma in the ground after she died. It’s a pretty place, and we wanted to go there to tell her we love her.”
Andrew: pause
Me: “How does that make you feel?”
Andrew: “A yiddle bit sad… They buried grandma in the ground?? I miss my mommy.”
So we talked about it a little more…I mention that I miss my mom enough that I really think Andrew has a pretty good handle on what is going on. And we went to the Windsor cemetery and stood near the bare earth on her grave site. It is a nice place. Mom talked about it in terms of being planted. She’s planted in a nice place. And we’re going to plant some trees for her. I think a scarlet oak and a non-fruiting flowering crab apple.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. We wish you were here.
Happy Mother’s Day!
May 11: I just wanted to send a quick hello to all my mom friends out there. Dad came over for lunch, and we toasted all the mothers who got us to where we are today. Andrew and I made a yummy berry coffee cake for breakfast this morning, and I think we’re going to head over to Olbrich this afternoon. I just uploaded a week’s worth of pictures (boy, are those kids cute!). They can be found in the gallery.
Poem recitation
Yesterday at breakfast, Andrew shocked me by reciting one of Shel Silverstein’s poems from start to finish. Then he did it again so I could video it…a small miracle! This is one cute kid:)
Joey Joey took a stone
And knocked
Down
The
Sun!
And Whoosh! It swizzled
Down so hard.
And bloomp! It bounced
In his backyard.
And glunk! It landed
On his toe!
And the world was dark,
And the corn wouldn’t grow!
And the wind wouldn’t blow!
And the cock wouldn’t crow!
And it always was Night,
Night,
Night.
All because
Of a stone
And Joe.
~Shel Silverstein
Thinking of Mom
May 4: While I was at Jack’s for the wildflower weekend, Sylvia and I stayed in the guest bedroom. It felt nice but kind of heavy to be sleeping in one of the rooms that Mom had so meticulously decorated. She spent many years helping Jack decorate his home, and almost every detail was shaped by her sense of style. Between seeing her imprint on the walls around me, thinking back on all the wonderful family vacations we took together at Jacks, and being close to the beautiful Wisconsin River, my mind filtered through thoughts of Mom all weekend. I think that if after she died, her spirit dissipated into a million million pieces that many of them might have found their way to the Lower Wisconsin River. I can imagine her energy flitting over the water like the swallows or living on in the powerful down strokes of a bald eagle as it launches into the sky.
Bergum Bottoms was always one of Mom’s favorite places, and walking down the beautiful road – eating lunch next to the River with the little girl she never met on my lap – made me want to appreciate it for her.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that I now appreciate life more since losing Mom, but I would say that I’ve become innately aware of the impermanence of life. That feeling you get on New Year’s Eve singing Auld Lang Syne has stuck with me. I often find myself looking around at the place I am occupying, the people I am with, the feeling I have in my heart because of their company, and I hold onto it a little more because I know it’s a moment in time and that we really can’t count on having things repeat again and again just as we would wish. I don’t think go around thinking that bad things will or might happen, I just try to make things count a bit more, pay a little more attention, and love a little harder.
Back in September, Joe wrote a post on his blog that has really stuck with me:
Given any moment, I have a set of conditions under which my brain operates. I assume that there is something beneath my feet, holding me up. I assume that there will continue to be oxygen in the air for me to
breathe after this breath. I assume the Earth isn’t going to spontaneously combust. I assume that I have a father, a mother, two sisters, and a brother. When I take time to stop and think about these conditions under which I am continually operating, I realize that they aren’t all true. I rediscover the flaw in the code of my brain and it feels like an entirely new wound.
For me, the conditions under which I operate feel a little less certain than they did years ago.
I assume that the next time I see you, dear reader, we will have as nice a time together as we did last time. But you never know. So I’ve been responding to the unknowable-ness of our future by hanging on to the relationships that I treasure just a bit more tightly.
Sometimes I think it’s nice to get out of my normal routine for even a couple days. It seems to allow my brain to do some meandering along less traveled paths.
New opportunities for art
May 4: April 30 was Bryan’s mom’s birthday, and to celebrate, we decided to pull up the art easel that they had gotten Andrew for Christmas. Andrew saw the box at Christmas time, but he’d forgotten all about it, so a few days ago, Michael put it together for him. Andrew has really been enjoying having open access to drawing supplies. The video below and some photos in the gallery show him having a fun time.