Note pregnancy ticker to right

We are talking less than 100 days here, people. I think the 3rd trimester begins this week. Scary.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I'm posting a lot today. It's feast or famine with the posting, I guess. Monday is my day off, and I have either bad allergies or a cold plus residual travel exhaustion, so I am sitting around all day.

I was going back through my email earlier today and came across this video sent by my cousin-in-law Suzi from San Fransisco. Suzi is a teacher-gardener and this video is about the community gardens she helps to run in San Fran. If you have a few minutes, you should watch it; it's EXCELLENT. The video, and a question from Liz about our composter and rain barrel, have inspired me to finally write a post about our garden, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

It all started with the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I bought the book in the Charlotte airport last June on the way home from Heather's graduation. It's about how a writer and her family move from the arid west to the Appalachian mountains to try to grow all of their own food for a year. Actually, they don't have to grow everything; they get some of it (sweeteners, flour, wine) locally. They define "locally" pretty strictly; I think it has to come from their own town. Each family member is allowed one sort of "free pass item" that they are allowed to buy from far away. (I think they choose coffee, spices, chocolate and dried fruit.) The book records the year as far as planting the garden, watching it grow, harvesting crops (and animals), and planning for the next year.

It's a fabulous book. It asks extremely important questions about our food. How many of us can say we know where our food comes from and how it was grown? Who planted and harvested it? How far did it travel to get to us? Who fed and raised our meat, and what were those animals fed? Kingsolver points out food facts that we may have forgotten or never known, such as when certain fruits and veggies are in season. For example, if you live in the Northern hemisphere and are eating asparagus in September or cherries in January, those items had to have come from very far away (or California, I guess). She talks about the problems all that traveling causes for food, not only environmentally in terms of the fuel for shipping it, but also in nutrient content and, most simply, taste.

The book made both Dean and I nearly desperate to start our own garden then and there. Both of us grew up around gardens. There's a reason so many of my poems contain garden imagery--helping someone in a garden was a regular part of my childhood. My great-grandmother, grandparents, aunts, uncles and parents all grew gardens. We picked beans, snapped them, and canned them. We washed silk off corn and cooked and froze it. My grandmother cut up a plate of cucumbers and tomatoes to go with almost every meal. People cooked corn, beans, squash, okra, and who knows what else in every imaginable way. No one visited anyone else or let any visitor leave without a bag of whatever produce was in season at the time. At the time, I took all this for granted, or disliked it. When I was young, I never was one to enjoy getting dirty and sweaty and itchy in a garden. But after I read Kingsolver's book, I was in despair about not having a garden. It seemed not only like I had lost a piece of who I was but that I was in real danger of forgetting or never knowing one of the most elemental pieces of knowledge possible: how to grow food to eat.

So we really wanted a garden, but we couldn't have one right then, because it was June and too late to start a garden. Also we had (have) a very, very small backyard. At the time it contained two large trees. We grumbled and worried and tried to be happy with the couple of cherry tomato plants we had grown on our porch.

From this point the story is really mostly Dean's. Fall came, and I put my garden wishes on the back burner while I taught and wrote and read poetry. But Dean kept thinking and reading, and talking to Luli a lot about gardening and what we might be able to do with our small space. With the permission of our landlord, he cut down the two trees in the yard (with a handsaw). By early winter, he'd read Grow Vegetables: Balconies, Roofs, Terraces and Square Foot Gardening. He'd used some Christmas gift money to buy a set of grow lights, seeds, and various books and garden tools. He'd read the farmer's almanac. He had a spreadsheet, a whole calendar filled in with garden tasks, and a plan.

Thus began my role as garden helper. (By the way, by this time I was busy with the primary role of baby grower.) Every weekend, even in the dead of winter, Dean had some garden tasks for us to complete. We planted seeds and put them under lights. We watered. Later we transplanted. We cleaned up in the yard. One weekend Jim and Luli came to help us build trellises and boxes for the square-foot boxes. (Well, okay, they helped Dean while I mostly laid on the couch.) In the early spring we planted, transplanted, and watered some more. Every morning at 5AM the lights in the next room would click on, and at 9PM they'd click off. (Yikes, and that memory reminds me of nausea.) And our garden grew and grew, even inside.

When it got warmer, we put plants outside for a few hours at a time so they could adjust to life away from their lights. We dealt with sunburned broccoli and wind-blown tomatoes. One by one it was time to put the plants outside (a part that always made me sad in a way that I think might be particular to mothers or parents). After some of the plants were finally in the ground, Dean devotedly ran outside in a hail storm to put sheets over the babies. (The storm stopped 3 minutes later.)

Since then, we've planted, weeded, clipped, staked and re-staked. We've coaxed baby peas up their trellises and been astounded by tomatillos that are taller than us. We've had a bumper crop of kale and mustard greens, but, sadly, no broccoli--it grew up strong but never flowered. Right now we are dealing with what we think is "early blight" and blossom-end rot on our tomato plants. Both are caused my excess moisture, and we have had a lot of rain. We have baby cucumbers and baby squash. The beans are flowering. Zinnias, marigolds, basil and dill are doing very well, and we have sunflowers coming soon. Yesterday we picked 5 beets (and today I am wondering what exactly to do with beets). The radishes that did quite well have gone to seed (we let them grow because their flowers are pretty).

I'm really amazed that we done so much with a garden in just a year. Like I said, most of the credit is Dean's, but we've both learned a lot. Obviously, we still but most of our food from other places. We try to buy what's in season from farmer's markets when we can (although my weird food issues have made that harder lately). It's been really nice to reclaim some of my heritage in the form of this tiny, wonderful city garden.

Cloudy With a Chance of Showers

The nameless wiggle baby was given not one but two baby showers last week. They were wonderful! Everyone was so kind and generous.

The first shower, last Thursday, was a family shower planned mostly by my aunt Carolyn. Thank you Carolyn! And thank you to the rest of my family too. It was a lovely shower, with great food and super cute decorations. Not to mention the super cute gifts. The baby now has more clothes than I do. The days of documenting each individual baby item are over, I guess, but everyone picked out great stuff, lots of precious dresses and gowns and skirts and t-shirts and onesies. One particularly scary onesie says "sleep is for the weak." Yikes!

It was great to be able to talk to my aunts and cousins about pregnancy and motherhood. Collectively they have a lot of advice to share. When the shower began, I was a little sad that my grandmother could not be there, but I tried to be happy to feel her presence in all of the other wonderful women I was with.

Then on Saturday, Meg and her mom threw us another shower in Chapel Hill. It too was beautiful. I got to see lots of friends and family, and again everyone was so generous. The baby received more lovely clothes, blankets, lots of practical items like baby wash and outlet plugs, and lots of fun things like books and toys and a rainforest play mat and a piggy bank. It took Dean and I many trips up the back stairs to unload everything yesterday. I had fun sitting down with Dean to show him everything. Right now the baby stuff is in bags or small piles in storage, but we think that next weekend we are going to start setting things up so that we don't have to avoid tripping over piles of baby items for the next 3 months. I will post pictures when things look a little better.

We are so grateful to have so many wonderful friends and family members. Thank you all for everything! And if all this weren't enough, we have another baby shower to look forward to soon--Luli and Corrie are giving us another shower in August!

Red Line

Several people wanted to know if I would have been on the Metro trains that crashed last week. I wouldn't, but I might have been waiting for one of them if it hadn't been my day off.

There was a nice tribute to the train operator in yesterday's Washington Post.

A page on the accident and Metro's handling of it also included this "local fact:"

"Although the Red Line crash has justifiably raised concerns about Metro's safety, driving is still a lot more dangerous. Metrorail has no fatalities from 1996 to last Monday. In the same period, more than 6,000 people died in road accidents in the Washington region."

This makes me feel better about getting back on the trains tomorrow, but I didn't especially find it comforting on our way up 95 yesterday afternoon.

Snuggle Cat

Several people have wondered how Suki will get along with the baby. As you can see by this picture, Suki likes her a lot already.

Suki's been sitting on my lap as I write. She is snuggling her head up to the baby and purring. The baby is kicking gently in reply. I think they will be close friends.

Poet Tree

Monday is fast becoming my favorite weekday because it is the weekday that I do not go to work. Since I am not teaching now my days off can truly be days off, not days that I plan lessons and grade. I am slowly regaining a weekday routine that involves writing. On Mondays I have the luxury (or torture, depending on how you look at it) of being able to sit at the computer for as long as I want.

Writing is going... okay. I have about three beginnings going and I realized today that one of them is probably going to go somewhere; the other two, probably not. This is par for the course of writing poetry, which I realize when I go back through my old files. I have many more stalled poems than finished ones. It's sad because of course I think all my ideas are fabulous when I start them. (Otherwise how would I have the energy to get them going?) Sometimes I go back and mess with old beginnings to see what will happen. Every now and then I am able to use something old in a new way, but a lot of the old stuff is just bad. In a way realizing this is freeing. It makes it less scary to write new bad stuff.

Today I went on a field trip to the library to look for the next book Liz and I are going to read in our online book club. (It's currently a small, two-member club, but watch your mailbox--you might get an invitation to join soon.) Liz is very inspirational to me because she is a mother and a teacher and a teacher and she apparently reads about 17 books a week. Our first book was As I Lay Dying. For the second we thought we'd do something lighter: I was looking for Confessions of a Shopaholic. It should be an easy book to find, and the library's online catalogue said that it had 3 copies. I went and could not find a single one.

So I wandered through the library, one of my all-time favorite activities. I love libraries. The downtown DC public library is three floors, a variety of rooms filled with oddly-organized collections of books and an interesting collection of people as well: secretaries on lunch breaks, kids, the homeless. It's a busy, bustling library. It smells like mildew, air conditioning, unwashed skin, and paper, but oddly, the scent seems to fit and does not disgust me, even in my pregnant state.

What's great about the library is that it just has so many books! Of course that seems obvious, but I really like just wandering through the stacks and seeing what I come across. Today I looked in the poetry section and found a sweet little book of poetry by Ted Kooser called Valentines. One year, Kooser wrote a valentine poem and sent it to a woman he knew; each year after that he wrote another and sent it out to more and more women, until he was sending it to thousands of women and it got too expensive to mail them all so he quit. The last one was just given to a single woman, his wife (who, according to the note at the beginning of the book, "didn't seem to mind" that he was sending his valentine poems to so many other women, including his friends' wives, for years). Describing the book makes it seem creepy, but really it's a nice book. The poems are not really love poems but are fitting for Valentines Day. Reading it gave me some ideas for a new poem (which is going to be GREAT, of course).

Then I looked in the cookbook section. I wanted to find very old cookbook to help with another idea for a poem that I have. I didn't really find what I was looking for, but it was fun just to browse. There are so many interesting books in the world. I came across The Food Lover's Book of Days. What a great idea for a book. (Hmm.. or a poem...)

It's a relief just to have more ideas. All spring, I had only two ideas and wrote one poem. I think that tomorrow I am going to go to the Library of Congress Folklife Collection and see what I can find in the way of old cookbooks.

The Wiggle Baby Update

Dean felt the baby move last night! We had just eaten and I felt a few strong kicks, so I got Dean to put his hand on my belly, and she did it a few more times!

And now this morning while I have been writing, she is apparently in there taking karate lessons. Just when I said she wasn't a kicker, she is (to put it as my grandmother would say it) kicking up a storm.

New Haircut

and bigger baby.

Namaste, Junky's Wife

A long time ago, when "Question Air" was a blog title that actually made sense for this blog, I had a blog role model, my friend JW. Her site and encouragement (and maybe a little bossing) are what caused me to start MY very own blog. Catching up on blog reading today, I saw that she has decided to end her blog. She's still blogging on The Second Road--you can see that I have updated my links.

You can read a lovely tribute to JW from MPJ of A Room of Mama's Own here. I stole this post title from it, actually. Well said, MPJ.

I wanted to chime in my own farewell to The Junky's Wife. I have been awed and inspired by JW's journey. She is one of the very best writers I know. The blog was funny, clever, insightful, honest and beautifully written. Thanks, JW, for showing me that blogs could be meaningful, a "real" place to write.

The Wiggle Baby

The Mystery Baby of several weeks ago is now The Wiggle Baby. I'm feeling her move a lot these days. It's fun, although it can be distracting if I am supposed to be paying attention to something else.

She has a lot of fun in there. I've started to notice a variety of movement types. Here's a list of her common moves:

The Wiggle: This one is most common, hence the baby's current name. It's a quick little wiggle.

The Kick: Not very common, contrary to popular belief. I've felt very few kicks. I'm told this will change. When she DOES kick, it's an obvious kick. Strong.

The Wave: This is a fairly new one. It's a slow, delicate wiggle, a wiggle in slow motion.

The Ice Queen: This was a new one last night. It was like the inside of my uterus was an ice rink, and she was sliding around on it. It tickled.

The Prolonged Poke: She pushes her foot or hand or something onto one spot and leaves it there. This is an odd feeling; it almost hurts. It makes me want to press back (I usually do, and then it goes away).


"Stay in there, baby!": This is the most alarming and unexpected of movements. It's any of the above movements felt in a spot that is difficult to describe--I guess it's just above the cervix. I've written about it before--it feels like where the baby will eventually begin to make her exit.

All of this is very interesting. When you've never been pregnant, if you've ever felt a baby move it was by putting your hand on a mother's belly and getting a kick. When the dance party is happening inside you, it's very different. It's very 3-D.