House Tour: Dining Room

The living room opens into the dining room, which doubles as my writing studio. This giant table is an excellent place to spread out, say, 48 pages of poetry and try to put it in some sort of order. And to write.





Behind the table is the desk. Note the pale green wall my dad repainted (the previous owners took their shelves and left the wall with the old paint torn off where the shelves had been). It is the only green wall in the house. It is my favorite wall.



This is Amelia's elephant, who currently lives in the corner of the dining room. I got the elephant at Goodwill (which is 2 blocks from our house) for her to practice standing on. We are used to it now but when I first got it, it kept scaring me and Dean. It sort of lurks, looking like a large, unfamiliar dog.

House Tour: Living Room

We love the living room. It is the prettiest room in the house, with shiny wood floors and this gorgeous built-in bookshelf (original to the house, which was built in 1895). We no longer have a TV in our house due to the living room's beauty. A TV just did not fit in, so ours in sitting in the garage. We've canceled our cable. (Instead we have been watching reruns of Arrested Development on hulu.)





The rocking chair was Dean's great-grandmother's. We just bought the coffee table from an antique furniture store in our neighborhood. And the couch is from Ikea.

House Tour: Front Porch

I am doing some cleaning today and my plan to to take pictures of each room as it is cleaned, then to post the pictures on the blog for a house tour. Here is the front porch! It didn't really require much cleaning, but it did get a makeover from Luli and Linda a couple of weeks ago. And a fabulous new welcome mat as a gift from my friend Laura.




The house, like most in this neighborhood, is very colorful.



I love having a place for hanging baskets. And to sit and watch thunderstorms (if it ever rains here again).

!!!

I just submitted my manuscript to the first book contest! I spent most of my writing time in July finishing a set of poems (the "4 and 40 Blackbirds that were inspired by Carline's 40 Forts), revising older poems, and arranging the whole mess into a collection. Now the waiting. I have big plans for relaxing all through August.

Creepy Crawly

This video captures Amelia's early crawl, which involves dragging one leg. It also features her "Vogue" smile (as she realizes that she is being recorded) and her "this is very serious" expression (caused by a sudden and intense desire to pick up something that is stuck to the floor).

The video is from Monday. The crawling is progressing! Our happy sitting Buddah days are numbered...

For the Record

Friday night: 2x crying out, 1x crying and calling for 30+minutes (3:30am, 1 feeding)

Saturday night: 2x crying and calling for 30+ minutes (11:00 and 3:30, 2 feedings)

Sunday night: 0x crying or calling! Amelia slept from about 7pm-5:30 am. !!! (0 feedings! And I slept well too!)

Monday night: TBA...

Permutations

These are some of Amelia's nicknames:

Little A
Baby A
Amelia the Baby
The Honey
Honey Bunny
Amelia Brown *(**)
Amelia B
Amelia Bee
Honey Bee
Honey McBunny
Honey McB
Honey McBee

*after both of her grandmothers' maiden names

(**no, we are pretty sure that Dean and I are not cousins)

Things change. Can you?

"The good news is things change. Babies grow out of everything. The bad news is things change. Can you?"

--Karen Maezen Miller, Momma Zen

Amelia went to see her new Denver pediatrician yesterday. She is a kind, grandmotherly woman with a reassuring air of care and confidence. Amelia is doing well. She weighs 20 pounds and 11 ounces (which is at the 50th percentile for weight) and is 29 and 3/4 inches long (95th percentile for height!). She is on track developmentally, and she was quite charming during her appointment, ripping up the paper on the examining table and babbling at the doctor.

Toward the end of the visit, the doctor asked me if Amelia slept through the night. "No," I replied.

You might have noticed that I stopped writing about Amelia's sleep. (It gets tedious.) Since we got settled after the move, her sleep hasn't been terrible. She has been waking once or twice a night, and a couple of times in the last 10 days she has slept through the night till 3 or 4 am.

But I never sleep as well as Amelia does. I have a track record of sleeping horribly on the very nights she sleeps great. In fact, the first night she slept for a 6-hour stretch, I was up at midnight with horrible stomach pains. We almost went to the emergency room. On the nights when Amelia sleeps well, I still wake up every 2-3 hours. I don't know if I am just used to waking up, or if I sleep lightly because I am listening for her, or what. The point is that I am still tired. Sometimes very tired. When you NEVER sleep for more than 3 or 4 hours straight, it wears you down.

I've been feeling okay, though. The pressure of having to teach is gone, which helps a lot. Amelia is a lot of fun during the day, which also helps. And there is another passage from Momma Zen that has helped me, too:

Fatigue is a gift. Like many of the gifts that come to mothers, it is not one you would choose, like a spa vacation, but one you can use, like a humidifier. It is a cure and a balm. When you are tired, you let go. You drop what you do no longer need and you do pick it up again. You slow down. You grow quiet. You take comfort. You appreciate the smallest things. You stop fighting.

It was rather a revolutionary idea for me that tiredness could be a balm. But it can. I tried it. It works. Just accepting the fact that I was tired, that I was not going to sleep for 12 or 10 or 8 hours straight (or 6 or probably even 4), made me realize that neither was I totally DEAD tired. I am no longer so exhausted that I can't have fun playing with Amelia, or write for an hour or two in the morning, or linger over dinner talking to Dean, or any number of other things that for months, it seems, in the back of my mind I have constantly been thinking "I am too tired to do this. I can not go on."

So the point is we have pretty much been merrily rolling along. But when the doctor then said, "You should think about night weaning. The milk at night is not so good for the baby's teeth," I felt a swell of excitement and relief rise from my belly to my chest to my brain.

Here was an out. A medically-endorsed reason to stop the once or twice a night, 10-minute interruption to my sweet dreams.

And then there is the whole thing about letting the baby learn to go back to sleep on her own. So I took it. Last night, the plan was to let Amelia learn to go back to sleep on her own. As we were going to bed, I got all panicky about letting her cry, but the plan was for one of us to check on her, and I was free to impose a 10 or 20 or whatever seemed appropriate time limit on the crying.

At 11:30, she cried out. I was wrenched from a deep and dreamless sleep. I sighed and turned over. I looked at the clock. She cried out again. I planned to go to her in 10 minutes. But in about 20 minutes, I realized I was dozing--in silence. She had gone back to sleep almost right away.

At 12:30, she cried out once and went back to sleep.

At 1:20, I woke up. I had to pee. (That's another thing I am battling--a body that still hasn't broken the pregnancy habit of peeing every 2 hours.) When I got back in bed, I was wide awake. I think I was partly just expecting Amelia to wake up soon, but something else was bothering me. I finally realized what it was:

I missed her.

I missed baby Amelia in the darkness of the wee hours, the one who quiets as soon as I pick her up, curls her body around mine in the glider, and nurses herself back to sleep.

Talk about ironic.

Baby Amelia is waking up from her nap, so I will finish quickly. The end of the story (up to this point) is that I was wide awake from that moment until 3:30 am. Amelia woke at 3:00 and was awake for over half an hour, fussing, babbling, then crying, so finally I went to her. We will try again tonight. But what popped into my head as I ealized I missed her, and also that she really does not need me to go to her, was the quotation I started with: Things change. Can you?

James Peak

We went hiking again on Saturday. It was Amelia's third hike and her first attempt at climbing a 13,000+ ft. mountain. (And mine.)

The hike was only about an hour's drive from Denver. We left at about 7 am and stopped on the way for breakfast burritos. Dean was proud to dive the car with CO plates. Amelia slept in her carseat on the way up.

After a relatively short hike up a wide and rocky path, we arrived at the St. Mary's Glacier, which rises up from a pretty little lake.




The glacier looks like a small pile of snow in this picture, but it was huge. The novelty of climbing a glacier quickly wore off, for me at least. Dean and Amelia got pretty far ahead of me and I began to harbor deep feelings of hate toward the glacier. It seemed neverending. I kept thinking I was near the top and then I would arrive there and see more glacier. Plus with every step my feet sort of slid backwards in the slush.

Finally I got to the actual top.



Then the hike leveled out to a pleasant (i.e. flat) alpine meadow, dotted with wildflowers.





We had lunch after about an hour of the meadow hiking. There were amazing views of mountains and lakes.




Then we had another ascent. After about 20 minutes of climbing I was feeling grouchy and dizzy. I guess it was a bit of altitude sickness. Amelia, who generally seems to love being in her backpack, was whining. I decided we both needed a break. We had a second picnic while Dean took on the actual summit. We stopped at a flatish area at the bottom of a fairly steep climb. We played there for about 45 minutes while Dean climbed. Almost everyone who came along looked dismayed at the climb in front of them, which made me feel better about stopping.

Dean got some good pictures of "Ice Lake" from higher up.



It's a beautiful lake, very well-named. It looks like an enchanted place, blue and cold and remote.

When Dean came back, we took some more pictures and began to pack up. Another hiker offered to take a family photo.



This marmot became very interested in our activities. We later found out it was because we were close to one of his (her?) burrow entrances. (I looked up "marmot" in my computer's dictionary because I was misspelling it. Here's the definition: a heavily built, gregarious, burrowing rodent of both Eurasia and North America, typically living in mountainous county. Gregarious indeed.)



After we shooed away the marmot, we Dean packed up Amelia, who was happy to get back on the trail.



The hike back down was much easier. Descending the glacier was still kind of tedious (and a bit treacherous due to all the sledders and snowboarders who had arrived to play in the snow in July). But we made it back to the car in good shape (well, if you don't count sunburn and blisters...). It was a beautiful hike and a great day in the mountains.

What's Amelia doing?

That's the question I often find myself asking Amelia, and then answering it for her. I guess this is how babies learn to talk. I also ask her "Where's Amelia going?" when I put her into the stroller or in the car seat, as a way of distracting her. She generally doesn't like to be put into things.

Anyway, I thought Amelia's fans might like to know what she's been up to these days. She is currently taking a late and, I hope, long nap after an exciting trip to the DMV. We have already taken two trips to the emissions testing station (the second not because we failed the test but because we had to get the "VIN" verified, something I didn't know and thus didn't have enough money to pay for the first time). She did well on all three trips, demonstrating yet again both her portability and her agreeableness. She actually seems to have a good time on these errands, because there are a lot of other people around with little to do except watch her play and coo and drool and smile and attempt to crawl, and Amelia loves an audience.

It's kind of astounding to both Dean and me how social Amelia is. When you point a camera at her, she gets all Vogue and drops her chin and smiles prettily. When she sees strangers, she stares at them till they look at her, then starts to flirt. If someone does not pay attention to her she is confused and slightly upset. She is a social bee. She did not get this from me or from Dean.

Here she is posing with some trail mix.



The nap turned out to be very short so I will give a summary of a few more Amelia facts. Her top front teeth are S-L-O-W-L-Y coming in. She is not crawling but has pulled herself up to a standing position by gripping a chair or something similar (such as the large stuffed elephant I bought at Goodwill for $5) several times. She very much likes to play with balls. She squeals and kicks her legs when you roll one to her. I think she understands "Hi!" and "Bye!" and waving to signal these things. She has been pitching huge crying fits at bathtime recently; we think it is because she is so tired by bathtime that she just can't go on. But she has been going to sleep at 6:30 and waking up at 5:15. (At 5:15, I shut her door, and we sort of ignore her cooing till it turns to a loud fuss around 5:45.) She will still spend a relatively long time pulling toys and items out of baskets, which is what she is doing now.

And yawning. Because of the short nap.

Words on Words

As usual, I have been doing more writing in my head than on paper or a screen. My friend Corrie just had a baby, and I have been composing an elaborate "Letter to a New Mother" during the hours of 3 and 4 am, which is when Amelia now enjoys talking and singing to herself. I finished--or came to a stopping point on-- a long poem last week, and I am kind of stalled on poetry. (I reread the long poem this morning and was much less enthralled by it than I was last week.) I have been playing around with a series of essays on the first year of motherhood, but I tend to forget what it was I wanted to say. Par for the course, I guess. I also think that I am having trouble re-entering the space of very early motherhood, which is what most of the essays so far are about, as well as when I started some of the essays (noting that by "started" I mean I wrote about 6 words). Very early motherhood was a scary space for me, a fact that I think was at once both obvious all along and one I am just realizing). However, I have been working somewhat steadily, if also somewhat slowly, since we got here, so I have hope for a productive year.

As I have been writing this post I have also been opening news tabs and reading other blogs. I really enjoy my (recently updated) blog list even though there is really no cohesion to it whatsoever. Or maybe because there is no cohesion. I only know about half of the authors whose blogs I read. Some of the authors are pretty different from me. Most but not all are moms. I think what draws me to blogs is the personal aspect. I was the kind of child who would read someone else's diary. I really would. I didn't do it to be mean; I just (1) loved to read and (2) loved to know what other people thought, as well as how they worded what they thought. Only as a near adult--when I had a college roommate who was also my best friend--did my desire not to invade other people's privacy outweigh my overwhelming desire to know about them through their own firsthand accounts. (Meg, I never read your diary, if you had one. I promise.) Anyway, blogs are great because they are about life AND they are public! Perfect. (And speaking of blogs, Debra has some news, and Liz just announced hers, and here is a brand new blog by a very beautiful writer (by which I mean the writing is beautiful, as well as the author herself).)

I realized (while cleaning the bathroom sink, incidentally) that all of the blogs I read are by women. I was imagining some poor English grad student's dissertation 100 years in the future: "21st Century Women's Blogs (Insert Colon and Clever yet Insightful Play on Words Here)" . I was thinking about blogs, specifically "mom blogs", as "women's writing," whatever that is, and I guess about the intersections between the domestic, personal, and larger or more political or worldly spheres. In other words, how I write about Amelia a lot but also about writing. (Or used to.) And what it means. I came to no conclusions. I think MPJ wrote about this sort of thing much better than I am a few weeks ago. Yes, here.

I guess I am thinking all this (whatever "this" is) because, in the back of my mind, while, for example, my body is at Book Babies and my hands are helping Amelia stand, and my voice is singing "One, two, three four five, once I caught a fish alive," I am wondering just what it is I am doing here. In Denver. With, you know, my life. In the distant, pre-Amelia past, when I would think about having babies, I didn't exactly have a clear idea of what motherhood would be like. And truthfully, much of the time it is great. And when I hear that little whisper asking just what it is I am doing here, part of me has a quick answer: I am raising Amelia.

But--and should I mention I just reread The Awakening?-- but. A part of me misses being well-rested, having a place to be at a certain time, participating in a larger world of work and school (which has pretty much always been the same place for me, unless you count those summers I gardened or temped at the law firm ("Keller and Heckman, this is Pam.") I don't want to go back to any of the things I used to do, but I can't exactly see just where I am going with anything besides motherhood.

Still, if there is one thing motherhood has taught me, it's that there is no point over-speculating about the future. The path will appear when I round the bend. AND--here's where it all ties together--sometimes the blogs I read help me feel that path developing. Like when I read about Caroline's VBS projects or Liz's plans to have another baby AND get a PhD. I think, Oh, so this is how you do it. This is how you keep going, how you can be a mom (a role that, in an interview I was reading, Sarah McLachlan described perfectly as "unrelenting") and yourself. Not your old self exactly, but yourself nonetheless.

(I just realized I kind of answered the questions posed in Motherlode linked in MPJ's post. I feel unoriginal. But I really didn't reread her post till just now, after I drafted all this. And I promise I can't remember ANYTHING from May.)

Anyway--in conclusion--The Awakening was beautiful. I read it accidentally. I try to read during Amelia's afternoon nap and for poetry I am reading Lorine Niedecker, so for prose I thought I would read Virgina Woolf (whom the Neidecker introduction says she read a lot). But instead I picked up Chopin. She was definitely a Romantic. The book does make painfully obvious First Wave Feminism's focus on a particular class and race of women (white, wealthy ones). But I love the book's ending:

She looked into the distance, ad the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.

Nine Months Old

to the day.