June

On New Year's Day, I took a yoga/art workshop dedicated to setting intentions for the new year. After a yoga flow session, students made collages that depicted goals or hopes for 2011.

Each participant was given a square of poster paper. There were plenty of magazines, markers, crayons, pastels, glue, glitter, feathers, old calendars, postcards, and who knows what else to go around. The room had the feel of an elementary school art classroom, happy with chatter and creation. I, however, had a hard time getting started.

For one thing, I went through a collage phase in college (ha! no near pun intended) and I wasn't in the mood to cut and paste. I had, though, come to the workshop with some vague intentions in mind, as well as a deep belief in the power of setting intentions. In 2009, I went to a similar New Year's Day workshop in DC. In that one, we wrote letters to ourselves, to be mailed to us by the instructor in 6 months, that described our lives 6 months later. The idea was to describe in present tense the life that you wanted to be living 6 months later. That year, Dean and I had just decided to have a baby and I was sending off poems to journals, but so far had only received rejections. In my letter to myself, I was pregnant and holding the journal that held my first published poem. When I found the letter in my mailbox in late June, I was 5 months pregnant. The journal that contained my first published poem was on my bookshelf, within easy reach.

Because of one of 2009's attained set intentions--guess which one--I couldn't make it to a New Year's Day workshop in 2010. But I did in 2011, and I knew I wanted a year of change. First and foremost, I wanted more sleep. I wanted more time for yoga, more time for writing, and more time for myself in general. I knew I was going to wean sometime in 2011, and I knew I was going to think about looking for work in the fall. In general, I was hoping that 2011 would be a year of finding footing in the world of motherhood, of making room in my life for the things that had defined me before Amelia came along and became the center of my universe.

In the weeks before the 2011 workshop, I had been writing a prose poem about Amelia's birth. Some lines from the poem were floating through my head. I decided to write/rewrite the poem on my poster paper. First I cut into into a more oval shape. Think O'Keefe flowers--I was writing about birth here. And then I wrote the poem in the same oval shape. On top of it all, I wrote the a word in large block letters. I colored in some of the letters and pasted paper over others. The word was EVOLVE.

June is a rich month, sun and flowers and early summer harvest. It is the month I was married. It is the sixth month of the year, a halfway point, the perfect time to pause and consider or reconsider intentions for the year.

My plan for June is to write one blog post a day. I don't have any particular theme in mind for the posts--I won't always be writing about setting intentions, although this did seem like a good place to start--it's just that I have finished up some fairly major projects in May, not least of which was finishing my poetry manuscript and sending it off to several contests, and I would like to get back to the blog for awhile.

I have some other goals in mind too. In June, I want to

1. Drink more water. I realized I go through the day feeling thirsty a lot. (A note to Mom: I don't think it's diabetes.) I think I'm just thirsty. Denver is dry and I am busy.

2. Read more. My plan for Amelia's naptimes in June are to write on the blog and then read. I want to read both poetry and fiction. I started a Goodreads account a couple of years ago I would like to get back to too.

3. And with #2 in mind, I am setting a cleaning limit for myself in June. I have been feeling like I fritter away too much time straightening the house. It becomes a creative block, almost, a way for me to avoid sitting down to write. So in June, I am allowed to straighten up after breakfast and to do whatever chores seem most urgent for 10 minutes, and only 10 minutes, after Amelia goes down for her nap. I am going to set the timer. If Amelia happens to be entertaining herself throughout the day, I can do small things then too, but that's pretty hit or miss.

And forth, I would like to exercise more. I have been going to yoga much more often and even running, although that's more sporadic. In June I am going to try to do one or the other every day.

It will be interesting to see how this goes, since I often don't feel like writing until everything is neat. And the truth is I really hate running. On top of all that, we are spending most of June 1st on a plane. So we'll see.

In the manuscript class I just finished, the instructor talked a lot about closure, about the importance of finishing a project, even if it wasn't as perfect as you'd hoped. The great thing about letting something go, he said, is that you get to see what you're going to do next. The month of May was for me a definite time of closure--I sent the manuscript off, I weaned Amelia--so I feel that this summer is a kind of beginning. All this reminds of some lines from a poem by T.S. Eliot:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Beginning or end, I am excited to see what happens next.

Hurricane

It has been quite a morning. Amelia woke up too early and has been a grouch. Plus she has played with Crispix, Play Dough, all of her toys, and helped me unpack groceries, an activity that entailed pulling everything out of the both the freezer and one cabinet, sampling several of the new items (grapes, cheese, oranges), and taking at least three breaks to read stories.

This is what my house looks like.







Is it just me? Do other people have days like these? Sometimes I wonder what I am doing wrong.

Speaking of weathering storms, we have all survived Amelia's first post-hospital sickness. She got a fever Thursday, first one so low I assumed it was teething and forgot about it, but later in the afternoon, it was around 102. She had no other symptoms so of course I immediately assumed she was at the beginning of another terrible illness. To make a long story short--really, I don't want to relive all the worry--I took her to the doctor Friday. Her doctor, who was never as convinced as the surgeons that Amelia's earlier problems originated with her appendix, drew blood. She wanted to be sure there was not some weird bacterial infection going on. After 4 tense hours waiting for the results, we got them: virus, possible mono. Amelia has had maybe one mild cold all winter, but she is certainly getting her share of Diseases You Didn't Think Toddlers Can Get. However, her pediatrician said that most 5-year-olds have antibodies for mono, meaning they already had it as babies or toddlers but it was never diagnosed. Apparently in younger kids mono passes quickly and is not nearly the problem it is in teens and adults. You can read more about that here. Anyway, they wouldn't know for sure it was mono with more tests, which the doctor said wasn't worth it. Whatever it was, Amelia's fever went away yesterday morning and she seems fine now.

I guess I should spend the rest of her naptime cleaning the house.

Snow Pictures!

Lead and Coal

At her one year check up, Amelia was tested for lead, and her results were on the high side. For the past couple of weeks, we have been searching for the source of her exposure. She has spent her life in two very old houses. While we can't test the DC house, we have had the Denver house tested thoroughly and are waiting for results.

The man who tested our house was very kind and informative. He reassured me a little about Amelia's lead level (a nine), saying that while lead is very bad for babies and children, a nine is on the high side of normal, to the extent that there is a normal.

He spent 5 hours at our house, testing and explaining. I know a lot about lead now. But one of the things he said stuck with me. He was going off on a tangent about cadmium, saying that now that lead is being more regulated, some companies are switching to cadmium (for example, see this recall of a toy from McDonald's here).

Then he said, "But it's not just lead, and it's not just cadmium. There are thousands of terrible things in our environment, and we put most of them there ourselves, or allow them to be there."

About a week later, I read a post on Beyond Friendship Gate, my friend Caroline's blog. She has been learning and speaking out against coal ash for awhile now.

Coal ash is waste from coal-fueled power plants. Its disposal is currently unregulated.
While we are continue our search for the lead in Amelia's environment, please take a minute to read Caroline's post about coal ash.

The EPA is taking comments from the public about coal ash until November 19. If you decide that you would like to speak out against coal ash, you can comment in less than a minute by using a pre-written letter here. If you like, you can do what I did and add personal comments at the beginning of the letter, too.

I know lots of people in our families have been concerned about Amelia's lead exposure. Dean and I have certainly been worried. But the truth is that there are thousands of other things she comes into contact with that are similarly harmful. Lead is just one that we have become more careful about fairly recently. Please take a moment to learn a little about coal ash, and to speak out sometime against it during the next four days.

House Tour: the Long-Awaited Conclusion

This is my and Dean's bedroom:




It's hard to take a picture of the bedroom that's not all bed but the room has lots of slanted walls like Amelia's room.

Here is a shot of the stairway:



Not pictured are the two bathrooms. They look funny in the pictures. But they are nice bathrooms. We like them.

Finally, here is a more recent picture of the stone pathway Dean built this weekend!



It is the first step in the reconstruction of the backyard (thanks to Jim for pulling up the stones and tilling all the grass!). We are planning another backyard garden, featuring an asparagus bed and a sandbox for Amelia. So far we are enjoying the lovely pathway.

The Housewife

Lest you were been misled by an earlier post in which I was somewhat cheery about housework, let me state for the record that I am neither emotionally nor intellectually fulfilled by the life of the housewife. Yet lately I have found myself loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, folding clothes, and sweeping up a curious mixture of shredded wheat shards, crushed Cheerios and cat hair all day long. Chores and the state of the house have been driving me crazy. It seems like no matter how much (laundry, sweeping, straightening up, etc) I do there is still more (laundry, sweeping, straightening up, etc) to be done. And it has started to eat away at time I would like to spend doing other things, when I am not playing with and caring for Amelia of course, such as writing, reading, posting here, and, perhaps most importantly, watching Teen Mom.

At the same time I really do like staying on top of what needs to be done around the house. Dean is more than willing to do his share and more but he already comes home to The Amelia Channel (all Amelia, all the time!) and it is more fun to hang out and relax during the evenings and on weekends than to catch up on weekly chores. Since I am home all the time anyway it seems like there has to be some way to find a balance between completing the tasks that need to be done and spending some of Amelia's nap time doing what I like, want and need to do to feel like my life is more than breastfeeding, housework, and singing "The Wheels on the Bus."

So, the other morning I began to imagine what the job of "housewife" and "stay at home mom" would look like if I had to go into an office to do it. I figure there would be more structure. Tasks organized into a sort of daily and weekly routine rather than a nebulous and perpetual blob.

So I made a list of everything I do: all the chores, errands, outings and fun things I usually do in an average week. Then I divided them up by how often they need to be done. There are daily chores like sweeping. There are every other day chores like doing a load of laundry or diapers. There are things that really only need to be done once a week, like going through all the mail and paying bills, and irritating administrative things like making appointments or trying to consolidate your various retirement accounts, a result of changing states and jobs several times, into a single IRA.

Next I drew up a little schedule:



I am hoping a loose structure is going to help me better use my time. As you can see my and Amelia's workday day is divided into 5 main segments: morning playtime, morning nap, midday playtime, afternoon nap, and post-nap. We go to the park in the mornings but I am happiest when the kitchen is clean, the beds are made, and I have showered before we go. Otherwise that stuff eats into A's morning nap, which as you can see I most like to use to write. Midday playtime is the best time to leave the house for errands like grocery shopping or for fun things like Book Babies or lunch with Dean, which we have decided to do once a week. (Sometimes I will join Amelia and Dean for lunch and sometimes I will leave them to their own devices for an hour while I go to the library, something I am very excited about.) We really spend most of Amelia's waking time playing or reading or the like but I am usually able to get a few things done while she pulls pots and pans out the of cabinets or turns the pages of board books on her own.

And, as a bonus, now readers of this blog can easily look up what I am doing at any given moment. Note that we are on Mountain Standard Time. :) As you can see, I am right on track: it is Thursday afternoon and I am writing on the blog. However, I am noticing that I forgot to add Teen Mom to my schedule. Pencil that in for right now.

House Tour: Amelia's Room

Amelia's room has lots of nooks and crannies, so it's hard to get it all in one picture.



This is looking in from the doorway.



To the left is her little crib cave.



To the right is the changing table, some shelves, and the glider.

(A note on the glider: I didn't buy it until we left DC--I got it used from a MOTH right before we left. It is the MOST comfortable piece of furniture ever. I truly wish I had had it from day 1. It you are having a baby, GET A GLIDER, even if you don't think you have enough space. Sacrifice something else. Get a glider.)


A's room is very colorful.



She has a lot of pretty items and artwork, including this toybox, made my her grandmother and other Whimsical Women.



She is standing tall.

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).

For the Record

Night 6 of CIO: Amelia in bed at 7:00; not a sound from her till 4:30, at which point I nursed her, and she slept again till 6:15 or so.

I actually slept pretty well too (!), although Dean did not. He apparently wrote a petition for rehearing in his head, though, so I tried to convince him to take a day off soon, since he worked from home last night. Maybe tomorrow, when we SIGN THE PAPERS TO CLOSE ON OUR HOUSE. THAT WE WILL OWN.

I want a record because I know this will all turn to a blur soon.