Writer's Milestone

I applied for my first copyright. I'm entering a screenplay writing contest and in order to submit a screenplay you have to have it copyrighted. Dropping that package in the mail made me feel so good. There is a record of my creativity on its way to the Library of Congress. It doesn't get any better than that.
The bad part of this is that my writer's group thinks it's a pretty bad screenplay. Oh well, you can't have everything. I really enjoyed writing it. I may write more, and hopefully better, scripts in the future.
Life is about exploring.

15.2 is the loveliest number in the world

15.2 15.2 15.2 15.2 15.2 15.2 15.2 15.2

We have been concerned that our new baby might have cystic fibrosis. The verdict is in. He's negative. We are so relieved and grateful. Life is so unpredictable and catastrophe is always right there. Then again, just when you think it's caught you the tornado swerves. The only way to feel is thankful.

The Count

Our baby boy doesn't care for burping. I dutifully pat and pat and nothing happens until later when he makes up for it at the other end. I've been keeping track of his burps and today he reached the grand total of 33, ah, ah ah, 33 burps. He's a boy. I'm sure he'll get into it later.

To + To = For

Since I labored
to learn without insight
to survive without hope
to sustain without reason

I have earned the right
to fly with my eyes open
to swim in the deep end
to bury all that dies

It is time
for exertion to bring pleasure
for fear to bring endurance
for suffering to bring peace

Privacy Please, Growing People

Today I am full of stories about my kids, but I won't be sharing them. Children should be in charge of their stories and their lives. They should choose what they want to share and how they interpret what they've done and what has happened to them. That's why I don't often tell stories about specific children and I very seldom post pictures of my kids. Their lives belong to them, and I won't be posting them on the internet. Like Mary I'll be treasuring the stories and pondering them in my heart.

Summer of the Monkeys

Making sure each child feels special when you are having a baby is the best way to ease sibling rivalry. Knowing that, I always make sure we have good stuff planned for everyone when I'm preparing for a birth. This time we'd stumbled onto a monkey theme (see It All Started with a Hat), and that set off an explosion of ideas.
Setting up a nursery always involves moving things around and freshening stuff up, and that creates opportunity for jealousy. To ease that I redid their bathroom with monkey stuff I scavenged from six different stores. I set it up a day or two after I got home from the hospital and it was a big hit. I couldn't redo all of their bedrooms, but I freshened up a kid space with a new shower curtain, trash can and other incidentals.
Deep cleaning the house is one of the ways I get ready for a new baby, but maintaining that clean can be tough. We also struggle with such basics as making sure everyone brushes their teeth. For the first three weeks or so of life with baby I just kept reminding and pushing when baby allowed, and they did pretty good. We went over the house this Saturday, and managed to get the whole house clean in under 2 hours. During the family meeting afterward I pulled out new bedding for the girls and jungle wall stickers for our boy. None of it was expensive, but it was a huge morale booster. With everybody happily hugging their reward for jobs well done, I introduced a new system for tracking chores--the monkey tree.
I had bought some great stuff from Oriental Trading Company and the little magnet monkey faces inspired me. Each child has a color of monkey, and the tree is divided up into ten basic chores that all of them are required to do. They have a monkey for each chore which they put on the tree as they finish. When they are done for the day they can put a monkey face on the corresponding leaf. Everyone who has a monkey face on all five leaves can put a silly springy monkey on the sun. Participation in the weekend family adventure depends on getting your monkey on the sun. So far it has been a great system.
Here's hoping your summer is full of happy monkeys and family adventure.

Ambition Sweet Ambition

When my daughters talk about their futures, motherhood is the main attraction. I'm proud of that, but at the same time I wonder if I should be.Having such a large family provides me with all the excuse necessary to be completely absorbed by family life. Homeschooling makes it even more understandable. I lead a very full and rewarding life, but is it a good star to guide my daughters by?
If one of them would come out with an obsession with art or science or something, I'd relax a little. Those other messages in their DNA are going to find full expression too. Then again, motherhood turned out to be my grand passion, the one thing I'd give everything else up for, why shouldn't it be theirs? It was in my DNA. Is it really that hard to believe I passed it along? But to all four of them? Somebody has to find something more inspiring than child-bearing, don't they?
I cultivate my other gifts and interests for many reasons, but recently the need to inspire my children to value all that life has to offer has become a big one. Just like they didn't all get my chin--thank God--it's unlikely that they all got my desire to procreate on a large scale. I need to make sure that my life offers them more than one future.

The Perils of Over-Planning

Being an artist of any kind requires stepping back and looking at life as a source for material to create art. Giving birth is hard on an artist, because there is no stepping back. You have to be there. On the other hand, how else would you ever get such a deep experience out of life? Diving in and being fully present makes for better, richer material. It's just painful--especially giving birth.
You may have noticed, faithful readers, that I like to plan. I was warned not only by experience but also by experts that this was going to be my most difficult birth/post-partum period ever, so I really went at it. We have almost all the summer shopping done--Kurt even has new socks. I won't be doing any cooking for at least another month as the freezer is still pretty full. (The food is great. I recommend Fix Freeze Feast.) The kids are discovering little rewards and treats as the days unfold--I'll give you the skinny on that later, they read the blog. To sum up, my eldest commented a few days ago that we had come this far and everything is still running smoothly. She felt that is pretty impressive, and I must agree. :)
The difficulty with being so prepared is, what happens when you check the last thing off the checklist? You give birth. At least I did. My doctor had decided that inducing was a good idea since we thought this guy was going to be as big or bigger than his brother (a ten pounder, oy vay.) We set the date for the fourteenth and I went right to work finishing up the checklist. I got my haircut. I bought the candy for the nurses. We arranged for childcare. The Braxton-Hicks became stronger, but remained irregular. The next day I finished up the little things I was planning to make the kids feel good, and as soon as I took the cookies out of the oven I started to worry. My second and I sat down to watch Harry Potter together and just as the Weasley twins were putting their names in the Goblet of Fire, my water broke.
You would think I'd be alarmed, but I wasn't. I'd given birth five times before and I am a slowpoke when it comes to giving birth. It takes me forever to get going, though in my defense, my doctor says it goes really fast once I commit. This time I must have been pre-committed. We went from the nurses being uncertain about keeping me to welcoming the baby into the world in three hours. The anasthesialogist didn't even make it to the hospital. My OB, (the incomparable Dr. David) walked in the door and played catch. All things considered it was a great birth.
Not that I was great at it. Experience does not make you better at things. I do much better with an epidural. God bless my nurses. They let me keep hoping for that epidural long after we all knew it wasn't happening. The pain was less of a problem than the fear. Giving birth to a ten pounder had been difficult with an epidural, I didn't know if I had what it took to do it without one. Fortunately, this guy was a svelte 7 lbs. 15 oz. He slid out of there like the proverbial greased pig. If I'd have known that, there would have been a lot less begging, flailing and general freaking out. Like I always say, any birth where everyone is breathing at the end is a good birth. By that standard I did fine.
In summary, put something impossible on your pre-birth checklist, or ignore something really important, unless you're in a hurry to have that baby.