Photo Show: Seattle

J and I had the opportunity to spend a night sans kid in a five star hotel, for pretty much free. That doesn't happen too often! I'd like to say I slept 10 hours in a row, but I didn't. I still didn't get any sleep, but not for the reason you may be thinking. J slept 10 hours solid like no one's business. I am just a hopeless insomniac.

We did have a great dinner and I had the chance to break out the long lens. That thing is awesome. Please enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shelly's 40th Birthday

I found on Facebook out that today is Shelly Baker Butler's 40th birthday. I met Shelly 10 years ago when I hired her to write for a website I was producing. She was beautiful, young, talented, funny, gracious and about to get married. We only worked together for a short while, and then she moved on to a full time job writing for REI.

Thanks to Facebook, I connected with her again a few years ago. I enjoyed seeing photos of her beautiful family on camping trips or family reunions. They looked so happy and together. I didn't communicate with her much, but I admired her from afar, and felt like I still knew her, at least in the fabricated way that Facebook leads you to believe.

I didn't remember seeing her post for awhile, so around December or so, I looked her up to see what she'd been up to. I was shocked to discover, through posts on her page, that she had been struggling with colon cancer, and had lost her fight. She had died just a few days before. She was only 39. She had two little kids, the oldest one was only six.

This news hit me extremely hard. I did a little bit of internet sleuthing and discovered that she had been keeping a blog about her experience with cancer. I read a few of the entries, my heart breaking a little bit with each one. I finally stopped reading when I came to the one where she was telling her daughter that she couldn't play with her before school because she had to go to chemo. I couldn't even formulate words to describe how sad I was to try and imagine what she had gone through, what her babies had gone through, and how her husband is feeling.

How can this kind of thing happen? How can a young, healthy, vibrant woman leave the world when she had two kids who still needed her so much? How do you reconcile your last days in this kind of situation? What happens now? I barely knew Shelly, but I am kind of beside myself with grief that this is possible.

Facebook can be a good thing. It can make you feel like you are still in touch with people and connected to the world. It just gets a little weird when people leave this world, and those traces of them are still here. It could be healing, I guess, in a way, to pay tribute to her life. I didn't know her or her people well enough to be comfortable leaving a message, but today I am reminded that Shelly was here, that she meant so much to so many people. She would have been 40 today. It seems to me that she deserved a lot more time than that.

Not Ready

A loves to look through her baby photos these days. She's got some sense of her growing body now, and some understanding that she used to be a little baby. When she sees photos of herself as a baby, she says really adorable things, like:

Ohhhh, look at how cute I was!

or

Look, Daddy is holding me. He loved me so much when I was a baby.

I have been a huge fan of family photos since I was tiny, too, and I'm so happy to share this lineage with her. I'm also setting her up with an amazing album that she will be able to enjoy as she grows. I have them organized by each month of her life. Photography and album organization is my main hobby these days, and just about the only thing I have extra energy for.

Last night she wanted to look through the Five Months Old folder. When she was five months old, she was just starting to taste solid food, she was sitting up, and she just had a dusting of hair. Her big blue eyes were very expressive. She was small for her age, because of her heart condition, I think. She was just creeping up on 12 pounds.

This was also the month she had open heart surgery.

I did take some photos of her right out of surgery, for documentation more than anything else. There are a few photos of her as she was recovering in the hospital and some of her stitches. There are even a couple of photos of her dad and I with the shocked expression on our faces as we left our baby with the anesthesiologists. I shudder to recall this experience at all. Even though my daughter is fine now, I'm still traumatized by it. The scars are on her body, but I carry my own unseen wounds.

Many parents in this situation will post these kinds of photos for awareness, or for other reasons, but I feel extremely private about it. I don't even like these images in my own mind, and I certainly don't want to share them with the world. I don't even really want to share them with my daughter.

She doesn't even know she has a heart defect. She doesn't know that her chest looks different from other kids. She's not aware of her scars or of how traumatizing this experience was. Maybe deep in her tissues, she does, but she will never remember it consciously. I don't want to keep her from her own history, but I'm just not prepared to explain it to her. I don't know how she would contextualize those pretty harsh photos. I don't know what kinds of things seeing them would plant in her impressionable mind. Someday I will share them with her if she wants to see it, but not just yet.

I don't want to set her up for life believing she's different, or compromised, or not as strong as her peers. I want her to use her experiences as strengths and never be bogged down by her limitations, especially emotionally. I want her to be informed, and therefore armed, for all the challenges she will meet in her life.

I'm just not sure that sharing these photos with her at three years old will accomplish that. I'm 100% for full disclosure, but to do that I need to be ready, and she needs to be able to understand. We have a little ways to go. I am keeping those photos in that folder, but for now, they're tucked away in a subfolder called Surgery. If she happens to be wandering through and I'm not looking, she at least won't accidentally stumble upon something that she, or I, can't handle.

More Famous Sayings

The entertainment never stops around here! More hilarious sayings from the three-year-old:

Daddy is snoring and it's making me sad and scared. (Me too, girl. Me too.)

You be the fridge, I'll be the freezer. Go! (Uhhhh...)

Mama and A have long hair. Grammy has short hair. Daddy has crazy hair. (Or curly, but we can go with crazy, sure.)

When I am a big girl, can I go to Weight Watchers meetings like Mama? (Hopefully, you won't have this problem.)

Baby (duck, dog, fox, cat, lion, elephant, hot dog, phone, etc.) needs his Mommy!

Lion and snake are in time-out for biting people in the hospital.  (???)

(After waking me up in the middle of the night, climbing into my bed and cuddling up): I need my stuffed animal! Go get it!  (To which I say - Go get it yourself! You woke me up!)

Thank you for doing my laundry. That was very nice of you. (I hope this one keeps up!)

And, my favorite: Mama Chicken! I love you Mama Chicken! Cheep cheep! (I love you too, Baby Chicky!)

These are good, good times. Three is my favorite so far.

I Want

We have entered the relentlessly exhausting world of, "I Want".  I want this toy, I want to play, I want more popsicles. All day long I Want I Want I Want. If she doesn't get it, I hear, "But I WANT it!"

I knew this was coming. I was a kid of many wants myself. I can relate. But in the hundreds of years since I was a small child, I've actually become very successful at tempering my wants. Or maybe just expecting not to get what I want, so not bothering to make a big deal of it.

As with most things, I blame myself for this behavior. She is my only little one, and sometimes, ok, a lot of the time, I can't help myself in the store. I love to see the delighted smile on her face when I buy her a little toy. I didn't get this a lot when I was a kid (I had lots of toys, but we weren't overindulged), and I love to do it because I can. Because how nice is it to live in a world where someone considers what you want and your wishes are granted. I want her to be happy, I think. What's the harm, I think. Well, I'm beginning to get it a little. If she gets something every time, she will expect it. And she does.

My husband is no better. He is fully on the hook for the request I heard the other day. The request that made me break out into a cold sweat while my heart stopped a little.

"Mommy, I want a Barbie Dream House."

You want WHAT?!?!? Nooooooooooooo, anything but that! You don't know what you're saying, little child. You don't really want that. How do you even know such a thing exists??? Oh, because you saw it on TV watching cartoons with Daddy? DAMN IT. Damn it all to hell. I will not have a Barbie Dream House in my house ever, if I can help it. You can have another kind of dream house, maybe, and other dolls, but not that combination. I just can't do that.

Aside from me being overindulgent and my husband not thinking it's a big deal for her to be bombarded with marketing, I blame the materialistic world we live in. We are always on the hunt for the new next best thing. We all participate in it. We all feed into it. At Christmastime, she got asked on the daily what she wanted for Christmas. Does she have a list? What is she asking Santa for? She didn't really get it then, but she gets it now!

When she's denied a request, she just says, well maybe Santa will bring it to me. Or maybe Grammy will get it for me. Or maybe we can go to the store tomorrow and get it. That's how it works, right? You want, and you get. Simple.

I'm going to make an extremely conscientious effort to manage this better. I'm going to restrain from getting her something every time. I'm going to help her set expectation that sometimes you just don't get what you want all the time, and that's ok. Maybe I'll teach her the Rolling Stones song that my mom used to sing to me. It went something like this:

"You can't always get what you want. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need."

Well played, Rolling Stones. You were so right, all along.

Photo Show: Feathered Friends

I have this super duper new telephoto lens, and I have been having fun capturing these fine feathered friends from afar:

Medical Emergency

I was at an airport tonight, all the way across the country, missing my girl with every fiber in my body.

I sat down and noticed a little backpack sitting all by itself a couple of seats down. We're supposed to be suspicious of such things, but when I saw a mom and her two girls come to claim it, I thought to myself, no mom is going to subject her babies to a bomb in a backpack.

This mom proceeded to change both girls' clothes, I'm guessing about 2 and 5, into matching super-warm jammies. Then she brushed their hair lovingly. They were adorable. It made me miss my girl all that much more. She then made a phone call while the girls were bouncing all over the place.

Don't worry, I thought to that mom in my mind, I am not at all bothered by them. They seem like good babies and it's a handful to bring kids in the airport. She got dirty looks from some people, like why don't you control your kids, but I noticed something else going on. All the other moms around, including myself, were keeping good eyes on them, so they didn't get too far from their mom. This was all unspoken, and automatic. Moms have each other's backs like this. It's instinct. I do this all the time in public without even thinking about it.

We finally got on the plane and I am SO GLAD to be on my way home. About an hour into the trip, the plane was diverted to Toronto due to a medical emergency. This is always disturbing. I wanted to be home so badly!

I found out that it was this mother who was having chest pains. She didn't speak any English, and she is traveling alone with the two girls and nine pieces of luggage. I can barely handle the sadness of this situation, and I can't imagine what she must be feeling.

Now we are on our way home, but she is in yet another strange country, probably in a hospital, 4,000 miles from her husband, who was supposed to pick them up. Who is watching her girls? How is she going to get home? Is she going to be ok? All of these questions are haunting me, and I am so tired but there is no way I will sleep.

I wanted to hop off the plane with her and just hold those babies and tell them that it would be ok. I wanted to stay with her the whole time until she got back home. I don't know anything about that woman, but I know what it's like to love your baby. I know how hard it is to travel with kids. I know the fear of thinking if something happens to me, what will happen to my child?

The worst part is, I can't do anything for her but pray. When I get home I'm going to get my baby out of her bed, take her into mine, and cuddle her with all my might. Life is so unpredictable, and you never know, and all you have is this one moment to make the most of.

Seven Years

I've been feeling weird lately, more weird than usual. My body aches and I'm really tired all the time. It could be the flu, but it hasn't seemed to progress much past this, plus headaches, in almost a week. Very strange. I find myself exhausted during the day, and I try to get a nap around working and being a mom, but you know that's not easy.

However, the last couple of nights, I've woken up in the wee hours and haven't been able to get back to sleep. My body wants to sleep but my mind keeps on rolling. Going back to a couple of blogs ago, I think this is all the in-between mental work I was referring to. It's downright disruptive sometimes!

I've had little bursts of progress, though, and I'm really feeling good about it. I'm on a big campaign to live how I want to live, and that includes possibly random things like eating out of a bowl more, and straightening up the millions of piles around here. Less clutter, more simplicity. Little baby steps feel like giant bounds when I've been stuck for a while.

The other morning, about 4:30am, after being up for hours, I had this epiphany, and after it burst out, I was able to sleep. My epiphany is this: I have a seven year life change cycle, and I'm 42.

I was thinking back to a time when I was 21, and I was really burned out on my warehouse coordination job. I just had other priorities. I didn't want to spend all my time thinking about dock bumpers and Genie lifts and install schedules. I had poetry to write, bands to see, people to meet, and men to enchant. My job got in the way of my creativity. That job was the exact opposite of creativity, and the management was pretty shitty. It could have been a nice solid career starter, but I just was not interested in that kind of life then.

In my spare time, which I had plenty of, I volunteered at a thrift store where all the proceeds went to helping people with AIDS. I lived on Capitol Hill, where all kinds of wacky, alternative things went on, and I was, of course, way into that. Plenty of fodder for poetry and art. When a full time position opened up there, I jumped on it. My stuffy colleagues at the warehouse handling job made fun of me for leaving, and that just made my decision feel all the more justified. I consciously made the decision to leave something that looked stable to do something that was meaningful to my heart. I have not one minute regretted it, and it set me on the path to where I am today.

If I think seven years past that, I made a very similar decision. I was working at Microsoft in their media studio. I liked what I did, but I totally hated working at a big monster corporation. I was being compared to my peers on a bell curve, and not based on my ethic, effort or performance. It was so wrong to me. And, the boys club. Don't even get me started on that bullshit.

I had an opportunity to go work for a competing corporation, and they had a division that created media for non-profits. A chance to use my skills, and expand my skills, get paid well, and still do something good for the world. I jumped. I didn't care about the criticism.

That gig was actually too good to be true, because I got out just before the division folded about two years later. Then I did a little bit of freelance project management before spending a few years at a small, friendly start up. I got on full time there and spent about four years getting some amazing experience in project and account management. Things took a turn there, too, as things do, and I was no longer on board with the direction of the company. I was stable. I was respected, mostly. I had mad skills. But my heart wasn't in it.

I remember being quite elated and refreshed to come to the company I work for now. It was small, and scrappy, and we did amazing work, fueled by amazing creative brains. I was so inspired and the transition was all good. I also had just gotten married and bought a house and had many dreams about many things. I was dedicated to my Buddhist practice. Things were solid.

Almost eight years later, it's a different place. They sold it to a big, monster corporation, and many of the key creative people have abandoned ship. I'm starting to see some of the same trends that I've seen in the past, and I just don't like the way it looks. I'm struggling to make progress professionally, and I'm just not spiritually into a big chunk of work that I have no choice but to do. It feels to me now that it may have run its course. Something needs to change.

I don't like this, because I'm comfortable there, or maybe just complacent. I don't want to put the effort into picking up and finding what's next. I don't know what's out there, or if I'll find anything else that will be as richly satisfying. I have a family to support now, and the stakes are high.

Once I've had a realization like this, I know from experience that it won't just sink back into the shadows. I can try to ignore it, but it just causes a lot more suffering. I don't know what this year will bring, but if the patterns in my life are any indicator, I'm in for some changes. These changes, it appears, are overdue.

Gulp.

Potty Party

Potty training is not exactly a party for us, but you wouldn't know it by looking at these sticker "charts".

There's a party on Mars all day long.

 

 

But, we soon ran out of robot stickers, so we moved on to butterflies.

Butterflies were a good time, and she even got a few for going poop! But then, they were no longer that motivating, so we moved on to...monkeys!



 

 

Her imagination is going wild lately. It's so delightful to watch. She makes up stories and songs for everything that she experiences. Her entire life is one long running commentary. And, she is very methodical about everything. She carefully chooses which sticker goes next, and its placement on the background. She puts similar stickers together. With the monkeys, she was making sure that each monkey got a banana or a flower for a while. When the scene was complete, she tallied up the girl and boy monkeys, and told stories about what they were all doing.

 

We've moved on now, to frogs. I asked her what kind of a background she wanted, and she wanted the frogs to be hopping on rooftops and trees. I may have gotten a little crazy with that one. We'll see.

 

Maybe I'm making this a little bit too fun, though, because what I really want is for the potty training to be OVER! She's really dragging this one out. We've tried all kinds of methods, and we refuse to make it a fight. I just need to have faith. All parents I've ever talked to, and the pediatrician, say that one day they just get it, and it's done.

 

Of course, as far as I'm concerned, if she wants to collaborate on these scenes even after she's going to the bathroom by herself, that's just fine with me. A little art never hurt anyone.

It's a New Year

It's a new year. We're off and running. I was thinking about resolutions and there are many things I should probably accomplish this year - lose weight, get more money, be happier, yada yada yada. All noble goals, but I'm going with something else this year, something a little more general but fundamental to driving all other goals and desires.

I want to work on ridding my mind of my fear. Lofty, huh? Fear fuels anger, anxiety, failure, confusion and inaction. I want to be done with all these things. I need to conquer and destroy what is keeping me from my happy mind. This is probably going to take me longer than one short year. It might take me my whole life, but I have to get back on the path.

I've been in quite a mental slump lately, and I want out. Slumps are super uncomfortable for me because I like to set my mind on something and get on with it. Slumps are also necessary. Sometimes you have to (or be forced to) pause so that you can allow the right answers to come to the surface. Sometimes I have to shut up a little bit and tap into the wisdom around me, so I can make the right decisions. These are the in-between times, where all the real work is done.

I don't really have a methodical plan for how to get rid of fear. It's not an effort comparable to pulling a semi-truck with my body like a strong man. I think it's more of a graceful mental massage. Staying in the moment. Mindfulness. Meditation. I need to tap back into that stream because I can't survive with this wild painful mind. I need to regain my mental suppleness. I think I can do it, but I have to keep my eye on the prize, with constant vigilance.

Also, I want to go real easy on myself this year. Easier than ever. I will be more forgiving and less demanding of myself. I will sit down when I need to rest. I will get out when I need a break. I will walk and do yoga more, as a favor to my body. I will ask for help when I need it. I will break down and weep when I feel out of control, instead of saving it up for a convenient PMS excuse. I will surround myself with the people that I can safely share my happiness with, and my sadness.

I will save some energy for myself, because challenging fear is a huge feat. It's not going down easy. If I have nothing left for this battle, I'll be in this same place this time next year. This is one resolution I don't want to slip away into obscurity.

Wish me luck.