Mushy Love Stuff

Presents for the Entourage

April 19, 2010

Wednesday was our last day with Atti’s therapists and it was awful. These women have been my support system for the last two years. Atti’s OT has been seeing him since he was 4 months old. The ladies from HOPE have been seeing him since the day I brought him home. It was like saying goodbye to family.

I needed to come up with a present for them, and I just did not have the time to do something like the quilt I did for the last therapist we said goodbye to, so I was stumped for weeks. I thought it would be nice to give them a picture of Atticus, but I felt a little self conscious assuming that a picture of my *perfect child* would be a present to them.

But I did it anyway because I wanted to honor the relationship they’ve had to him. I wanted to recognize how important they’ve been in our lives. And a framed picture seems a little intimate – reflecting just how close to our hearts they are.

Michael’s carries 8 x 8 unfinished wooden frames, so I bought up a bunch of those and painted them a neutral cream color.

I pulled out some fabrics from my stash and cut each piece 2 inches bigger than the frame on each side. Then I stapled two sides to the back of the frame.

Fold the corners neatly and staple the other two sides to the back.

Cut the center out of the fabric, leaving just enough fabric to cover the inside lip of the frame and glue in place with fabric glue. You’ll need to make a slit in each corner to get it to lay flat. Slit right up to the edge but be careful not to go past it.

Add any additional decorations to the front. I stamped “You made a difference” onto grosgrain ribbon using a permanent ink and glued it to the front with fabric glue.

Secure that ribbon to the back with more glue, and maybe even a staple.

Cut a piece of flannel or fleece or felt or whatever – whatever you don’t have to hem – to 7″ square, and then cut a square out of the center 1 1/2″ in from each edge. Glue this to the back to cover up any mess and staples.

Despite my misgivings, these seemed to be a big hit. His OT told me she’s going to hang it up in her living room. I just don’t know how these therapists do it – pouring so much love and concern into these kids only to watch them grow up and go away and lose that connection. I just hope that they know how important they have been to the both of us.

Filed Under: Atticus, Mushy Love Stuff, Stuff I Make, Tutorials

2 years old

February 4, 2010

Today is Atti’s second birthday, and I’m rendered nearly speechless. I can’t count the number of times someone told me, “Treasure this time! It goes so fast!” but boy howdy, they were not kidding. How do I have a two year old?

In some ways I don’t. He’s caught up on the growth chart, but developmentally he’s much younger. Even aside from the whole not walking part. I had another preemie mom tell me that her doctor explained it took 1 year for every month of prematurity for them to catch up to their peers. So theoretically, by the time Atti’s three he’ll be socially and emotionally caught up. He’s already making big strides. Throwing tantrums like any toddler worthy of the title. Learning to come out of his little shell and play with other kids. Capturing more words every day.

The other day I was bent over cleaning up a mess he made, and Atti came up behind me and surprised me with a smack on the bum. I jumped in the air and said, “You goosed me!” and ever since he’s been crawling around the house saying “Goose, goose, goose.” With just the tiniest bit of a baby lisp.

He’s just blossoming all of a sudden. After working on it for a solid year of therapy, he finally decided he was ready to start waving Bye-bye. But instead of doing it when we asked, he’d crawl off into a corner and practice by himself. I’d find his little legs sticking out from under the table and hear “buh bye. Bye, ba bye.” As he stared at his hand and willed it to move back and forth. I’ve been reading stories to him his whole life, but overnight he went from bored to fascinated and now he throws a fit if he doesn’t get to have as many stories as he commands. He kisses the baby in the book, and turns the pages by himself.

He’s in this amazing limbo state. Part of him is becoming so aware of the world, so keen to interact and discover, and the other part of him is still my baby. While writing this I had to stop three times to give snuggle breaks. He crawls over to me and pulls on my pant leg to check in for a snuggle before he goes back to playing with his toys. He still loves kisses so much that I can motivate him to keep working through therapy by just saying, “Mama has kisses for you! Come and get kisses!” and then he will.

This little guy brings me so much happiness it’s almost embarrassing. Whenever I talk about him with his therapists and teachers, I catch myself grinning like a fool and I can’t wipe it off. I’m so proud of him I can barely stand it. My little champion.

Filed Under: Atticus, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff

Mynah bird

December 7, 2009

I’ve been working hard on Christmas stuff and I’m doing fairly well. Christmas shopping is done, Christmas making not so much. But I’ll get to that later this week.

Today is my birthday – 31 years old. I was thinking about doing a big introspective post about how great this year was and how it really changed everything for me, but I think I’ll save that for New Years. For today I want to give you the gift of adorableness that I get to live with every day.

Atti’s a little bit speech delayed as a result of his disability, but you wouldn’t know it based on how much jibber jabber comes out of this little guy all day. He’s got the T and K sounds down, so everything he says includes those, but it’s pretty funny how everything he loves most – kitties, kisses and tickles – can be expressed with just that much skill.

This one is my favorite. I don’t know where he picked this up, it just sprung naturally out of his little positive spirit. It is the best thing ever to be mid conversation and have Atti back me up with one of his emphatic Yeah!’s. He’s very agreeable.

He always says it just like that too – full bodied. Like he’s ready to provide the muscle behind whatever scheme I’ve got going that day.

This kid is pretty darn great.

Filed Under: Atticus, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

5 years

November 13, 2009

As of today I’ve been pecking away in this space for five years. It feels like it couldn’t only be five years. I’ve lived lifetimes since then!

I started this blog just after we left New Hampshire and moved to California. I hadn’t found a home in our new location, I was so very sick, and I felt this need to communicate with someone. I’ve also always felt ….haunted, maybe?…. by the need to write, but so terrified by how much I wanted to be good at it that I barely wrote anything at all. I found myself at this moment in my life where everything I was doing wrapped up, and I was left with this wide open future and no idea what I wanted to do with myself, or was even capable of doing. I didn’t have kids, I didn’t have much of a career, and the broadness of my open life was almost claustrophobic.

2005 was a trying and yet wonderful time. We were so desperate to have a baby, but by then that wasn’t even the central issue anymore. I was so sick, and we had no health insurance to make that change. I spent my days on pain pills, and if I did one thing in my day – cooked dinner, put the slipcovers on the couches, took a shower – that was a productive day. The posts back then were few and far between, and I think that’s because I was in too much pain to put thoughts together, but also because I was surrounded by some of the greatest friends ever. There were so many people who took such great care of us then.

By 2006, health insurance kicked in and we started trying to get me healthy. That sucked, and I am loathe to think about it too much. It was a really tough time. But this is the year that I really started to discover myself. This was when I did most of the work on my craft book that didn’t go anywhere but was tremendously educational for me. This was when I started to appreciate how essential creation is to my identity and accepted that no vision of my future could be complete without it.

Of course, as soon as I realized what I needed to be happy in my life without children, children became a possibility. Doesn’t it always work that way? Again, looking back my first reaction is always, “Boy, what a hard year.” A move away from beloved friends, miscarriage of a hard won pregnancy, failing to make a place in my new community, a fire threatening our beloved home, but then, also, beauty. Finding healing in the hard work of my hands, getting pregnant with Atti and staying that way, communing with this new little life in me.

2008 was the year everything changed for us. In the very best ways, even though it came at such a cost. Nearly two years later I can’t really even write about that time when Atti was in the hospital, or the fear I’ve had to learn to walk with as we work towards his future. It’s so terrifying and heartbreaking to think back on, but it was just so wonderful to have him, none of it seemed to matter.

I think that is the biggest gift that blogging has given me. I look at the big events of all these years and when you add it all up, I should be in the red. I shouldn’t be joyous when I’m dealing with miscarriages and moves and prolonged chronic illness. The life that I’ve been given is ridiculous and hard and even sometimes ugly in the big picture. But somehow, it doesn’t really feel that way. I have a record of all the little tender mercies, all the oases of beauty that sustain me, all the loving kindnesses of supportive readers, and when you add it all up it so outweighs the big hard things that I am happy. Truly, profoundly, almost unbearably happy.

I can’t thank you guys enough for being here through it all with me.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

2009 Year of Pleasure #42

October 26, 2009

Last Saturday, desperate to drink up the fall before it’s gone, we tossed the whole hacking, coughing family into the car and drove into Julian, a little mountain town full of apple orchards, gold mines, and quaint tourist trappings.

It was a wonderful day. Atti was at his best behaved, most snuggly and thoroughly adorable, we spent the whole day wandering around in the sunshine and eating apples in every form known to man, brought home juice and caramel apples and apple butter and more juice, and went to the last remaining open orchard of the season for fresh apples we’re turning into pies and tarts and baby food.

It ended up being a day perfect in it’s imperfection. The apple crop was weak this year, so the U-Pick orchards were all closed and we could only buy what was at the farm stand. We went for afternoon tea at a place that sounded like perfection and ended up being four pieces of bread eaten while seated in the middle of a store. We wandered through shops that sold truly unfathomable levels of junk to a captive audience. But we laughed the whole way through, enjoying our sweet little family and a perfect fall day, with loads of sweetness in our bellies.

Filed Under: Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life, Year of Pleasures

Finished again!

September 11, 2009

I’ve been on a finishing roll, and I finally managed to finish a simple project I’ve been dragging around since 2001. Way back then we went on my dream vacation to Rome. In November even, so I got to wander around my dream city when it was rainy and crisp and glorious. We stayed in this little hotel right on the edge of an enormous park and scoured the city looking for all the artwork I had learned about in my Western Civ classes. Bear still teases me about my obsessive fixation with Bernini.

While strolling through one piazza or another, we came across a few booths with artists selling their work and snapped up this lovely little watercolor.

I love this piece, but the only problem is that it is such an odd size I could *not* find a frame for it. I looked at getting it custom framed but it’s just so very expensive and we have never been in a position where I could make that a high priority, so it’s been sitting, carefully, in the bottom of my work in progress drawer, only getting out when it was time to put it in a box and move to the next house where it went back in it’s drawer.

Whenever I’m at a thrift store, I always scout through the frames, hoping I’ll find something that just happens to be right. When I was up in Utah I found something that still isn’t perfect, but is close enough. It’s a few inches too long, and I wish it was just a little bit taller, but I’ll deal with the extra white space if it means I get to actually look at it instead of just squirrel it away.

It was a light blond wood, so I gave it a good sanding and painted it with Folk Arts enamel paints. This worked great! You get a good hard cure so it’s WAY stronger than acrylics, but you can save yourself the trouble of busting out the spray paint.

This hangs in my studio just above my ironing board, and I’m wondering how long it will be before I burn something because I’m too busy staring at it. It was those two tiny people walking through the arch that really captured my imagination, and it brings back such sweet memories of walking through an ancient city hand in hand with my love.

Filed Under: Mushy Love Stuff, My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make, The Good Life

Another reason I love my husband

September 10, 2009

Even once we had Atticus, we never really got off the infertility roller coaster. In fact, we started trying for Baby #2 before Baby #1 even made it home from the hospital. Since Atti took eight years to conceive, we knew that time was not on our side. Oh how I laughed and laughed when the discharge nurse gave me a contraception lecture. Yeah, not really an issue, thanks though.

Over all those years I’ve done all the charting and graphs and measuring of mucus viscosity and waving burning sage over my womb, but right now the easiest thing for me to do is use one of those ridiculously expensive ovulation predictor kits. The kit cost me about $80 used off of ebay, and that’s at a discounted price to get over the mental ickiness of knowing someone else’s pee was inside a plastic wand that touched the inside of this contraption. But after eight years, you’ll deal with the ickiness and the cost just for a measure of convenience.

The predictor measures your hormone levels on a scale of 1 to 3, and on Monday it declared that this was the big night, complete with a little LCD picture of an empty womb with a little egg floating inside and a big fat flashing ‘3′. The big night does not come around every month, so this was a red letter day.

As luck would have it, Bear and I got in a **HUGE** fight on Monday. He’s a big muckety muck at work, work that is very important and has been steadily encroaching upon our family time for years now, I took umbrage to how it had been encroaching, blah blah blah, same fight couples around the world have been having since the first caveman wanted to go back out for another try at the mastodon while cavewoman whined about how she never gets to leave the cave anymore.

The problem with this is that we do not have one of those feisty marriages where people have a little fight and then enjoy the making up. We have a ridiculously sappy shmoopy woopy marriage. So when the blue moon shows up and we actually get cranky with each other, it takes us time to mope around and feel our feelings before we’re ready to come back for more ridiculous sap.

To make it through eight years of charts and graphs and doctors and the big fat ultrasound wand, you have to do all you can to protect your relationship from clinical insensitivity. It’s all too easy to wake up one morning and realize that you can’t remember when it happened but somewhere along the way your loving act of intimacy morphed into a medical procedure no more remarkable than a throat culture. It takes a careful balance to get the timing of optimal conception lined up with all the warm loving feelings that are supposed to be there. So on Monday, after the fight, when I discover that The Big Night was upon us, I called Bear and told him, “I don’t really know what to do. I’m a three.”

He didn’t have a ready response, being sensitive to my feelings and letting me make the call, so we dropped the subject and went on about our day. I brought it up a couple more times throughout the night. “What do you think Bear? I’m a three.” “I don’t really know what we should do, I’m a three.”

Finally he put his hand on my face, looked me in the eyes with all his earnest devotion and said, “I know I can’t get you back down to a zero tonight, but I’m hoping you can at least get down to a two.”

Wait, what? “What do you think I’m talking about?” “A three means you’re really mad, right? I wasn’t really familiar with the scale, but I figured it must be really bad if you assigned a number to it.”

Filed Under: infertility is evil, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff

2009 Year of Pleasures #35

September 8, 2009

Bear is such a good dad.

Filed Under: baby news, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life, Year of Pleasures

Separation Anxiety

September 3, 2009

I’m sitting here typing this in the house all by myself. It’s so quiet I’m having trouble being productive. I have had two back to back all day marathons of doctors appointments*, so Atticus spent last night up at Grandma’s and then ended up getting stuck there when my Sister in Law started showing signs of going into labor. Bear ran up to take baby duty over, Grandma and Grandpa divvied up daughter/grandbaby responsibilities, and the whole family is holding their breath waiting for this little girl to make her way into the world.

*more on that another day.

When Atti was born and in the hospital without me, the hardest part was the intense loneliness I felt. People often tried to comfort me by reminding me that I shouldn’t miss him too much since he wouldn’t have been here yet anyway, but that did me no good. If I had managed to stay pregnant longer he might not have been *here* but he was still with me. Being at home while he was at the hospital was just agony. There were times when I felt that separation so keenly it felt like a death.

Prior to my week away last month, the longest I’ve been away from him was a measly 16 hours. Once. An anniversary dinner and hotel stay and then right back to baby as soon as we woke up the next morning. Because of his disability we have 8 hours of nursing care allotted to us every month and I’ve never ever used it. Not because I’m some ridiculous martyr, but because those first few months of distance made such an impression on me that I can’t help but be greedy for him. I want to drink him. I feel a literal, physical pull on my heart when I’m away from him.

Atti has developed a few new behaviors as a result of our time apart. After talking to me on the phone every night, now he freaks out if the phone rings and I don’t let him talk on it. Which of course is just him listening to the other person while he licks the phone and breaths heavily. The receptionist at the dentist office didn’t seem to enjoy that too much.

He’s also gotten so much more motivated to be wherever I am. During the morning I usually set him in the middle of our main living room, on that red circle rug that is so ubiquitous in the photos I take of him, and let him roll around and work on crawling and play with his toys while I spend some time connecting with my online world. He’s developed into a really good independent player, so I usually had as much time as I wanted. Now I have twenty minute bursts while he inchworms his way from the carpet to my feet and slaps the base of my chair until I pick him up. After a few minutes of songs and snuggles I put him back down on the carpet and he starts the journey all over again. He’s getting to be pretty darn quick.

At therapy we’ve been making fantastic strides towards his walking skills. He spends a lot of time in a gate trainer, which is basically a high tech version of those walkers that people had to stop using in the 80’s after one too many babies took a tumble. He sits in a seat that supports his weight and then steps with his legs to make the contraption move on the wheels. He wasn’t doing much with the gate trainer prior to the trip, content to let his therapist move his legs for him. Now I’ll sit five feet in front of him and offer him kisses, and he marshals all the concentration available to him to make those feet move and get to his momma.

I wonder sometimes. If we get to have another kid, will I be so connected to them? Is this the magic of motherhood? Or did something happen in those first few days, standing there in my hospital gown, looking at him in his isolette, me fighting for life to get back to him, him fighting for life to get back to me. I remember standing there feeling this *intense* spiritual connection to him. Like, so intense it almost had mass, kind of connection. I felt like what we had been through together united us, physically, chemically.

I certainly hope I don’t have to go through such a gauntlet again, but today, it was totally worth it.

Here’s a little something to help all the sap go down a little easier.