Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Those Days
Does anyone else with little children ever have one of those days? Those days when you really want to walk into your kitchen, grab all of the fruit snacks and cracker packets and dump them on the table, walk to the freezer and snip open all of the Otter Pops, turn the television on to PBS kids, and go back to bed for the day and let the kids live it up? I was feeling a bit like that this morning. But, I overcame it to an extent and made the little ones blueberry pancakes and made all the beds and made sure they all got dressed and gathered some laundry and fed the baby a couple of times in there, and then I did lay down with my little bundle and take a nap. I LOVE taking naps with babies. Of course that "nap" was interrupted for several reasons including CT needing to know how to make the sound come out of the computer since Dad hooked it up to speakers, Lily wanting me to take the plastic wrappings off of the "Princess and the Frog" DVD that Tyler's mom sent her the other day, and Amelia wanting to know if I had washed her favorite blanket yet, since it got a little damp in the night. I'm sure you can figure out how. I finally fully committed to my day and spent some time on the treadmill and told the kids we were heading out to the swimming pool after lunch. I'm sure the kids will have more fun doing that that than they would just watching PBS kids all day with unlimited snacks...or maybe not. But I'll feel better about myself anyway.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Summer
Things I Love About Summer:
1) No morning rush to get kids to school.
2) No nighttime rush to get kids to bed.
3) Little tan bodies with bright white behinds.
4) Popsicles for dessert.
5) 98 cent strawberries.
6) Our annual family reunion.
7) Hearing the kids shout "Cannonball!" each time they jump in the pool.
Things I Loathe About Summer:
1) The heat.
2) The humidity.
3) Girls sweaty, straggly hair minutes after you finish putting in the pigtails and cute bows in the first place.
4) The electricity bill.
5) Dealing with wet swimming suits and towels all the time.
6) The heat.
7) The humidity.
1) No morning rush to get kids to school.
2) No nighttime rush to get kids to bed.
3) Little tan bodies with bright white behinds.
4) Popsicles for dessert.
5) 98 cent strawberries.
6) Our annual family reunion.
7) Hearing the kids shout "Cannonball!" each time they jump in the pool.
Things I Loathe About Summer:
1) The heat.
2) The humidity.
3) Girls sweaty, straggly hair minutes after you finish putting in the pigtails and cute bows in the first place.
4) The electricity bill.
5) Dealing with wet swimming suits and towels all the time.
6) The heat.
7) The humidity.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Photographic Evidence of Progress
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| Hanging out in the NICU under the special light to treat jaundice (with his cool "shades" to protect his eyes). |
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| While in the NICU he looked like this - IV in his head, feeding tube in his nose, etc, etc. Plus he went down to 4 pounds 9 ounces. |
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| Once we got him home he was looking much more comfortable! No tubes, wires, or anything! |
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| He's just still trying to figure out what that whole week with the beeping machines and the bright lights was all about... |
Friday, March 18, 2011
He's a Keeper
So I had a baby last week. Wesley Bisel Brock was born on March 10. (Amelia says "Baby Wes-a-ley") It was a little crazy. I hadn't been feeling my best so I called the nurse at my doctor's office. She said my symptoms sounded like a gallbladder problem and to eat a low fat diet. Luckily, the next day I had a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment. The nurse called me back and checked my blood pressure...thirty minutes later I was all prepped for a C-section waiting to be wheeled into the operating room. I had developed a sudden, apparently severe, case of pre-eclampsia (which, as some of you may know, Tyler refers to only as "some strange disease"). The whole situation really freaked Tyler out at first and he was worried he was going to miss the whole thing rushing to take the girls to play with friends and gather our hospital stuff and meet me there. Once he was there and the operation was started he was quite fascinated and kept standing up and peering over the drape to try and see all of my internal organs laid out all over the place. He said he couldn't ever get a good view. He did managed to see them pull out the baby. We thought it was kind of funny that the doctors kept saying "he was breech too!". It's not like he was ready to be born. He was 36 weeks. He still technically had four weeks left in there. He was still moving all around and not at all in "locked and loaded" position. Anyway - he made it out at a whopping 5 lbs. 6 oz., 19 inches long.
Unfortunately that wasn't quite big enough for his little body to regulate his blood sugars and they took him to the NICU the night he was born. He ended up staying there for a week. We got to bring him home yesterday and it has been more adorable than I could have imagined to see the kids with him. Especially C.T. I told Tyler I wish I could make a video of every time the two of them are together, like their own little reality show. I can't handle the cuteness.
Unfortunately that wasn't quite big enough for his little body to regulate his blood sugars and they took him to the NICU the night he was born. He ended up staying there for a week. We got to bring him home yesterday and it has been more adorable than I could have imagined to see the kids with him. Especially C.T. I told Tyler I wish I could make a video of every time the two of them are together, like their own little reality show. I can't handle the cuteness.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
I Don't Get It
What is it that I don't get? I'll give you some hints:
1) It is animated.
2) It is feature length.
3) It has a lot of big name stars lending their voices to it's characters. (Why does Cate Blanchett always gets roles of ethereal women with long flowing hair? In this case, ridiculously long and ridiculously flowing.)
4) It is a Japanese import.
5) It is supposed to have some greater meaning about harmony or nature or true love or something.
Did you figure it out? It is the movie "Ponyo".
We have a tradition of watching a family movie on Sunday afternoons. As a child my family always watched "Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights and I remember those times fondly. Now we use our handy Netflix to pick one family friendly movie a week. This week I convinced the family to watch "Ponyo" because it was rated "G" and I remember vaguely hearing some good reviews of it a couple of years ago.
For some inexplicable reason, my kids LOVED it. I myself was kind of freaked out by the whole thing. Particularly by Ponyo's parents - the androgynous looking father with the hideous purple bags under his eyes and the bafflingly large aforementioned Cate Balnchett as the mother.
The kids want to watch it every day. I made a rule that they can watch a half hour of it per day. I can't decide if they would grow out of their Ponyo phase faster if I just let them watch the whole thing a couple of times or if I keep up the installment plan.
It's not all bad - the little boy in it has excellent manners that hopefully my children are noticing. Maybe they'll start calling all adults "San" from now on...
1) It is animated.
2) It is feature length.
3) It has a lot of big name stars lending their voices to it's characters. (Why does Cate Blanchett always gets roles of ethereal women with long flowing hair? In this case, ridiculously long and ridiculously flowing.)
4) It is a Japanese import.
5) It is supposed to have some greater meaning about harmony or nature or true love or something.
Did you figure it out? It is the movie "Ponyo".
We have a tradition of watching a family movie on Sunday afternoons. As a child my family always watched "Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights and I remember those times fondly. Now we use our handy Netflix to pick one family friendly movie a week. This week I convinced the family to watch "Ponyo" because it was rated "G" and I remember vaguely hearing some good reviews of it a couple of years ago.
For some inexplicable reason, my kids LOVED it. I myself was kind of freaked out by the whole thing. Particularly by Ponyo's parents - the androgynous looking father with the hideous purple bags under his eyes and the bafflingly large aforementioned Cate Balnchett as the mother.
The kids want to watch it every day. I made a rule that they can watch a half hour of it per day. I can't decide if they would grow out of their Ponyo phase faster if I just let them watch the whole thing a couple of times or if I keep up the installment plan.
It's not all bad - the little boy in it has excellent manners that hopefully my children are noticing. Maybe they'll start calling all adults "San" from now on...
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Snow Days
It snowed. They canceled school. It is really, really cold. They canceled school again. I'm unprepared for this. I had plans. Things to do. Projects to work on. CT's birthday is Thursday and I really need to go to the store. CT's birthday party is on Saturday and I really need to go the store. Our driveway is nice and clear behind Tyler's car, but apparently it is a solid sheet of ice behind mine. (I'm taking Tyler's word for this since I didn't step outside once today.) My mom called and told me to make cookies and sit down and read a good book. Well, frankly I'm too tired to make cookies. And I don't have a good book that I haven't already read 9,000 times. (The novelty of our quaint small town library has worn off. I miss having something new to read.) If I could hibernate I believe I would. Just wake me up for my due date.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
A Book
Tyler heard this book review on NPR as he was driving home from work the other day. When he got home he was telling me about it. He wondered if it was something I'd be interested in reading myself. And it was. I ordered it on Amazon as we were still discussing it. The book came the other day, but I refrained from starting it. I was saving it for some time when I really needed a book - like a waiting room or a park watching the kids play or something like that. Yesterday afternoon I decided I might as well read it now. So I did. It's not a long book. I read the whole thing last night.
After reading the reviews I didn't quite know what to expect. It was called "powerful" and "wildly important" and "an enlarging experience". On NPR they alluded to it being entertaining and funny. I'll be honest here - while I read it I wasn't laughing. After I finished I told Tyler that maybe for people who haven't actually lived it themselves this book is all of those things the reviewers said. For me, this book was simply true. Real. I liked the way the writer was able to express much of what I think and feel. I liked reading another woman's account of having a stillborn baby who seemed just as much at a loss of what came next as I was.
I can't resist posting just a sampling of excerpts that I really related to. Here is a passage on missing what you don't have (that could have come out of my journal but instead came from this book):
"He was a person. I missed him like a person. Seeing babies on the the street did not stab me with pain the way I know they stab some grieving women, those who have lost children or simply desperately want to have them. For me, other babies were other babies. They weren't who I was missing. Every now and then a baby could take me by surprise and make me weep...Babies born to mothers who'd been pregnant at the same time as me hurt a little. I didn't mind hearing about them, but I didn't want to meet them...One new mother enfolded me in a hug and said "Oh, Elizabeth, I am so sorry about your baby" - and I just wanted her to leave, because I didn't want to be a good and decent and functioning human being and ask after her baby. Even now I have a hard time with the babies born to friends around our baby's birth. It's not logical, and yet there it is: this one is one month older, this one three weeks younger. But mostly I just missed my own child."
One of the big issues I continue to struggle with is how we all deal with grief, how we offer comfort to others - or not. She had this to say about helping others grieve:
"...you need everyone you know after a disaster, becasue there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy. I needed all of it...to know that other people were sad made my baby more real. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn't."
I have to stop myself or I'll end up quoting half the book here, so this is the last one:
"After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything's changed: you no longer recognize the form of your days. There's a hole. It's person shaped and it follows you everywhere, to bed, to the dinner table, in the car. For us what was killing us was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life."
I'm glad I read this book. I finally feel like here is a woman who would understand me. Who would want to understand me. I'm not quite sure how I would react to this book if I hadn't been through something like it myself...but I feel there is always something valuable about trying to see things from another person's perspective. (If you're interested, my copy is available for borrowing.)
After reading the reviews I didn't quite know what to expect. It was called "powerful" and "wildly important" and "an enlarging experience". On NPR they alluded to it being entertaining and funny. I'll be honest here - while I read it I wasn't laughing. After I finished I told Tyler that maybe for people who haven't actually lived it themselves this book is all of those things the reviewers said. For me, this book was simply true. Real. I liked the way the writer was able to express much of what I think and feel. I liked reading another woman's account of having a stillborn baby who seemed just as much at a loss of what came next as I was.
I can't resist posting just a sampling of excerpts that I really related to. Here is a passage on missing what you don't have (that could have come out of my journal but instead came from this book):
"He was a person. I missed him like a person. Seeing babies on the the street did not stab me with pain the way I know they stab some grieving women, those who have lost children or simply desperately want to have them. For me, other babies were other babies. They weren't who I was missing. Every now and then a baby could take me by surprise and make me weep...Babies born to mothers who'd been pregnant at the same time as me hurt a little. I didn't mind hearing about them, but I didn't want to meet them...One new mother enfolded me in a hug and said "Oh, Elizabeth, I am so sorry about your baby" - and I just wanted her to leave, because I didn't want to be a good and decent and functioning human being and ask after her baby. Even now I have a hard time with the babies born to friends around our baby's birth. It's not logical, and yet there it is: this one is one month older, this one three weeks younger. But mostly I just missed my own child."
One of the big issues I continue to struggle with is how we all deal with grief, how we offer comfort to others - or not. She had this to say about helping others grieve:
"...you need everyone you know after a disaster, becasue there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy. I needed all of it...to know that other people were sad made my baby more real. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn't."
I have to stop myself or I'll end up quoting half the book here, so this is the last one:
"After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything's changed: you no longer recognize the form of your days. There's a hole. It's person shaped and it follows you everywhere, to bed, to the dinner table, in the car. For us what was killing us was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life."
I'm glad I read this book. I finally feel like here is a woman who would understand me. Who would want to understand me. I'm not quite sure how I would react to this book if I hadn't been through something like it myself...but I feel there is always something valuable about trying to see things from another person's perspective. (If you're interested, my copy is available for borrowing.)
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