Nipper

Isaac fell asleep on my chest on the couch yesterday. Neither of my kids has ever done that so far. Actually, except in the first few weeks I've never even seen either of them drift off since they do that in the privacy of their wee little beds.

I guess this was one of those new mom moments I somehow missed over the last three years. It's kinda nice to be able to say, without a doubt, that this is no parenting hormone gush. The sweet treebark smell of his hair, the warmth and weight of his chest, the light quick snore and smushy cheek undo me.

I hope he does it again soon.

Jona(than) in the belly of the fish

Aiiiiiiiiisaac

I'm not sure why he does it.

The thing about parenting a nine-month old is that you can't take their word for anything at all. They could look perfectly fine and be hiding some horrible disease. I watch House. I've seen how a little tic here or an out of place cry there could be hiding an allergy to air or somesuch.

So when he wakes up at 11:15, 3:30, 6 and 8... well, it's confusing. He used to sleep. I remember the days, sweet and carefree and smelling faintly of milk and honey. (Not that he can eat either yet.)

It makes me sleepy and incoherent. And irritable. And prone to not blogging.

And then he actually ASKED to wash his hands...

Isaac's Year-end Round-up

Isaac has been teething. He's had two big teeth on the bottom, perfect for all his lucrative exploited child modeling contracts. Now, he appears to be adding on in the upper story. Poor dude attempted to eat our entire couch the other day.

I think he's more adventurous than Toby was. He gets himself into the strangest trouble. A few months back we broke a wine glass and even with both of us cleaning it up I almost lost my mind the next day when I looked up to see him start to gum a largish shard. Somehow no blood was shed.

Tonight he made his distress sound (kind of like a dust-buster's whine) when he got himself stuck under the train table. As he ramped up into the "no, really, I'm in pain" octave, I sprinted over and pulled out the drawer to extract him. Turns out he was sort of half stuck in that drawer, so when I pulled it forward his head smacked right into the table's edge. Some rescue, sigh. Parent of the year moment, right there.

Lucky for me he's an easy boss. Lucky for him he figured out how to sleep twelve (12!) hours just after Thanksgiving and has not backslid at all. We were this close to shipping him off to a nunnery.

Actually, at my last recital I played this incredible piece written for voice by Samuel Barber and the text was all based on a vision of St. Ita about Mary's nursing Jesus. Talking about breastfeeding the creator of the universe seems kinda creepy or maybe kinda Hindu, but the text is pretty cool. I know the words don't exactly come through the viola so much, but I do look at it and I usually read a bit of it when I'm performing.

My fav line: Infant Jesus at my breast, Nothing in this world is true.
There's a version on Youtube of everything these days, ain't there?

I am feeling very sentimental at night when Isaac's getting settled for bed. I guess I will miss this season... he makes little hummy sounds until I sing him something. He also giggles if I lift his feet & drop them, and bats away my hand if I play with his ears. They're hard to leave alone, who could blame me?

Currents

We're currently experiencing busy days and sleepy nights. An actual post will be up soon.

Meanwhile, look! The weather is perfect, and the train table is finally painted.

Bonding begins with 99 cent die-cast metal.

Toby has taken upon himself the important task of educating Isaac about the deep importance of all things wheeled.


Isaac adores him already, and is very trusting. Plus, he likes the bouncer to bounce.


Toby's favorite pose as big brother.

Aisaac

I think I went back to gigging a bit too soon.

Don't get me wrong, both the orchestras I've played with this past month have been great. The first was for a conductor I adore who reminds me of a favorite uncle and we did Missa Solemnis with lovely soloists and the only thing I can think to complain of is that the venue was a shmancy catholic church and sounded exactly like a deafening bathroom. My hands would have been protecting my ears if it weren't for the viola they were full of.

Isaac was only a few weeks old at the first rehearsal for that noise, so J brought him to me at the breaks to eat. Let's take a minute and be thankful someone invented this nursing privacy blanket thingy, shall we? I'm working on making myself a couple of knock-offs so I can have one in every bag. If you have a pregnant friend who's planning to boob the kid, get them one of these puppies and I swear she'll remember you in her will.

I also played with the Portland opera, and I am trying to figure out if the woman who sang Aida sold her soul to get her voice or is simply an angel on break from the sparkling gates of heaven. She reminds me of Renee Fleming, whom I might cyber-stalk if I were a socially dysfunctional tecky dude. Amneris kicked it old school, too. I had no idea how much I enjoy Aida- it was almost never a countdown of page turns to the final notes, which really are haunting despite always being described as such by critics.


The conductor, who must be very closely related to Jerry Stiller, was fantastic. I am not kidding- these are four-hour rehearsals and the time skips by. Everyone calling him Gigi made me feel more familiar than we are, like I might bump into him at a streetside cafe in Venice, peer over my huge black sunglasses and offer to buy him a glass of wine while he fawns over my adorably precocious yet incredibly well behaved wonder children.

So why then, in the midst of all the wine and roses, did I wish I weren't working?

Isaac's early weeks were, as everyone warned, entirely different than our memory of Toby's. We joke that he had two moods: asleep and pissed. He has an adorable scowl. Once after I got stuck in old-people traffic exiting the hall's parking garage, J greeted me with a screaming baby and "What HAPPened?" before I could even put down my case. In his defense, there are few circles of hell deeper than The Baby Won't Ever Stop Screaming. Now that Isaac's got a few months under his wee little belt, the learning-a-stick-after-driving-an-automatic phase has mostly passed and we've laid off comparing every single thing he does to rosy memories of his big brother. That, and he has indeed stopped screaming. (mostly)

It surprises me, though, how much just one gig on my schedule made in the feeling of a day or even a week. He probably picked up on my tension. I've probably ruined him something awful by failing to grow my hair seven feet long and wear gingham recreationally, but he was in trouble from the beginning what with a viola being practiced within earshot and such.

In conclusion, if we have another one of these things, I hope I remember to beg off any work for the first three or four months. Even though he was only ever in my hands or his dad's and even though it was nice to get out and smell the Egyptians (Aiiiiida!).

My love language is sleep.

The new guy insists on getting up every two hours at night. He sleeps better during the day, mostly. When he's not waking up, he's grunting or snoring or passing gas so loud you'd think a very large man with medical problems has come for a visit. I am not a heavy sleeper.

I thought I'd be posting more than mushy fauning over my husband type of stuff now, I even had a few thoughts flit through my brain yesterday while I was driving. By the time I got home all that was left of them was the impression that there was something I meant get done on the computer.

We have our fabulous family coming to town this weekend, and rehearsals for Aida start Saturday. Both are things I'm looking forward to. The thing about sleep deprivation is that it could just cause me to jot down things my inlaws tell me in my music and bring the conductor a beer and an extra pillow. Though maybe neither would mind the switch so much, who knows?

After an absence from blogging, it seems a post of some depth would be required. Too bad!

We are honestly having a great time with Isaac. He is so beautiful, I can and do stare at him literally for hours.

Toby has been very casual about the whole thing. At the hospital he was enamored of J's banana muffin and could have cared less that a new wee sheriff was in the room. For the first two days after we came home, he ran around like his pants were on fire in a spot-on imitation of tired-hungry-hyper Toby. After that he's been his two year-old self. He actually offered Isaac his blanket once or twice. This is the Toby equivalent of the shirt off his back, so we were impressed.

We have so much help it's almost embarrassing. Mom and Dad are Toby's playmate slaves of choice and they also do a mean job pampering us with beer & sherbert-stocked fridges and same-day laundry service. I think we'll have a bunch more kids just to score the sweet set-up. But J can be the pregnant one this time.

I'm too lazy to get my USB chord and camera to post any more pictures... but wait! My phone is by my foot, and I think I might have something cute in there somewhere... yep:

Piles of Isaac

Look how little! And he can already blow kisses.










Rad hair, baaaaaad attitude.










Imitating mama in labor.










Heart-shaped nostrils, special ordered.











Mwah.

Isaac Thomas

March 24, 3:35am
8 lbs 10 oz
21.5 inches

We're all happily lazing in our hospital suite, letting them do the laundry and cooking for a couple of nights. Plus I like the bendy bed. Everything went perfectly and I am so pleased to meet him.

Thank God!

POV

{Should you be so curious, you'll have to click the pics to enlarge and see the pirate ship in the first one and the relevant text in the second.}




Pirate stories, especially the Shanghai-ed variety, are fun because people are often whisked away from the daily grind and forced into a complete otherness of perspective. When I was a kid I daydreamed about being kidnapped by the circus or transported back to Mozart's time (where I would be the best player EVER and would also understand that rats carry the plague) or I would be taken on some kind of adventure in which my family would unknowingly be saved by my incredible horsemanship and Wonder Woman costume. I was (was?) a daydreamy kid. Mom often had to remind me to "stop dawdling" and put on my other sock as I sat on my bed in a reverie on school days.

The hijacking of my life by my family feels a bit like one of these imaginary sagas. Daring situations come up, new characters are introduced, the path just gets randomer. Today it occurred to me that I like it that way. Call it a new flood of hormones on an already swollen sea, but the next year is looking more like a beacon and less like a burden by the day.

I recently posted a 35 x 35 list of things I wanted to do before turning 35 in May. That pipe dream has been revised as I have been busy doing much more important things like building a human being in my middle and eating several tankards of refined sugar daily. So, as owner-operator of this whole shebang, I have revised my list and expanded the deadline such that these things are now to be completed throughout my 35th year.

Just to avoid boring you to death, I'll refrain from including my list here, but maybe it will show up somewhere later if I find it motivating. My mom's not so likely to remind me to keep going with this, so maybe I'll be off on other trails and May 2009 will come and go without a whimper. I think I'll stay tuned to find out. You can see the old version here. For the record, I've completed 4.267 out of 35. That's 12.19 percent.

Heart wide open, fully invested life is all a matter of your POV.

Week 38 Round-up

I've caught that dreaded third-trimester bug, you know, the one where the preggo cannot stop watching Discovery Health shows involving rare disorders and high-risk deliveries. I have a few hours to myself right now and I spent part of it wallowing in frightening medical possibilities, with Toby at the Aumsville toddler ranch while I take care of some high powered (cough) viola career-related jockeying and teach a student in Portland. Mostly I had my bible study come over and also had tea with my pianist while we talked about what we wanna play this year.

As to my balance of ambition/parenting dilemnas, I think I have found a partial solution for at least the next few years. My focus will turn to my duo, building the viola studio at the college, and to opportunities I can arrange for myself. Those are the things I enjoy most artistically anyway. Those are also the most easily self-driven aspects of classical freelancing and they afford me the most control. I would rather put my energy there than in drumming up gigs and networking, though there are a few ensembles I will always agree to play when they call.

A brilliant friend reminded me about grace this week- and especially that it can include the ability to be okay with a different circumstance than one has planned. This relinquishment of control and trust in grace applies both in sacrifice and in receipt of energies and abilities.

A phrase from a song lyric has been rattling around my head: heart wide open. I want that in these preschool, busy, boring, frenetic, rapid adaptation years. In the three most important years of my life (marriage, Toby's birth, and now Isaac's arrival) I've always longed for the ability to be present, to slow down, to remember and absorb my own days.

I tease and complain about pregnancy, but I hope I don't forget what it's like to actually contain all this life, otherness, potential.

And I hope he comes soon.

28 days!

Because I don't count today or the day I'm actually due, there are just 28 days left on this hormone trip! Last stop, everybody off, this train is speeding back to the yard to remedy all misshapenness.

28 days is a fun thing to google, because you come up with either everyone's favorite sweatpants & beer movie star Sandra Bullock or a deadly virus.

I'm doing a little dance. It's jiggly, but it's mine.

Tricksy

...or, How to Trick Your Man Into Finally Taking the Family for a Tram Ride.

Imagine you are in early labor, and get the midwife-on-call to agree enough to have you all trek into town. While waiting the hour for test results (all negative) and having all uterine activity stall immediately upon entering the hospital (just like when it was Toby's turn) you might scam a nice gardenburger and a tram-ride out of the somewhat humiliating deal.

I'm still feeling crampy. Eight more weeks of this??

Gifts!

Lately life is like being in an Oprah show audience over at casa del jwards- gifts are piling up under all our chairs.



We just got this sweater set in a package from the Kalispell grandparents. People who can knit are cool, and tend to be incredibly generous to boot. I love the hat- he wore it to church this morning with a brown plaid flannel and I felt like we were almost as hip as the other parents. He's going to be wearing that thing all the time.

The chair he's sitting on's from my aunt & uncle in Spokane. They are practically professional thrift & antiquers and we've benefited a bunch from their finds since Toby's arrival. They are my home-decor-finding idols.

Then there's that black fabric photography background. It came from my parents to J for Christmas, and it is going to be so rad to have that thing. Everything looks better in front of it. I mean, even this tattooed freak's enormous pregnant belly seems practically... naturalesque.

The Braxton sucks sermon.

Sorry, blog. I'm pretty tired lately.

I spend a lot of time cursing Toni Braxton. Okay, I know they're really called Braxton-Hicks, but whatever you call them, practice contractions are of the devil. Besides, she clearly has poor taste in how to help endorse dental floss and Charmin.

Anyway, I'm running around feeling all my insides tense up and wondering if we are going to go from a family of three to five in a short period of time, maybe even shorter than we thought. And I wonder if I will be allowed to have a life outside mommyhood between now and my first year in the AARP. And if maybe parenting's what I'm supposed to do to the exclusion of other stuff. And whether I can do all this and still focus on my faith and my marriage let alone my music. Yup, MY. Mine. Me me me. I feel no guilt saying I've gotta be able to honestly commit to the roles I choose, especially parenting.

I've been reading John Piper's Future Grace, and it has already changed the way I thought about how we are supposed to live. The modern Church's way of sort of making good living a required & expected response to God, a "thank-you" lived out to repay Him, cheapens grace. It's unattractive to non-believers because it is all premised on a transaction-style dead and dusty faith. You're either in... or you're out. Worse, it's not what's emphasized by God in the Bible. Piper makes a very convincing case for our living by reliance and joy and thankfulness for Future Grace- well, here are some of my favorite of his words:

If grace is to be free- which is the very meaning of grace- we cannot view it as something to be repaid... {the debtor's ethic}
[and]
The Bible does not assume the true believers will have no anxieties. Instead the Bible tells us how to fight when they strike.
[and]
This is not decoration on the permanent structure of Christian life, it is what makes the Christian life permanent. We live moment by moment from the strength of future grace...

This is a radical idea, and it brings the emphasis back to a lively and almost dangerously current view of faith. There should be no worldly safety in being a Christian (incidentally, no guarantee of prosperity either). God's got us in a world full of all kinds of challenges but even greater piles of grace are available and God deigns to allow his grace to show (be glorified!) through us. It should be a little scary to ask for opportunities to be given those gifts, if we really understand what we're asking.

Just in case anyone's still reading, looky what Toby ate for dessert after lunch. Playdough!!

Horseshoes and hand grenades...

Can I just say, I'm really looking forward to the moment in time when science and medicine and Star Trek all align to create one of these little electric shaver-looking body scanner devices they wave over you to see exactly what is happening in your body in no uncertain terms?

I had a regular OB check-up on Monday, and it was the one where they do a glucose screen to see if you have gestational diabetes. You have to drink an unpleasant sweet syrup (why don't they just give the pregnant ladies a doughnut?!), wait an hour and then have your blood tested to see if your body has freaked out or whether you should allow yourself all the Egg Nog Latte's your heart desires for the remaining 2.5 months of hugeness. Mine was apparently fine because no one has called to tell me otherwise, but I wanted to tell you all about my doughnut idea before somebody else publishes it.

What was a little widgy was my protein level. They tested twice (it's a pee-in-a-cup type test, for which people in their third trimester have some seriously Olympian skillz) and could basically only say, "it looks somewhere between trace and positive."

This happened a few months back with another test (are you leaking, are you leaking, ew that's gross! ew that's gross! etc...), where they said it seemed pretty much kinda okay-ish "except maybe for one spot" and just recommended I think happy thoughts and let them know if my check engine or holy crap I'm about to have a baby light came on during the course of the day...

My hospital (OHSU) is very impressive looking. The Center for Women's Health is in the newest part, where the shiny silver tram lands, and is packed with expensive looking art and luminescent glass wall tiles. It's reassuringly posh. Point being, when I pee in a cup, I expect them to know for sure what it means- and to spare me the tea-leaf reader's digest.

Hmphh. I suppose I'll just have to waddle through the week with my whatever anxiety I couldn't park on my blog in tow.

Claude's Holiday Cheer

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
~Claude Debussy



In my viola-piano duo we do a Debussy Nocturne and it's been in my head all day. It's very impression-y and I feel there should be some tutued nymphs (are sylphs a thing or am I making that up?) flitting about to properly represent where my head's at. I've been trying to pay attention to the new guy kicking and such, so I don't miss it and kick myself later. My mind wandered around and finally slunk up on a realization: I haven't been thinking of him as an actual person yet at all. Excitement is tempered by parenting-career anxiety and by physical discomfort at this point. I'm getting there, little guy- good thing you people bake for such a long time. Gives me a chance to look beyond my own navel and remember you are on the way.