Learning to let go

Ever since I had Benjamin I have been gripped by the fear that someday I may lose one of my children.  Children get sick or injured all the time.  And there is rarely a comforting explanation for why and when they do.  Better women and men than me have lost their precious sons and daughters.  I am scared to death of going through a similar trial and my active imagination plagues me with all the ways I could lose them.  It scares me to love them so much because I can only imagine the pain of seeing them in pain or the intense ache of living without them.

My constant fears were starting to really affect my sense of peace and happiness with my family.  I was trying to steel myself each day against the pain of future hurt.  And it was affecting my enjoyment of my family now.

And then this past Sunday I learned some terrible news.  One of my nephews had just lost his battle with HLH, a life threatening immunodeficiency disorder which had required two bone marrow transplants.  He was thirteen.  It was a battle that his mother had fought with him as well.  She stayed with him almost  every day of his illness.  Her facebook profile picture was a poster which read "some people never meet their hero-- I gave birth to mine."

My sister in law was living my nightmare-- of saying goodbye to the precious child she had birthed and taught and raised and loved and scolded and tucked into bed.  I ached for her.  While her son's pain is over, there is no short path when it comes to a mother's healing.

It should have made me more paranoid-- seeing in reality what usually only exists in my imagination.  But in a strange way, as I contemplated this sad moment for my family, I began to let go.

I realized that there are very few things I can control in my life.  I can't prevent every ill from happening.  I can't perfectly protect my children.  I can't ensure they will make it to adulthood with their self-esteem and limbs intact.  I can't prevent myself from feeling the hurt that occurs when you suffer with another's suffering.  Even Jesus wept when his close friends felt sorrow and loss.  It is natural to love deeply.  It is natural to feel pain.  But it is entirely unnecessary to so anticipate pain that you live with it constantly.

Here are the things I can control:

I can kiss Benjamin hundreds of times a day if I want to.  I can tell Anna that I love her often.  I can hug my kids tighter and express my admiration and appreciation more.  I can choose to sit and hold my son when I could be cleaning.  I can choose to tickle Anna when there are dishes in the sink waiting to be loaded.  I can choose to play with my kids instead of surfing the internet on my phone.  I can choose to be happy and in the moment as I spend these beautiful days with them.  And if the future leads me down a path I do not choose or want to go, then I will pray for the strength to bear it then, and I will remember that during the time I had my children close, I loved them...with everything.

Anna is growing up

Life is so busy.  And at the end of the day, I find that sometimes the only thing I have the energy for is falling asleep while I watch TV and drool.  But every day there is some new sweetness or breathtakingly memorable moment or frustrating evidence that our daughter is evolving into a superspecies of toddler.  And I don't want to forget any of it-- even the hard moments.  So here is a brief sum up of the past few months of Anna activity.

Our Anna banana is such a sweet, quirky girl!  She is 3 1/2 feet of awesomeness and attitude.  She does not like to be forced into anything.  She is all independence.  She is strong and brave and fast and incredibly girly and feminine all wrapped into one wiggly "don't hug me while I'm on the move" kind of girl.

This is her "ghost" face in preparation for Halloween.

Anna still loves puppets.  Richard and she made sock puppets at the Salmon festival this year.  Anna's imagination has really kicked into gear the past few months so she can supply the details of the stories we play out together.

Anna is growing up.  Sometimes too fast, and sometimes, not fast enough.  She has moved to a toddler bed, that I am really not sure how much she uses.  She sure doesn't nap there, but I think occasionally she sleeps there at night...with the light on.  We think she might sleep walk.  Sometimes we find her curled up in front of our door.  Sometimes she has gotten a yogurt or crackers and will be eating them at 3 am.  Sometimes she comes into our room completely naked, looking confused as to why she is there.  Sometimes we will find her surrounded by books or toys or her dollhouse.  On any given morning, I don't know how much of the previous night she has slept.  I must say, for a toddler who gets much less sleep than she needs, she holds herself together remarkably well.

Anna also started preschool this fall.  We were both SO ready for it.  She didn't look back once we were in the door.  She has made so many friends.  Anna operates under the assumption that people like her, so she is completely confident with other kids, parents, teachers, etc. She will join in almost any activity and she likes to tell everyone around her what she is thinking and what she is doing.

Anna loves going to school.  She loves packing her backpack, putting it on, and heading out the door.  Every day she paints.  I have dozens of Mark Rothko knockoffs to show for it :)  She also spends an inordinate amount of time at the snack table.  One day, one of the teachers told me that Anna had seemed very hungry that day and ate a lot of snacks.  All I could tell her is that she had already had two bowls of cereal that morning.  The kid has an incredible appetite and is constantly moving!

Richard taught Anna how to iron last week.  Anna is interested in whatever we are doing.  She wants to put on makeup when I put on makeup, and she wanted to iron when Richard was ironing (because I do NONE of the ironing in our house).  After she learns how to do something she likes to repeat back what she has learned.  She becomes the teacher.  She will tell you step by step how to do something.  I think it makes her feel very important.

Anna is quite the daddy's girl.  One of the unexpected benefits from having a second child is that Anna has re-discovered how wonderful it is to have a loving daddy.  There have been times in the past when Anna would scream and run away from Richard and only want to talk to me, but now they are practically inseparable when he is not at work.  Richard's dream came true the first time she ran into his arms when he walked in the door.  Now she has graduated to hugging him and asking him how his day at work went (like I said, she picks up on things!)

We woke up this morning to find that Anna had taken care of breakfast!
Her favorite cereal is frosted mini wheats, so she took out some frying pans and poured us a couple of very large "bowls" of her favorite breakfast food.

Lately Anna is obsessed with "Fancy Nancy" books.  She loves them and we have pretty much cleaned out the library of its stock.  I love the series because they teach Anna all sorts of fancy new words.  Like her parents, Anna is a bonafide logolept.
She loves them so much that she has taken to reading them on her own and taking the books with her everywhere.  Richard was putting Benjamin to bed and when he came out to the living room again, he found that Anna had fallen asleep while reading one of her precious books.

Anna loves the outdoors and exploring and has become quite a hiker.  She has learned to watch for things like caterpillars, slugs, interesting leaves, rocks, and water formations.

Anna's favorite souvenir from any trip is a stick.  She loves sticks.  Lets just hope she learns to walk softly as well as carry a big stick :)

Anna is still in a princess phase.  I love the princess phase.  I love watching her in her beautiful gowns and I can tell that she feels really beautiful when she wears them.  She now has dresses for 4 princesses and shoes for 6.  Sometimes instead of stuffed animals, she takes her princess shoes to bed with her-- most notably the Belle slippers.  But she is also incredibly smart and loves to run and play with balls and manipulate playdough, and read read read!  I think she is really well rounded.  She plays equally well with both boys and girls.

Anna hates the sun.  She has told us several times "I hate the sun!!" (usually in her whiny crying voice as she cowers like a vampire). And the southern Utah girl in me cringes every time I hear her say it.  That's what we get for raising our children in the Pacific Northwest.  During the last trip we took with her through the land of the sun, we finally realized the key to happiness was buying Anna a pair of pink sunglasses.  Now she likes it when it is "too bright" (any day that is not completely overcast) because she gets to wear her new shades.

while we were in St. George, Anna decided her hair needed to be shorter so she grabbed some very dull pruning shears and started sawing at her hair.  Luckily, the tuft she got was on the side of her face and it looks like she has some feathery bangs now :)

I love these two videos of Anna.  They show her uninhibited artistic side as well as her athletic determined side.  In the first she sings an original song she created, complete with vibratto.  In the second video, she is running for the sake of running.  I love every power packed inch of this girl!!

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The Accidental Perfect Day

 I have spent the last decade of my life trying to create perfect days!  When they happen, they typically consist of a good outing, great food, and wonderful company.  A perfect day doesn't necessarily mean that nothing bad happens or that no mistakes are made.  To me, a perfect day is one that is so blissful that you would relive it over and over again.  The kind you try to memorize so you can think about it on not-so-perfect days, as a kind of hope that better times will come again.
And being the planner that I am, I usually plan out our summers, our falls, our Christmas season...and I try to fill up each day with "planned" remarkable moments and experiences.  Sometimes those days fall a little flat-- like the day I wanted to try out every Asian restaurant in the shopping center near our house...
And sometimes, the planned activity is so disappointing or underwhelming that you need graham crackers and chocolate ovaltine just to get over it-- like the ventriloquist whose recommended book to the audience of children was called "How to be a Ventriloquist" and whose mouth moves as blatantly as mine does when I play act with Anna.
But sometimes, without planning or purpose, you get a perfect day.  Last Saturday was such a day.  It was an unplanned, fly by the seat of our pants kind of day.  The kind of day where Richard and I decided we have everything we could ever want or need!  And we needed it because we had been experiencing a particularly long, stressful stretch of time for our family.

We decided to go for a long walk through the Mercer Slough Nature trails in the morning.  Days are especially perfect when you get an unexpected gift.  Like beautiful weather when it was forecast to be rainy.

 We took our umbrella (much to Anna's delight), but didn't need it at all.   The sun is such a flirt!

 I love autumn!  The colors are spectacular and there is something exhilarating about the combination of slightly brisk temperatures and sunshine.

 This is why I am glad we are staying around for another few years.  In the three years we have been here, I have never ran out of things to do or see.   And there never seems to be enough time for all the possibilities. Seattle continues to take my breath away (but gives plenty of O2 in return!).

 This is happy Richard!  He loves his new job.  He loves his daughter and his son, and when I don't make him go on family photo shoots, he usually loves his wife as well ;)

 Anna likes to explore.  Here she is holding what she pronounced as "the biggest leaf ever!"

 We finished our long walk at a fruit stand where we bought a big bag of Honeycrisp apples to eat on the way home.  Later, while I made pizza, Richard and Anna carved pumpkins.  This was Richard's special request for the day.

So there you have it.  A perfect day.  May there be many more in the future!

Scavenger Dash Seattle

For Richard's birthday this year, I struggled to think of an appropriate gift that would perfectly utilize Richard's raw intellectual talent as well as his manly physique and love of competition.

And then I found the Scavenger Dash Seattle.  Twelve clues, one city, one race to the finish line!

Benjamin was our third team-mate.  He didn't slow us down at all....except for those elevators we had to use...and that time I had to feed him...and the caution we had to use navigating the streets.  In actuality he probably helped us more than anything ;)

One of the first tasks we had to do was find someone to take a picture of us jumping that showed us both with feet off the floor.  Not a problem...since this is how we end every family prayer



Then we had the option of either building a human pyramid with strangers, or finding brussels sprouts. (I just realized I spell checked "brussels" and the name is in the picture...)

We had to balance ping pong balls around an obstacle course.

Get our picture taken with statues and landmarks all over the city

The statue above has been called the ugliest statue in Seattle.  It is called "Miser" and it is just outside the Grand Hyatt hotel.  It is supposed to represent the class distinction between good monopoly players and bad monopoly players...

This is a statue of Ivar somebody (of Ivar's Seafood) feeding the birds.  Apparently there was a plaque put up a long time ago instructing people to not feed the birds, so Ivar, being the very adult person that he is, asked to be dipped in bronze so that his non-compliance could be immortalized forever.

Richard didn't really need to ride the carousel for the race....he just really likes pretty horsies...

This is us making a donation to the pig at Pike Place.  It was only a nickel.  It might buy one homeless guy a cup of coffee at a very bad coffee stand.

WE finished in 34th place out of about 80 teams.  Next year, we are totally going to win!!

Benjamin rocked! We voted him MVP for the day.  He made absolutely no-complaint as we ran the 6 miles around Seattle.  This little man is a champ!

How to enjoy maternity leave

The maternity leave I am talking about is not my leave of absence from work, but my mother's!  The two weeks she spent with us were some of the most blissful of my life.  I don't think I have EVER had that much uninterrupted time with my mom.  In fact,  if/when we have more children, it will probably be almost exclusively because I want more time with my mom (okay, so that might be a slight exaggeration, but only just slight!).
I am NOT the kind of mom that gets a kick out of holing up indoors with their newborn for a month.  This is summer in Seattle, and not to be missed.  In preparing for my mother's visit, I kept telling her all the things I wanted to do with her once she got there, and she had to keep reminding me that she was coming because I was having a baby and that it would be okay if we just stayed at the house and she helped me out.  You would think that she would know me better than that!  I can't stay in the house if my mom is visiting and it is SUMMER in Seattle.  Nope, new baby notwithstanding, I had a whole list of things we were going to do together, and I have to say, I got almost all of them checked off the list!So we started going to the beach when Benjamin was just three days old!

The surest way for me to avoid post-partum depression is to have time outdoors every day.  Feeling the sunshine, walking on a beach, and watching my daughter run are the medicines I need for my mental health.

Benjamin...he just goes along for the ride most days.  He is so forgiving, and chill, and relaxed, and resilient.  He lets me go wherever I want and do whatever I want, and he seem to love me anyway.

WE ate lots of ice cream cones and popsicles

For some reason, I couldn't give up the cooking role entirely, even with my mom here.  I always have to have my hand in every pot, which Richard doesn't like for sanitation reasons.

We had to get the ubiquitous plastic swimming pool to help cool off the scorching 75 degree heat!

I love this picture of Anna showing Benjamin a little love.  He's got a lot of bald head for us to kiss.

We went for lots of walks together...
and my mom didn't so much walk as gracefully hobble.  She can't seem to keep her limbs intact.  Injuries are the only way my mom ever slows down.  When I was little, there was no one who could run faster than my mom could walk!

We examined lots of creatures.

We picked berries which was is my favorite NW activity!  These are blueberries.

We gathered wildflowers!

I may always compete with Anna for the love of my husband...he just adores her so much!

more visits to the lighthouse!

Eating Salmon burgers.

a great visit with my brother. Right now Benjamin looks more like Nate than he does me or Richard!

more berry picking-- this time big ripe raspberries.

I just didn't want to miss a single great summer moment, new baby notwithstanding.  I kept myself, Anna, and my mom busy every day with wonderful explorations and experiences.

Anna was actually a big help...eating all the raspberries before they went into the box.

I love my mom so much.  I tell my mom often that I have the soul of an only child but I trapped in the body of a middle child.  I wish I could have her all to myself, every day, forever.

We even went to a Mariners baseball game while my mom was here!

Anna actually likes the baseball games we go to.  She can follow pretty well and likes to see the men hit the ball with the stick.  And she never EVER got bored....for at least the first 20 minutes.

blueberry picking again.

We went to the science museum and got to pose as King Tut

my mom even took the opportunity to teach Anna about helping out around the house.

and of course, as many trips to the beach that we could handle. Benjamin is such a trooper.  He just goes wherever and sweetly puts up with all of our plans.

Anna and I took our own little trip to see the blue angels.  We got to stand in the middle of the I-90 floating bridge and watch them fly formations right above us.

We even saw a rock concert or two.  We had front row seats to the see the "Not Its" at Kelsey Creek Farm.

And puppet shows

And Shakespeare in the park!  We saw Twelvth Night.  Someday when we are filthy rich, we will give oodles of money to awesome free programs like this.

And Benjamin was just 6 weeks old when he took his first trip to the top of the Space Needle.