Ten on Tuesday

1.What can I say? I just have a lot to write about these days. And, well, I'm a third of a way into this wonderful stretch of maternity leave. I'm feeling a little bit like a stay-at-home-mama, and really enjoying it. Which isn't to say I won't be ready and happy to go back to work when the time comes. Just that this is nice. Really nice.

2. We went to church on Sunday. Juliette learned about Namaan during Sunday School, and Genevieve slept in my arms throughout the whole service. When I received communion, I touched the bread to her lips before I ate it, and kissed her on the forehead after I drank the juice. Welcome to the table, little one.

3. I love cloth diapers; there's just something so sweet about wrapping a clean rectangle of cotton around a baby's bum. We unsuccessfully tried to use borrowed all-in-ones for the early newborn days, but we had a lot of leaks and a hard time getting the nubby fabrics clean. So we're back with cheap, simple prefolds and proraps. And man, the nifty washable bag for dirty diapers makes laundry even easier. If you're on the market for diapers, I highly recommend ordering from Dy-Dee, the diaper service we briefly used in California. Their diapers and wraps are way cheaper than most.

4. How about some *riveting* footage of a sleeping newborn? You have to turn up your sound to get the full effect.

5. I love summertime meals. Juliette and I brought our plates out to our new front steps yesterday.The blurry light green stuff on my plate is a salad of local cabbage, a cucumber from a friend's garden, a can of garbanzo beans, and a dressing of olive oil, lemon, and garlic. It's a variation of a Molly Wizenberg recipe, and super yummy.

6. I've been using cloth napkins since I moved in with Lisa in 2001, and only just thought of a solution to the Which Napkin Was Mine Again? conundrum: napkin rings. Now we can reuse our still-clean-enough napkins without wondering if those were our toast crumbs. Those were the least gaudy napkin rings at Pier One, where the napkin rings spectrum goes from Gaudy to Super Special Extreme Gaudy with Sequins On Top.

7. During my last back outtage, I got a massage at the local chain. I signed up for the discount monthly plan, which means that for the next year I will get one massage a month. Given my history of back issues, I'm feeling like it's high time I start getting proactive. I will be counting down the days until the 28th, when I'm eligible for my next massage.

8. We had a locksmith come by today to add a deadbolt, and he was so good with Juliette, who peppered him with a zillion questions. He told her how great it was she asked questions, how lucky she was to have a sister, how she could be a locksmith if she wanted to when she grows up, and how she was so smart she might also think about being a doctor or lawyer. (This, after we'd been at the park earlier and I overheard a mother chide her son for wanting to play with Juliette's doll stroller, "Boys don't play with strollers!") As it turns out, the friendly locksmith has five daughters of his own, two of whom grew up to be farmers who drive big tractors and know how to weld. This man clearly knows how to empower girls.

9. Best ice cream recipe yet: mix 2/3 cup sugar with 1 cup peanut butter. Add one cup whole milk, one cup heavy cream, and one teaspoon vanilla. Pour it into the ice cream maker and run until it's frozen. I seriously said "wow" after every single bite. (I just found out that they sell heavy cream in bulk at Costco. Never thought I'd be the sort of person to buy heavy cream in bulk. And now we know why they were selling the ice cream makers for so cheap!)

10. I was interviewed in the most recent issue of the Christian Century. I'm really pleased with how it turned out; I got to give props to many of the people and organizations that have been so important to my ministry. And, I nearly had a conniption when I read another article in the same issue, about the recent Wild Goose Festival - it quotes Karin Bergquist from Over the Rhine. As if it weren't enough to be in my favorite magazine, to be in my favorite magazine with my favorite band!

The Big Kid, the Baby, and the Book

Other than the recounting of our jaunt with jaundice (gee, what a phrase!), things have been peachy around here. On my blog, and "in real life," as they say.

To say that things weren't entirely peachy in the first weeks of Juliette's life is an understatement. She was lovely - don't get me wrong. Yes, she screamed. (A lot.) She didn't sleep. (At all.) She has, in every way, been a marvel in our lives, from day one to day one thousand.

Though you might not have detected it from the fairly cheerful blog posts I kept up during that era, I was kind of a train wreck.

Motherhood hit me hard. In retrospect, I was clearly experiencing postpartum depression. I was obsessed with what went wrong during Juliette's birth, just profoundly disappointed that I hadn't had the beautiful childbirth experience I'd hoped for. Nursing was painful and frustrating. My anxiety that something could happen to the baby was debilitating. When my back went out, I plumb near lost my mind. I remember bawling my eyes out for what seemed like hours, bewildered by how much pain I was in, how foreign my body looked and felt, how much I loved and feared the child at my breast, how I was convinced that I would never recognize my life or my self again.

This time, I made ice cream on the second day home from the hospital. Ice cream! I did the dishes while I was in labor. I threw my back out again, as I dreaded but expected, because when my three-year-old landed head first on a hard tile floor, nothing in the whole wide world could have stopped me from scooping her into my arms.

The fact is this: I don't recognize my life or self anymore. This motherhood gig has changed me in such profound ways my pre-parenting persona would just stand there dumbfounded if she happened to encounter the mother of Juliette and Genevieve.

(Conversely, I wouldn't step foot in my college apartment kitchen; my younger self barely washed dishes at all, let alone in between bursts of pain.)

That feeling I had that my life was over wasn't entirely false. Life as I knew it was over, and thank God for that. In the three and a half years since Juliette's birth, I've lurched and lunged into an infinitely more fulfilling existence. And I don't just mean the emergence of my latent domestic side or even the expansion of my capacity to take care of others, though those are significant. My marriage, which once seemed plagued with a sickness unto death, was restored to a far greater health than we had ever known. My faith, which once sounded like a hollow wall if you knocked on it, crumbled, and on those broken pieces a lasting foundation was finally constructed.

Oh, and: I wrote a book about it.

I've been a little panicky about the publication of Any Day a Beautiful Change: A Story of Faith and Family. Though the book shares the same name as my blog, it's not a repackaging of blog posts. The manuscript addresses stuff I haven't touched on the internet. I'm not used to feeling so vulnerable. But in these last few weeks, I've thought about the book quite a bit, and it dawned on me: that book is partially why I'm doing so well right now. It put the hard-learned lessons and God-given graces into writing. I can't forsake the changes or deny the truth; I have written proof.

There's a distinction I want to make. The process of writing is therapeutic to many people. I won't go so far as to say that writing isn't therapeutic for me. It is, though the healing factor is abated by how hard I work to string words together, and how keenly aware of the audience those strings of words might reach. (There's a reason I'm a blogger, not a keeper of private journals.)

Here's the distinction: what seems so helpful to me all of a sudden about the book I wrote last year isn't that I wrote it; it's what I wrote. There are observations about childbirth that help me chill out when - once again - things didn't go exactly as I'd hoped. There are reflections about anxiety that remind me to Be Still and Know That God Is God. And last night, when lack of sleep and stress were starting to wear away at our capacity to love one another well, a soon-to-be-published manuscript compelled me to walk downstairs and apologize.

If what I wrote about the beautiful changes in my life - in our lives - continues to help me... maybe it will help other people, too.

That would be great. Downright peachy, in fact.

~ ~ ~

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’ (Isaiah 52:7)

A Tale of Two Blankets

There's nothing quite like a blanket homemade by someone who loves you.

This week, Genevieve was the lucky recipient of two extremely special blankets.

The first came from Florida. My grandmother - who was a serious professional knitter in her day - knit it, and my Aunt Dee Dee sent it along. It's just lovely.
And then the second one follows in the tradition of Juliette's Nikki McClure-themed quilt, and was made by our friends from SBCC, Karen and her niece Codyanne.

(It is totally fitting that Genevieve's quilt is inspired by Awake to Nap, because she actually sleeps.)
Oh, Genevieve Love... you are loved.

About Borders

This morning the Pershey girls spent an hour or so at Borders. (We also went to the pediatrician, car wash, and grocery store. I was proud of all three of us for handling all those errands so swimmingly.) I'm sad about Borders closing down, though I've always been fairly ambivalent about it, having been sad about the bookstores Borders helped run out of business.

A few thoughts... Jumbled, as usual:

My family was entranced by Borders when the first one near us opened. It was far enough away that we didn't go often, but when we did it was a total Event. I remember reading all of Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block at Borders, probably when I was about 12 years old, and being amazed that no one was stopping me.

One of the reasons I took the girls to Borders today was that I thought it would be a good place to nurse Genevieve. You know, on account all those comfy chairs they put out to enable people to read the merchandise. The chairs had been removed. Borders as a destination, a hangout, is already gone.

Ben and I went to Borders the night Deacon died, because we couldn't bear to be in the house. Milling about the books was exactly what we needed.

The saddest part was seeing all the employees dutifully reorganizing the shrinking inventory. By all accounts, people liked working at Borders. And even those that didn't, now they are losing their jobs, and in the interim have to put up with all these bargain shoppers trolling the 30% off racks.

I have never, in the many years I've been purchasing books from Amazon, seen nor spoken to an Amazon employee.

When I paid for our selections, I stopped myself from saying anything to the woman at the counter, beyond the usual niceties. I would imagine she has heard the earnest lamentations of far too many customers.

I bought several children's books for gifts, as well as two books for myself: The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure, and I Is an Other by James Geary. The first is all Little House on the Prairie geekery, and the second is about the way metaphor influences the way we think and function. I had heard of one, thanks to Goodreads, but probably wouldn't have happened upon the other without perusing the shelves of the local bookstore.

Which we no longer have.

Unlikely to Forget: Jaundice

At first I was afraid to say it out loud, thinking it would immediately jinx the situation. But it's true, at least this far: the transition from one to two children has been infinitely easier than the transition from none to one. Our parental temperaments are completely different this time around, and Juliette's temperament - which was, let's face it, a little tough as a baby - has been downright extraordinary.

That said, we've had two issues that are totally minor in the grand scheme of issues. I'm still recovering from my back pain, but before that there was the jaundice.

Genevieve's bilirubin count was high the second night of our hospital stay. By morning, it was high enough to merit twenty-four hours under the phototherapy lights. Upon hearing this news I cried, of course. It's just not what you want to hear. You don't want anything to be wrong, not even some little thing that can be fixed by fancy lightbulbs. And you want to go home. Like crazy.

Just the thought of her having to be in the nursery did me in. I swear, the whole time we were at the hospital I practically had to fight off the nurses who would come and try to convince me she should be wheeled off to the nursery. This child has been living inside of me for nine months; how can I just blithely wave goodbye for a few hours? But when she started her phototherapy, I only got 30 minutes with her every two hours, just long enough to nurse. I intentionally did not take a picture of her in the incubator, wearing the protective foam sunglasses. I didn't want to remember it, though I do.

So there was an initial upset that we had to stay, but it was clear fairly quickly that jaundice is common and the lights weren't terrible, and again, in the grand scheme of things, all was well.

And then I had to be discharged.

They explained that I could stay at the hospital, just not on the busy maternity floor. A nurse wheeled me down to my new room, in a bustling recovery unit. It was loud. But not just normal loud. More like: oh, there's a hospital renovation construction zone on the other side of my window loud. Really, really loud. But, whatever, they'll pack up and leave at five, right?

I immediately headed back up to the maternity ward, so I could sit vigil by the incubator until it was time to nurse Genevieve again. Only, the elevator we'd taken to the new floor inexplicably required a security clearance. I asked the lady at the desk, and she pointed me down the hall - way down the hall - to the guest elevator. The one we'd taken was for medical personnel only. (Not that anyone told me that; I hadn't realized it was my responsibility to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back out of the woods.) I started walking, which, you may recall, isn't the most comfortable activity for a woman who's only just given birth to an eight and a half pound baby less than forty-eight hours before.

Halfway to the elevator - I'm really not kidding, it was a long way away - the postpartum hormones kicked in. I tried to compose myself in a bathroom, but all I could think was: how am I going to do this every two hours, all night long? By the time I was buzzed in to the maternity ward, I was a weepy wreck. I solemnly promise that I did not intend to make a scene, but I'm happy to report that it worked. They let me move back into my room on the maternity floor, with the understanding that if a lot of babies were born I might be ousted in the night.

So: happy ending. I was near enough to nurse as often as she needed without having anymore nervous breakdowns, and we went home in the morning.

And here's Genevieve, perfectly pale at two weeks old. I didn't realize how much the bilirubin had discolored her skin until it fully cleared up.So grateful, so blessed.