how we all dance.

I recently sent a couple of my latest homebrews to a friend in the Tahoe area. He took one out for a hike to enjoy along with the fresh mountain air:

IPA travels to Tahoe

Yes, that’s a real photo, no photoshop tricks here… I’m jealous, now my homebrew gets to travel more than I do!

The description for this, my latest IPA titled “New Year, New IPA”, is:

A boat-load of hops in a moderately malty wrapper.

It came out quite well, but next time I need to use whole leaf hops for the dry-hop to avoid hop sediment in the final product. I’ll be brewing again today with some slight modifications to the hop profile. Hopefully that will come out just as well or better…

When you have a newborn baby…

and you take dozens and dozens of photos in those first couple of weeks so that you will remember how tiny he is, and how intent on living he is…

and then it’s another day and you hook up your camera to your laptop to upload yet another batch of photos….

which makes the first two weeks of photos disappear….

you wish you could turn back time just by five minutes. Just five minutes. You wonder if it is real? You wonder if you could possibly have lost all your precious brand-new little person images in a split second? Are you that foolish?

Your mind flashes to the passage in the gospel about not storing up earthly treasures since they will only rot away anyway and earth isn’t your eternal home, but can that really apply to photographs? Photographs of brand new babies?

You call your husband, who is off skiing for the day, to tell him what you did, and surprise yourself by bursting into sobs – which is weird because you just never really cry – and he says he will see what he can do, they must still be there somewhere.

You spend the rest of the day assuming the worst, that the photos really are gone, and that you will not remember just how tiny and sweet that baby was in the first few days of his life.

Then your husband calls back and says that he was able to find the photos (yes from his phone while skiing) and that you just shouldn’t touch anything, your computer is just having trouble recognizing some data. So you don’t touch anything, not for another two whole weeks.

Then your husband spends most of his day off work locating things that need to be located, synching up things that need to be synched up, and the brand new baby photos are restored. And he is your knight in shining titanium.

It’s a boy! No, he doesn’t have a name yet, it’s rough assigning a permanent identity to a brand new, clean slate of a person.

Martin Luther King Day, 1.18.10

Home birth. If I could do this one over, though, I would have preferred to do an unassisted birth. This time there was too much chaos, too many interruptions pulling me out of my focus… and I am an introvert. Maybe I’ll write on that idea sometime.

Easy short labor, big healthy boy: 7lbs 14oz and 21.5 inches long. I’m going to check my midwife’s scale, though, he seemed so much bigger than Matthias who also had the same stats.

Family love:

The guys are pretty stoked on having another member in their man club.

Still using the newborn hat that my SF friend Lane knitted for me back in ‘96.

We have a photo just like this of Persephone from 13 years ago, similar little face peeking out from the same little hat and blanket. She’s good at holding a baby because she’s good at holding a cat.

Day Three trying out the “new” mei tai – straps salvaged from the old one, new body made from some more of that Ugandan batik from Mary. It’s been good for three baby carriers so far.

Also from Day Three – I made sure to snatch photos of the skinny newborn before he started changing and chunking up – which he has done quick style. Again like Matthias, he seems to be on the “gain a pound per week” plan.

Old tee shirt turned into a little dude hat – just in time for the Saints/Vikings playoffs game. This also assuages somewhat the disappointment Bret felt at not being able to get a Sons of Anarchy baby hat.

Pure glee – the world’s HAPPIEST big sister ever.

Last October I had the ridiculously good fortune to meet a kindred spirit living right in my neighborhood. We hesitantly began a friendship by sending a few emails, getting together a couple of times, that sort of thing. A few days into January I sent her another email and received back an automated message saying that she was offline for all of 2009 and that if I wanted to contact her I could call or write. I wondered what kind of virus had gotten into her mail server.

I looked to see if she had a Facebook account. She did. It was open to people in our network, so even though we weren’t “friends” yet, I could access her profile. Right there at the top was a message confirming the idea that she was offline for all of 2009.

And – I panicked. How were we supposed to develop our new friendship without emails and facebook status updates? Why did she have to do this to me, to trounce on my hopefulness for an exciting and fruitful mind-meld? How was I going to schedule her to come over for tea?

I called her. I sent her notes in the mail. She called back. We had tea. And bit by bit over the year she shared with me an occasional musing on her ‘net-free life, on making the decision to become more present to her family, breaking the addiction to constant email-checking, maybe turning her experience into a writing project. Parts of me were envious. I’ve often practiced, in small spurts, computer-free Sundays for the very purposes of being more aware of my immediate surroundings, being more productive in and around our home. I always find that I really enjoy my kids more on those days, and that I accomplish a frightening amount of non-cerebral work. The internet can cause us to become a bit frenetic and a lot distracted, and Jenny always seemed so peaceful. She still ran into people, she still went places, she still found things to do. All of these things were tangible, real, and local. She probably harvested a lot more value from each experience because she wasn’t simultaneously checking her phone for text messages or writing emails in her head.

Baby gift: fleece purchased locally, dyed and spun into yarn by Jenny while she was not occupied by the internet.

Jenny came back online this past weekend. Now she’s blogging about her experience and thoughts from the past year. Her writing is clean and clear, there is no bogginess. If you can stand the irony, check it out.

Emphasis on the “little.” I know it’s really hard to figure out just which of these kids is mine, right?

After the first few weeks of gymnastics, Rivendell decided she would prefer to do karate. Actually she’s been wanting to start almost since Matthias began about a year ago, but I was unsure about her commitment level… Anyway, we made her finish gymnastics before signing up for karate NOT because I believe in the finish-what-you-start theory of parenting (I don’t – if something doesn’t seem to have value, don’t waste any more of your time with it!) but because she needs more lessons in economics, both financial and time.

R.’s ability to focus and perform the moves is impressive – or maybe I’m just the mom that thinks so. Regardless, she does seem to be taking it more seriously than most of the other Little Ninjas. I wonder if therapists offer family discounts for so many people with over-achievement issues.

We DO thankfully get family discounts here. Persephone just started in the teen class, and when I go back, I will be free!

I didn’t use a pattern for this one (of course not) but hybridized my own design after studying some of the offerings at Clan Arans. I especially love the moss-filled V in the center panel and the upwards winding braid. I never thought of making one go up before! Grab your cable needle and go find your clan – or graft yourself into a more fashionable one.

Totally fearless little compact person.

She’s trading in her balance beam for a gi and a deep fighting stance though, and for that I am quite thankful.

The last one we made – maybe five or six years ago? – was a complete disaster. Maybe because I was still trying to bake without eggs and butter. This time, I hardly had anything to do with it, which is just the way I like things to be in my kitchen.

Matthias figured out all the elevations; I cut out the facades and realized that “measure twice, cut once” only works if you check the specs first. Oops. Back to the drawing board.

Practicing on the extra pieces. It’s sort of like a glue gun…

The face of accomplishment. (I wish she would let me comb her hair. I really do.)

Ours doesn’t look anything like the Martha Stewart one that inspired us, but it’s standing and that alone is nearly a miracle.

I have been at a complete loss for words lately – a little vampire is sucking up my life force right now. And of course, I’m perfectly willing to allow this to happen. I’m just surprised, even though I’ve done this before, that this process can use up all my mental creativity. I don’t know why the brain has to shut down when the womb is fully active; in fact it seems that is not true for everyone. There are some fabulous bloggers out there who don’t get stopped by a little pregnancy once in a while. But it’s true for me and I just can’t seem to get any creative or productive projects done. There are even a couple of topics that have been burning my brain lately but I Just. Can’t. Start. Writing. Snore.

But now we have Mike. He’s staying with us for a couple of months while he looks for his own place up here, and he and Bret have been knocking things off “the list” every day. (See top item in the sidebar to the right.) Granted, neither of them seems to be capable of knitting a baby sweater, but I’ll let that go since I no longer have to be assaulted every day by pink stripes.

Thanks Mike.