Rainy Wedding

Wedding Day, 1998. Cake is a homemade cheesecake also made by Lynn 🙂

Today is our thirteenth wedding anniversary. We planned a lovely outdoor ceremony at Meramec Spring Park and this time thirteen years ago, it was pouring down rain. While we still got married outside (in the dirty old pavilion rather than by the Iron Works as we had imagined), our wedding site was actually evacuated later in the afternoon!

When we returned from our honeymoon in August, there was a copy of a newspaper article in our mailbox. Our family friend, Lynn, had a newspaper column at the time and she’d written this beautiful poem about our wedding day:

Rainy Wedding

by Lynn Saults

We cannot know what will bring perfection.
They had supposed that it would be a day
of exalted blue heights,
a tree-columned cathedral day
in the loftiest, most elegant
sapphire domed summer.

Sun blessing stone,
birds blessing sky
and in the gentle benevolence of that day
the bride and her ribboned maidens
would drift, pale and clear as flowers
toward the welcoming arms of her groom.

To wed in the blue and white
softness of a summer morning
would be perfection.

But the day hung like an iron bell
tolling rain, rain, rain
all down the metalled sky.
The stones stood dark and forbidding
as thunder upon the earth,
and all our tinseled plans
for a bright and delicate day
were washed away in gray cascades
above and below us.

Yet, there was another kind of beauty there:
Small boys slid like silver minnows
in that heavy green light between the trees.
Garlanded little girls yearned
toward the coming of the bride,
tugged at their mothers’ hands,
pulled at their mothers’ hearts
with the brevity of their innocence.
Family and friends gathered
and sheltering, made a chapel
of their bodies and faces and wishes.

There, in the unplanned darkness,
was unlooked for wonder,
joy beyond ornament,
song beyond instruments.

At last the bride came and like a white flame
blazed among her maidens,
in brilliance more stern and starlike
and vastly more magnificent
than the ribbons and confections
we had planned for that day.

She blessed us as she passed,
toward her waiting bridegroom
in the unadorned steadfastness of her love,
and in the wake of that radiance
we turned to one another,
a silent hymn of faces
now wet with more than rain,
having glimpsed in that lambent bride
the flaming sun heart of human love.
Small, fallible, mortal,
we could not have dreamt or designed such a day.

It was Perfection.

——-
I read this poem every year on our anniversary and it makes me cry every time! Before we got married, people would say things in semi-ominous tones like, “just wait. After you get married, everything changes.” We still laugh about this—nothing changed except for that it felt really fun to be married instead of just dating 🙂

I occasionally read articles that say things like, “marriage is lots of hard work” or, “parenting and marriage are both very, very tough.” I’ve truly never felt like our marriage was hard work. And, while I daily feel that parenting is tough and emotionally very complicated, I would never describe my relationship with my husband as “tough” or difficult in any way. I actually feel like he is my oasis of calm, peace, and love in what sometimes feels like lots of chaos. He is steady and even and I always feel as if I can be completely and totally real with him—there is no feeling or thought or experience that is too awful to share with him. He has seen the places where the “meat has been chewed off my bones” and he still says I’m the greatest person in the world. So, while it is fully possibly that being married to ME is tough—I’m pretty intense—being married to him is not. It is gentle and sweet and whole.

After the ceremony and before the rain re-started, we were able to get some pictures in front of the Iron Works after all.

Self-portrait taken on his birthday this year.

Book Review: Ben Behind His Voices

Jul22

Review: Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope
By Randye Kaye
ISBN: 978-1442210899

Rowman and Littlefield Publishers

Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.95; Kindle, $9.99
http://benbehindhisvoices.com/

Reviewed by Molly Remer

Ben Behind His Voices is a mother’s poignant memoir of her young adult son’s struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. It was instantly engaging and kept my attention throughout. The author, Randye Kaye, is a radio personality and voice actress and the mother of two children. When her oldest child, Ben, is 17 he begins exhibiting increasingly strange, confusing, and disturbing symptoms. After being shuttled through a variety of diagnoses and treatment providers while steadily becoming worse, he is diagnosed at age 21 with schizophrenia. Randye is obviously a devoted parent to Ben and a committed advocate for her son and the book chronicles a roller coaster of experiences with psychiatric hospitalizations, medication challenges, bright spots of hope, relapses, group home placements, and readjustments of expectations. Perhaps most touching are her struggles to accept the “new normal” of her family’s life and to let go of her old expectations and hopes for her son, while still celebrating the caring and worthwhile person he is, albeit one who is coping with a formidable disability.

A particularly nice feature of this book are the textboxes inset throughout containing facts and information for family members of those with mental illnesses. Much of this information is based on Family-to-Family peer support materials from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Randye becomes a trainer for this program).

Though written about very emotional events, there is a dispassionate quality to the writing that kept me from feeling fully connected to the narrator.

A fascinating character study as well as an exploration of family adaptation and coping skills, Ben Behind His Voices would be a particularly interesting read for students in psychology, social work, or human services as well as anyone who has a family member with a mental illness. As a mother of young sons, Ben Behind His Voices was a difficult book to read—Randye’s thoughts and reflections about her own son as a young boy, made me look at my own little guys with a pang of “what if.”

——-

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Telling About It…

Jul19

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

-Mary Oliver

I saw this quote on another mother’s blog yesterday and loved it. To me, it sums up the reason why I continue to write this blog. I have so many things going on in my life and I often wonder why I bother to continue writing blog posts. Does it matter at all? Aren’t I just adding to the general cacophony of voices and wild, information overloaded chaos of the internet (and even of the birth activist sphere in general). I feel almost compelled to do so though. And, really, the reason why is to tell about it. There is a lot to be astonished by in one’s everyday life. While I can get distracted and frantic and lose my present moment orientation, I do pay attention a lot. To a lot of things. A friend told me at my blessingway that I live my life with more intention than most people she knows. I considered that to be a great compliment—and, I also think I live my life with a lot of attention. Sometimes that attention may seem like excessive navel-gazing and very often it is excessively self-critical (and, isn’t that being self-centered, she says critically and self-evaluatively?), but I feel like I am a generally observant person, paying attention to my place in the world and the manner in which I walk through my day. And, the paying attention is intimately involved with then wanting to tell about it—here, on my blog 🙂

Here’s what feels astonishing about my life today. Six months ago today I gave birth to a little treasure. I feel like every day for the past six months I’ve experienced astonishment that she’s here—where did you come from, I ask her. She’s magic. I can hardly believe it has been six months already and yet, it also feels like she’s been here forever. And, guess what? My friend who has been waiting for her rainbow baby to be born, gave birth to her own precious daughter this morning. So, now our journeys share one more point of connection.

I really, really wanted to write an effusive blog post about my baby today in honor of her sixmonthabirthday. However, the end of the summer session is wrapping up and I had many papers to grade instead. I spent naptime working on them with the plan to reward myself with a blog post after finishing my grades (though, since I planned to grade 22 papers and 11 exams, you can see that something was awry in my calculations!). She woke up of course, after my only having graded 11 papers, and needed me to hold her rather than to write about her and so now I am here at almost midnight, needing to go to bed rather than to gush. Anyway, my happy, BIG, smiley, adorable, friendly, charming, unflappable, cooperative, sitting-up-and-working-on-crawling-and-pulling-up girl is six months old today. Her head smells like apricots and flowers. She loves watching her big brothers. She loves watching chickens and cats. She loves watching me. While I’ve written a lot about what an easy baby she is, she also likes to be held and toted along pretty much everywhere I go—maybe some people would define that as “high need” (i.e. “I can never put her down!”). I, however, think that is biologically appropriate baby genius. She is very grabby and reachy lately. My mom described holding her like “holding a bag of snakes,” because she is constantly on the lookout for something to snag. She has begun pushing up on surfaces so that her legs are standing (but her hands are still on the surface—so, not pulling up exactly, but pre-pulling up). She LOVES to find and eat paper and tear up catalogs. She laughs like crazy if I make monster noises on her belly. We tried to give her some solid food, but she gags and spits it out, even though she appears captivated by other people eating food. We still do EC (elimination communication) and she sleeps all night with a dry diaper. She always wakes up with a smile. She thinks Zander is hilarious, but isn’t very comfortable with him holding her. When Lann holds her, she snuggles down on him with total trust (even though he staggers under her weight—she weighs almost 18 pounds now and he weighs under 50). I love having a baby while also have a 7.5 year old. He carries her to the car for me. He watches her while I take a shower. He can hold her while I cut up vegetables or do something food-prep related that needs two hands. It is awesome.

Despite grabbiness, she strokes and pats faces very gently. It is very sweet. She likes to ride in a pouch on my hip checking out the action. She likes to nurse best while lying down in bed—she tucks her feet up on my legs and puts her hands on either side of my chest. She has beautiful skin and beautiful eyelashes and her eyes sparkle with the delight of life. She is chubby and not petite. She is my most relaxed, settled baby—she rarely gets scared, hurt, or upset by things. She’s tough! When something makes a loud noise, she jumps, but then looks at me (to gauge possible severity) and then gives a big grin (the boys would both cry). If she tips and bumps her head or gets bonked or scratched by something, she usually doesn’t cry about it—my older son would have screamed and my younger son would have had a fit of rage. Her temperament is very steady and even. She has started to get more displeased if you take something away from her that she wants though—sometimes that provokes a protest. She also growls to herself while she plays with toys lately—she loves to empty a basket of toys and will sit on the floor working on this task for about 30 minutes. We think the growling sound is from listening to the boys play. I cannot believe how fast she is growing and changing. I try to take mental snapshots every day—her soft hair, her round cheeks, her little neck when her head is bent looking at something, her dark watchful pools of eyes, her careful and still clumsy hand movements and swiping grabs, her big gumbly smiles, her eyes fluttering closed at the breast. I pay attention. I am astonished. And, I tell about it.

Telling you all about it...

“You’ll Miss This…”

Jul14

We’ve all seen or heard it happen. A mother voices a complaint about something she is not enjoying about the mothering experience and someone else returns with a comment that disguises itself as “words of wisdom,” but is perhaps actually a thinly veiled criticism of the other mother: “well, you know, they grow so fast and you’ll miss them when they’re older!” I am curious if anyone actually finds this a helpful remark or thinks it is an original sentiment. While probably originally born from good intent, “you’ll miss this” based comments have become trite and cliche. While perhaps voiced in a good-intentioned way and theoretically used to bring perspective, to bring a proper sense of gratitude, and as an honest reminder to count your blessings (which are many and true), I think the shadow side and darker purpose of this “bringing perspective” is to silence, to muffle, to dismiss, to deny, and to shame. How often do we use this phrase against ourselves in exactly this manner? Perhaps we are nursing the baby and longing for it to fall into a deep enough sleep so that we can sneak away and “get things done.” And then, pop! there it is, “You shouldn’t be trying to get up, you’ll miss this when they’re older.”

Well, guess what, there are plenty of things I’m confident I won’t miss when they’re older. I know that I will miss breastfeeding. It is one of the deepest and richest joys of my life. The breastfeeding relationship is an intimate, interdependent, and profound connection that is irreplaceable. However, I also know in my heart that I will never miss having a toddler twiddle, pinch, stretch, and pick at the other nipple while nursing (and, frankly, I seriously doubt that any woman on earth has spent her twilight years wishing someone was stretching her nipple out to superhuman lengths). I’ll miss the sounds of little boys as they spin elaborate imaginary scenarios out in their play. I will not miss having to shout to be heard over this play while trying to carry on a reasonable, adult conversation with my husband. I’ll miss having warm little bodies snuggling with me. I won’t miss having someone sit on my back and chew on my hair while I try to type an article (yes, this has happened more than once!). I could go on, but you get the drift. There are pieces of parenting that are profoundly disagreeable and it is okay to name them, rather than shame yourself or others in the name of imaginary future regret. Additionally, the subtext that women with grown children spend their days pining for earlier years rankles with me. Personally, I really hope my own mother doesn’t waste a lot of her time wishing I was still a baby. I like to think she enjoys my company now!

Children grow and change. It is what they do. And, we want them to, really, and we want to continue to grow and develop ourselves as well, not to remain stagnated in memories of an earlier day or paralyzed by concerns about future regrets. A good friend once said something that has had a profound impact on me: “I parent the child in front of me.” Not the future adult, or, the memory of the baby or the toddler.

Here are some scenarios carrying a genuinely meaningful message: My older son is then three. He takes off his shirt at an event and a playgroup friend with adult children stops and her breath catches a little. She says, “Oh, Molly, make sure you take a picture of that little boy belly.” That night, I make sure to take one. Watching my sons playing in a wading pool one year, my mom says, “just look at the back of his neck and his powerful [tiny, narrow] shoulders.” I take another picture, not just with my camera, but with my heart. I visit my friend with a newborn baby. Even though I have my own treasure of a 5 month old with me, I ask my friend if I can touch the back of her newborn’s head. When I touch him, tears fill my eyes. All of these are genuine expressions of the original heart of the “you’ll miss this” message—pay attention and remember to look. We don’t need a trite platitude that summarily dismisses the potent intensity of mothering small children day to day, we need to see other mothers in the act of remembering. Those moments with our babies and our children that bring a sweet, deep ache to our hearts in the moment, those are our clues that we are savoring and cherishing their lives as they unfold. The tears that may spring unbidden to our eyes in the future when another mother’s child makes us remember this potency of early childhood, the very fact that we look back with such a pang, means that we did a very, very good job with the savoring—if we hadn’t savored, we wouldn’t know how to feel so deeply later.

Here's what I'm savoring 🙂

“It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it myself.”

–Joyce Maynard

Listening to my baby…even when we disagreed!

Jul6

I have a lot of breastfeeding-related posts I’d like to share soon. Here’s hoping I have time to make that come true! The following is an essay I wrote about my experiences nursing my first baby. It was originally published in LLL‘s New Beginnings in 2006.

Listening to my baby…

Taking a break from nursing to peek at the camera!

By Molly Remer

Before my son Lann was born, I felt prepared for frequent nursing, comfort nursing, and for experiences nursing in public. I started attending LLL meetings when I was 26 weeks pregnant and was also involved with the local Breastfeeding Coalition. I fondly imagined cuddling my baby as he nursed away. I also imagined proudly nursing in public wherever necessary—doing my part to increasing public perception of nursing being a normal part of everyday life, not secret or shameful.

After newborn Lann’s first growth spurt had passed, I was surprised to learn that he had other ideas about what our breastfeeding relationship would be like. Lann did not like to comfort nurse—he nursed when hungry and stopped when full. He would become upset and cry loudly if the breast was offered and after the first few sucks he would get milk that he wasn’t looking for. He also vastly preferred nursing lying down in our own bed. In public, he would refuse to nurse at all or would nurse a bit, choke on a mouthful, and become upset and not continue. He would often choke while nursing in any setting (though less frequently while lying down at home) and become very distraught and turn away from the breast—sometimes even pushing at me with his hands. These experiences were very difficult for me. I felt embarrassed to go to LLL meetings with a baby who cried and fought the breast, despite clearly appearing hungry, but then would nurse happily in the car! I did not have the cozy, peaceful nursling I imagined (though I was comforted by the fact that at home, lying down, when he was hungry, he certainly loved to nurse!).

These challenges continued for three and a half months, before I finally accepted that listening to my baby’s needs applied to these situations as well! Even though Lann didn’t breastfeed the way I had imagined or in the way I thought he needed to breastfeed, I still needed to listen to what he was telling me. Things became much less stressful when I finally realized this. If we were in a public place, I went to the car to nurse him and generally averted the crying, gagging/choking on milk episodes. At friends’ houses, I would ask to go lie down in another room. I made sure to “tank him up” before we left our house and planned to be home again within approximately three hours so we could nurse in our comfortable surroundings. I stopped being embarrassed that my baby wouldn’t nurse the “right” way and accepted that his style was different than what I had anticipated. After Lann went through a very challenging nursing strike at 5 months old due to a cold, I also learned that it often worked to nurse him standing up and moving around and I successfully employed this strategy in other settings after the nursing strike had passed. I also learned that if I let him unlatch to look around frequently while nursing in public (something I had never expected to “allow” before he was born), we could usually manage to complete a nursing session without struggling.

Interestingly, Lann’s disinterest in comfort nursing and his preference for private nursing both faded away when he was about 10 months old. He began to enjoy nursing “just because” or for comfort when distressed. He started to nurse around other people and in public places with ease and continued to nurse happily and frequently until he was two and half and weaned during my pregnancy with his brother, Zander.

I loved the feeling of being able to meet multiple needs in one interaction with Lann. Even during our early “conflict” over where and how to nurse, I loved the experience of feeling both of our bodies suffused with peace as we lay down together to nurse. I also deeply cherished the times we eventually spent comfort nursing. I felt so sad to be missing out on those times when he was younger, that every time toddler Lann asked to comfort nurse, I felt like it was a true gift.

—-

(Hindsight lets me know that I was struggling with oversupply/overactive letdown with Lann, an issue that has re-arisen with each baby, but one that I’ve managed much better each time!)

Book Review: 101 Offline Activities You Can Do With Your Child

Jul2

101 Offline Activities You Can Do With Your Child
Steve Bennett, Ruth Bennett
Paperback: 134 pages
Publisher: BPT Press (June 14, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0984228522

Reviewed by Molly Remer

Just in time for summer amusement comes the new book 101 Offline Activities You Can Do With Your Child. Written by the authors of the classic 365 TV-Free Activities You Can Do With Your Child (a book I’ve used a resource for about 6 years), this concise little book offers a wide variety of fun activities. Coded at the bottom of the page with a sketch, the activities are either designed to be used at home, on the road, in the kitchen, or anytime, anyplace. A nice feature is the picture index for kids who are not yet reading to choose their own activities.

Single page explanations/descriptions mean all of the activities are fairly simple to implement and enjoy—offering a brief time-out for anytime fun. Many of the craft ideas seem most appropriate for children under age 10 and plenty of the other games and other activities are enjoyable for any age group.

My kids have come up with quite a few of the suggested ideas using their own imaginations and some of the ideas are classic car games (or variations thereof), but there is enough fresh, unique content to make this book a worthwhile resource for our family.

—

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Postpartum Feelings, Part 3

Jun24

When I published my article about my postpartum feelings with my first son, I envisioned it as the first part of a series of three posts comparing/contrasting my postpartum feelings and experiences following each child. Here’s what happened—I wrote part two in which I shared some of the recurrent thoughts I had in the year following my second son’s birth and decided that I just don’t feel like publishing it. Reading it back over makes me feel like I probably could have been considered mentally ill and I don’t really feel like sharing that right now. I started to analyze why I feel like sharing any kinds of feelings via blog anyway—really, what is this about? Why “expose” myself? In part, because that is what helped, and still helps, me the most; knowing that I’m not alone in my feelings and that other women have “been there.” So, I feel I have a responsibility of sorts to share my own “been theres.” When I began this website/blog, it was primarily about gathering and sharing information with others, not about telling my own story or sharing my personal experiences. I didn’t start it intending to have any element of a, “personal journal published online” feeling. After the birth-miscarriage of my third son and then my pregnancy-after-loss journey, it took on more of the personal journal flavor. And, I’ve liked that. I’ve enjoyed sharing my feelings and experiences and learning from the comments other people leave that I’ve “spoken” to something in them, and/or helped someone to understand their own experiences (or me) better. That said, I don’t have to share everything I write just because I’ve bothered typing it and I just don’t feel like sharing my second post about weirdo, “crazy” postpartum thoughts right now. So there! Maybe someday I’ll hit “publish” on it.

Of course I know (and firmly believe!), that you’re “postpartum for the rest of your life” (Robin Lim), but I feel like this current postpartum experience is different than my others in some qualitatively different ways. I first credited it to having taken placenta pills this time around. My doula encapsulated my placenta for me and I took all 95 capsules during the first 6 weeks postpartum. It was amazing! I have become a total “convert” to the benefits of placenta encapsulation. I felt GREAT and I had tons and tons of energy, instead of being wiped out and weak and exhausted feeling. I’ve only taken about two naps in Alaina’s life (this may come back to bite me with regard to lactational amenorrhea , we’ll see…) and that ISN’T because I’m crazy and was pushing myself too hard, it is because I haven’t felt like I needed to take any naps. I highly recommend placenta encapsulation. Amazingly powerful!

Another thing that is different about this experience is that I don’t feel “restricted” after having her—I don’t feel like I’ve had to sacrifice or let anything go, I feel like she has integrated smoothly into our lives. I had a phone counseling session with an intuitive healer the afternoon before Alaina was born and one of the new “neural pathways” I set was, “the new baby seamlessly integrates into our lives.” I think it worked! 🙂 What is interesting, is that I have put quite a lot on hold lately, but it doesn’t feel like she MADE me, it feels like what I want to do (or not do, as the case may be). When my first son was born, I had to let go of most of my old life and work and it was very painful. With my second son. I felt like I had a lot of energy to give to the “world” that was being blocked/couldn’t find expression. This time, there is more balance. I’m continuing to teach college classes in-seat and online and that feels really good to me. I’m homeschooling the boys and doing well with that (we actually “do school” almost every day!). I read all of the time (55 books so far this year!). I’ve started a doctoral program. And, I make time for a variety of other smallish projects like facilitating quarterly women’s retreats, editing the FoMM newsletter, and answering breastfeeding help calls/emails. Oh, and making birth art sculptures (new pictures to follow soon!) And, here’s what I’m not doing: writing new articles, working on my books (I have three in progress), doing much birth work, staying caught up on articles/news/research, teaching prenatal yoga or prenatal fitness classes or leading birth art sessions (all of which I trained to do last year), creating (or teaching) any new craft classes for our annual craft camp, writing the dozens of blog posts that come to mind (or even pulling old material into this blog the way I’d like to do), staying caught up with book reviews, keeping up with the garden, etc., etc. More about balancing mothering and personing will follow someday. I promise!

With previous babies, I’ve felt very haunted by the “list” of all I’m not doing. While I still feel this way sometimes, I more often have a less familiar feeling—that of amazement at my own capacity for adaptation and change. I regularly feel kind of proud of myself—like, look how I can expand and enfold and how I can create a life that works and is satisfying as it continually evolves and changes.

This time with my baby has been the sweetest and most delicious time in my life. Yes, I’m still busy and overextended and hard on myself about a lot of things, but there is a different clarity to the experience. I feel like every moment with her is so vivid, clear, and memorable and like each one is being etched into me. It is just so real this life we have together now and it is weird for me to realize how quickly things change and how pretty soon, this life that I’m living in this moment, will just be our past. I do feel like I savored my boys’ infancies as well, but I don’t remember this sharpness of feeling and observation. I feel like I will never forget what it is like to be this mother of my baby girl. However, I also know that the reality is that the growing baby and then toddler, and then child replaces the one who came before (even though it is the same person—those other versions of them are replaced by the vivid reality of the now). So, while I retain distinct mental snapshots of my life with the boys as babies, their current, vibrant, and ever-growing selves are much more intense and real (obviously), and I know it will be the same with her. And, it makes my eyes well up to know that this sharp sweetness will float away on the rivers of time and that before I know it, I will be the mother of two men and a woman. It is hard to explain what I mean in writing—what I want to say is, “but this is SO REAL now.” Well, duh. It IS real now. And, later will be real as well. That is just the flow of life, Molly dear ;-P However, one of the main reasons I wanted to get her pictures taken yesterday is to try to capture what it is like to be her mother NOW:

Then, last night while I was nursing her to sleep in my arms as I have done every night for five months, I took this picture myself to capture how well we fit together. I wanted to get how her little feet are nestled into my legs so perfectly and how her hands rests on me and how her head cradles in my arm:

I know this one isn’t a pro picture, but this is what it is like to be her mama 🙂

Happy Father’s Day!

Jun17

My man and his kids!

“No one can describe to a man what having his own child will mean to him. Words simply cannot do justice; each man needs to discover it for himself.”

“Fatherhood challenges us, but it also enlarges us and reshapes our perception of what is important in the world around us. As we take stock of this new world, we find that doing our job as a dad is inherently honorable and respectful, and brings to us the dignity that goes with the territory. Far from being emasculating, being a dad makes us men in the finest sense of the term.” —Dads Adventure

Both of the above quotes come from a wonderful article from Dads Adventure about The Dignity of Being a Dad. Make sure to check out the associated Father’s Day Flashmob in Denver and keep watching until the 3.5 minute point—loved this part especially and it made me cry! I really appreciate this new “brotherhood of dads” movement and hope it becomes widely known! I have used materials from Dads Adventure in my birth classes for quite some time. More often than not, the wife comments to me privately about how her husband appreciated receiving materials that were specifically for him.

Here are some links to past posts I’ve made about fatherhood:

And, from Mother’s Advocate, here is a great article with some specifics for new(ish) fathers:

Sex After Baby: A How-To Guide for Partners (an associated post called Sex, Lies, & the Postpartum Year is also very good)

Mother’s Day

May13

My other grandmother is town visiting this month (also from CA), so on Mother’s Day, we were able to get another four generations pictures—this time with my dad and his mother.

And, then my mom took a new family picture for us:

Mother’s Day present from Mark:

I keep only finding time to post short, picture-type blog posts lately! I’m getting ready to be on break from teaching though and have grand plans for all of the posts I’m going to write with all of my “free” time ;-D

Family Adventures in Polymer Clay

May7

Last time I made new polymer clay sculptures, my boys wanted to join in. They have always liked sculpting things and got into it, making a whole little series of figures each. My older son (7.5) made these little cuties:

Close up of the mom with her baby

My younger son (5), made a whole series of little ball creatures:

Two of them looked like they had another ball stuck on to them and so I said, “oh! Are these holding babies?” He looked a little sheepish and said, “no, it is eating that other one.” LOL! This is classic, classic Z ;-D

Later, he said he’d changed his mind and this one above, “actually IS holding a baby.”