The silence here has, sadly, been due to a yucky stomach bug followed immediately by a terrible cold. Not the sorts of things I’d anticipated busying myself with, but oh well.
We’ve started to perk up a bit this week, and done exciting things like follow Papa around on his day off.
And a few other things, too.
Last night, Ryan’s step-sister’s first baby was born. A stillborn baby boy.
Red-haired, 7 pounds… and gone before he came.
They named him Oliver.
Please pray for Catherine and Ben, for their journey through a grief I can’t imagine. Psalms says that our tears are not cried into a void, but that a God who cares collects them in His bottle: He grieves, too.
Pray that a glimmer of His deep love shines through these days of dark.
I s’pose it goes without saying that posting around here may (will?) be a bit sporadic. It’s hard to sit and think and ponder and write when you’ve got a limited number of days to visit and chat and catch up and participate.
I will try to keep my thinker working, and probably that will show up now and again here in the form of a post.
I will also try to remember that I’m going to have a baby, and stretch and exercise and all of that once in awhile. (It’s kinda nice to just sit on the side porch, breathing in peonies.)
Before I sign off and get back to my bird-listening, coffee-sipping early morning (when everyone [and you cannot even imagine how many everyone is around this house] is sleeping except Mama and me), a few snippets:
:: It’s green here. The glowing, living, overwhelming green of early summer.
:: Detours abound, thanks to our trusty bridge and its failing, and so there are back roads to be driven. And back roads, around here, mean rolling field of grass and corn, hemmed by tree lines of varying green, and over all, a vast blue sky. Space. Growing, beautiful space.
:: The first thing I noticed as we pulled into this little speck of a town last week was a fire engine sitting in someone’s front yard. Wow. Could we just pretend to not be quite such… hicks? (Then again, it’s provided me with a chuckle every time I pass by, so leave it there. I like to laugh.)
:: I spent an hour dead-heading gardens and watering baby plants yesterday. Then I cut a few bouquets to freshen up the house, and everyone told me how beautiful they were. This is gardening at its best: let Mom kill it and grow it and be frustrated and then figure it out at last. And I’ll take the credit for how beautiful it all looks today.
:: The Little Yellow House was finally visited yesterday. We joined the rowdy bunch of fun-loving toddlers for dinner, ice cream, and a walk to Merrick’s ballgame. I love how zany and crazy and loud in their talk-over-each-other way it all is. I’ll be sad when they all grow up and stop telling the worlds dumbest knock knock jokes.
:: I’ve been here almost a week. Anywhere else, that would feel like a chunk of time. Here, in this busy house, with this busy family, it’s just a start. Do you know how many siblings I have yet to catch up with? Well, here’s a clue: there are eight, total, and I think I’ve got about one or two crossed off the list. By the end, I hope to have hunted them all down for a little catch-up chat. Wish me luck!
:: I have a camera. It has batteries. It’s sitting in my bag. I’ll try to do better and maybe actually snap a few shots while I’m here. That would be nice, huh?
::
(click through to see some of what we’ve been up to.)
Yesterday was a “special” day, as Ryan tells Jameson. One last Saturday together, just the three of us, before our little family splits up for a bit.
We decided to take Jameson to the San Francisco Zoo. I was a bit nervous, as the tigers there seem to be in the habit of mauling visitors, but hoped the for the best — and that the extra 4′ the zoo added to the wall would be enough to deter even the angriest of cats.
I did my best to think through a day away from the house, and packed snacks, warm clothes (you never know in the city), diapers, drinks, bibs, and the cash envelopes I thought we’d need. (Ryan flips when he thinks about me carrying all of our cash at all times, which means me remembering to grab the right envelope every time we leave the house. Tricky, but not impossible!)
Of course, upon arriving at the zoo, I realized that I’d forgotten:
–my camera
–the bib
–the cash.
I knew exactly where the missing items were, and could picture them in the neat little pile on the kitchen table that I somehow walked right by. Oh well. Thank goodness for camera phones, paper napkins, and debit cards.
We brought “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?,” to help make some animal connections for Jameson. That was a great idea, except for how many animals aren’t in that book.
Neither Ryan or I had been to a zoo in years (decades? yeah, decades), and so I think we were just as excited about the first giraffe we encountered as any animal-obsessed child. Jameson loved that the giraffe was chewing, which is the only thing I’ve come up with for giraffes to “do” when we’re looking at picture books. (Do giraffes make noise?)
Monkeys, rhinos, lions, tigers (asleep, thank goodness), peacocks strutting their stuff for totally unimpressed ladies, and bears were among the animals I remember stopping and watching. The polar bears were Jameson’s favorite, and I wonder if it was because he could actually see them. (All of those other brown animals sort of blend in. Good for the wild, bad for the zoo.)
A couple of hours later, dehydrated and full of kettle corn, we loaded ourselves back into the van and decided to head to the ocean. Jameson had never been, and we thought it would be fun for him to see the sand and waves. He, of course, with his adorable sanguine temperament, did not disappoint. We shed our shoes, rolled our pants, and walked over scorching sand to frigid water’s edge. Jameson’s little toes squished and danced and flew off the ground when the edge of the waves reached him. Over and over, he and Ryan ran toward the water, only to turn and run back, laughing, while it chased their feet, lapping at their ankles. A few large waves and a tumble or two later, we headed again to the van to dry off, brush off, and change into the extra clothes that I (fortunately) had remembered to bring.
We drove a bit farther down the coast and ate dinner at Halfmoon Bay, and then headed our van inland, away from the smell of salty air, towards home.
Exhausted and a bit sun burned, we arrived to a little house that has become home (I really think it has.) We played basket ball (of course) in the backyard for a bit, ate ice cream with hot fudge, and then walked to the park to exhaust any last bursts of energy before we, at long last, fell into bed.
It was a very nice, very special sort of day.
I made Jameson some PJ pants, and made a matching t-shirt with some applique. I thought I’d take a picture this morning. Easier said than done. You gotta be fast around here, I guess:
I got this one and called it a day.
