three weeks in three photos?

I'm still here, just so you know.  Most of my online presence in the last three weeks has been something along the lines of fkaosdig;aoinb;aoifaldskfj....or maybe a little less eloquent.  But I'm here.  And even though the last time I posted, it was all about writing difficulties, and even though I've had play rehearsals and book report grading and student learning conferences for my own students and for Jabber...I've managed to get my fake-NaNo MG ghost story up to 15k and also made three pages of revision notes for my Cassandra WIP, which needs...a lot of work. 

(Side note--as though any of this is not a side note--we found out tonight at Jabber's conference that he's doing well in all areas, and though I'm not saying I didn't *believe* Ms. S. when she said he only needed reminders to stop acting silly "every once in a while," I do believe I saw a bit of an eye-twitch when she said it.  Probably blocking out the trauma.  I mean, I'm pretty nice in conferences, too--for instance, usually I try not to say things like, "Well, I kind of wanted to scream at your kid fifteen times in fifteen minutes this morning, but then when I saw him in the hall, he waved at me, and I thought he kind of seemed like he might turn into a fully functional human in about eight to ten years," and besides, sitting there nervously next to their parents, they do actually seem like the sweet, interesting people they someday will become.)

(I also found out in a secret, late-night snuggle-conversation last night the name of a girl of whom Jabber says, "I really, REALLY like her, and I might want to marry her," but I would never tell, even if I did make him show me her artwork on the wall this evening at school--she has quite passable handwriting for a first grader, and she doesn't color too carefully within the lines...)

Oh, dear.  This is what happens when I don't post.  I forget how to be coherent.

So.  Picture number one is from Halloween.  I had a ninja (with a glowing light saber and a cowboy pistol) and a Spiderman (with the mask turned into a hat and a toddler who asked, of his padded muscles, "Mama, does my costume have nummies?")

Picture two is from our 9th Anniversary.  I got a new Day of the Dead ornament from D., and it just may be my favorite one yet.  Luckily my husband remains thoughtful (and a good shopper) enough for the both of us--I gave him a Halloween card and permission to buy himself a new knife.  So romantic.  I'm actually not sure how anything in my real world would get accomplished if it weren't for David, so it's probably a good thing he's been around for the last nine years.  I would be constantly doing things like...oh, driving on a flat tire, serving the children cereal for supper, and getting buried underneath a bunch of snow because I have no idea where a shovel might be.  (These are all just things I have done in the past week.)

The last picture is two of my old journals, which I have been reading my way through lately for some reason.  Actually, both of these are from the months leading up to my engagement and wedding, which was kind of fun to read, so close after the anniversary.  I've learned a lot about myself in this trip down memory lane, but I think I'll sum it up into three neat bullet points.  Maybe I can even avoid using parentheses (but I cannot give up dashes) (okay, starting in the next paragraph!)

• I learned that I've made a lot of progress as a writer, both in terms of craft--I'm a better writer, a more confident writer, especially in fiction--and in terms of business.  A lot of the time that I was writing in these two journals, I was dreaming of being published someday.  Of course, I had hoped at the time it would be soon, but I've been persistent and patient, overall.
• I learned that probably the biggest point of unhappiness in my life had to do with finding a balance as an introvert and as a person who likes the company of interesting, intelligent people.  I still have to work to find the balance between solitude and loneliness, and I still get overwhelmed when I don't have alone-time to recharge, but do better when I'm forced out of that alone-time to interact with others.  
• I learned (and in all cases, "learned" is more of a "reaffirmed my thoughts about") (damn, I got SO FAR without parentheses, too!) that the times in my life that I have taken a big risk, stepped completely outside of my comfort zone and tried something that was really difficult for me, it has turned into a hugely valuable experience for me.  

Okay.  So there was the last three weeks of my life, in which I have failed to blog but only because there are not seventy-six hours in each day, and because sometimes, I need to spend my time lying in the dark next to my nearly seven-year-old son, learning the names of the people he believes he might marry.  (That way I won't have to find out on facebook!)

picture this!

Having a husband who is a photographer means a lot of things.  It means that my children are charmingly documented in a parade of beautiful portraits capturing their every change and mood from birth to the present.

It means that when I need an author photo taken, I can count on him to help me out at a good price.  It means that even when there's nothing actually wrong with the photos that result from our first shoot, when I tell him, "These just...aren't quite me enough..." he smiles, looks more closely at the photos, and says, "Oh! Well, of course!  The problem here is..." and then he goes on to tell me a complicated explanation involving light temperature and bounce-flashes and white balances that have NOTHING to do with the fact that I'm squinting my eyes a little funny and tipping my head at that awkward angle that makes my chin multiply into the plural form.

It means that we can't go anywhere or do anything without a complicated packing process and six camera bags.  It also means that we're almost never caught in that, "If only we had a camera..." position.

It means that the bottom drawer of our refrigerator is full of high speed black and white film.

And it means that up until yesterday, the last time we had a family portrait that included David was actually three days before Monkey was born.  I'm so happy to finally have a photo of all four of us to hang on my wall!  Thanks to David, for taking all those wonderful pictures at our family gathering last night, and thanks to Mom for snapping this shot so he didn't have to sprint madly into place while everyone else tries desperately to remain in place and looking pretty.

replenishing

When we got married, David and I put together a little bundle of items that symbolized different things about our relationship--an object to represent our individual self, something to show what we have to offer the relationship, a symbol of us as a couple, and a symbol of what we need to keep for ourselves.  We shared these items with our friends at the ceremony, explaining each item as we tucked it into a small piece of cloth that we call our wedding bundle. 

We take this bundle out every so often, at the very least on our anniversary, and see if we can remember what all the things symbolize.  It's funny because we never thought it would be as difficult as it sometimes is, given how our interests and qualities do tend to merge and overlap.  (Was the pencil you and the crayons me, or was it the other way around?)  Sometimes we think about things we might put in today, whether they might be different now that we are older and busier and if not wiser then at least more experienced.  And we always take a minute to dab on a bit of D's special cologne that he put in.

So one of the items that I put in was this little jar of water from the Clackamas River, where we were married.  It was meant to symbolize our relationship, and I remember writing up a whole list of metaphorical reasons--our love of nature and traveling, the way it seeks balance and figures out the path of least resistance no matter the terrain, even the cohesion of the very water molecules was a comment on how D. and I would surely stick together.  But the biggest reason that I chose water as a symbol of our relationship was that, like a marriage, keeping a jar of water for any length of time was going to take a little attention--a little work.  It's not like you can just get married and then you're good.  The water disappears if you don't replenish it from time to time.

Well, if you look at the photo of our little jar, you can see there's hardly any left.  Did we forget about it, tucked away in the bundle?  Did we stop caring about replenishing the jar?  Well.  Not...exactly.  I admit, we could have done a much better job of refilling our little jar, but I also have to admit that a big part of that (for me, anyway) was a sort of sentimentality about the actual water.  Aw, look!  It's our little bit of Oregon!  Remember how beautiful that day was?  Remember the rain, the way the beeswax candles held up?  Remember how we scattered the leaves and the wine in the river, and how my maid of honor almost fell in retrieving the lost shoe of our minister?  It's not that we were neglecting our jar, but rather that we were holding onto the memories...maybe to the past?

Marriages change.  We have a very different life today than the one we went home to after our ceremony in the Mount Hood National Forest.  It's better and worse; it's richer and...well, no, it's richer--in so many ways. 

Anyway, we finally did it.  We went out and replenished our wedding jar, adding the cold, fresh water of Lake Superior to the lingering drops of Clackamas.  We got our feet wet (and most of our legs, to be honest) in the process, and we had a good laugh and a few shivers (it was freezing!) and then we came home and tucked our full jar back in the bundle and talked about how much things have changed and how much we've stayed the same.  And we whispered our hopes for what our marriage may look like the next time we fill the jar.

aniversario de boda: ocho anos!

David and I were married on November 1st, and David's cousin got us a souvenir from Mexico for our wedding with a dia de los muertos skeleton bride and groom getting their portrait taken by a skeleton photographer (which was doubly meaningful since D. is a wedding photographer!).

Since then, we've bought Day of the Dead decorations for each other (okay, I admit, mostly he has bought them for me because I suck at giving gifts...) for all our anniversaries.

This year was our eighth anniversary, so I snapped some (not that great) photos of our collection.

Here they all are!


http://www.flickr.com/photos/32155717@N05/sets/72157622594740041/

Last weekend in pictures

So last weekend we went to our friend's wedding in the woods, and we also went camping for the first and only time this whole summer. It's pathetic, really, that we haven't been out camping the whole year, or last year either for that matter, but I guess that's what happens when a Monkey enters your life and suddenly you realize that everything is way more complicated with two munchkins instead of one. In any case, the whole trip first required a trial run of the great big Duluth Pack that we always carry all the gear in when we're car camping. So here's David testing out the load limits on both the bag and his own frame.



There's a funny story that goes with that pack, which David and I found in this little patch of woods next to the freeway; David climbed down this spooky embankment to find it, only to discover that there was something in it--something the size and shape of a head! He gingerly opened up the pack to find...a circular saw! We came up with lots of interesting ideas about the origin of the saw and the pack, and we also had an interesting adventure getting it back home to our apartment, many blocks away by foot.

Here's David taking photos at the wedding. He wasn't hired to do this, but he cannot help himself. He's cute, too!

David hugs the groom and gets a once-over by the happy couple's little cutie. Their wedding clothes were made of carhardt overalls--so cute.
The happy family...
David and I asked a random guy to take our picture.
And then he took our picture, too! This was the first time we were alone overnight, with the sickly kiddos at Grandma's house for the night. It was exciting to be free for the night, but I'll admit we both missed having the boys along to run with the other kids.Our tent has a wonderful skylight--the whole reason I fell in love with this tent years and years ago, when David first spent one month's rent on our new home for our summer of traveling.

Here's me, setting up our tent...

And a little later in the evening, relaxing in a huge chair by the fire.

Congratulations, newly wedded friends! We are honored to share such a joyful day with you!

Transitions

Moving from one thing to the next can be a bit tricky. Some of the hardest parts of writing--a novel, an essay, even a blog post--are the bits where you try to make one idea lead into the next, flow in smoothly with a minimum of fuss. My students learn transition words from a list, but you can't really just memorize a list of words and let them do all the work to move your writing from piece to piece.

Like a choppy paragraph break, we started school again today, and everything about the transition was crazy. I had to peel the boys off of their sheets this morning and stuff their floppy limbs into clothing while brushing my teeth hurriedly and making a grocery list for this morning's potluck, which I had forgotten. I stayed up well into the wee hours like usual last night, and by the middle of my leadership meeting this afternoon, I was all but comatose in my steamy classroom. It was a good thing the chairs are so uncomfortable.

After the children finally succumbed to sleep in their beds again this evening, David collapsed in his chair in the living room, looking like a refugee of war. His eyes darted and twitched; his hands shook.

"What's the matter?" I asked, from my slump on the couch. I sucked back a couple of aspirins with a whiskey shot.

"I...can...do...this...." His voice was thin and sounded a little deranged.

I thought about giving him a hug, but that would involve moving. So I just sent him telepathic thoughts of love instead. Upstairs, the alarm clocks ticked on, inexorably moving us toward tomorrow.

"Tomorrow," I whispered, "will be much easier."

"Tomorrow," he groaned, "we have to go grocery shopping."

Transitions are tough.

The More Things Change

I went to a birthday party today (Happy first, Little B!) for a friend's son who turned one year old. It made me sad because I realized that I haven't seen him or his parents since my own son's first birthday (well, and my other son's fourth birthday because we're super lucky and both our boys were born one day apart, conveniently just a little over a week before Christmas...parenthetical tangent over), which was seven months ago.

It got me thinking about how much our lives have changed since having kiddos, because really, David and I used to be really good friends with these people, before Jabberwock was born. She was the first friend I made in college. David worked with him, and the four of us even got together for a road trip to Vancouver, B.C., when David and I lived out in Oregon for a couple years. True, they did move quite a ways out, and David got this annoying schedule that doesn't allow us to have much of a social life anyway, but it all happened right around the time we had our first kid.

Becoming a parent changes so much about the dynamics of your family, your friendships, your identity, and sometimes that's hard to think about too much. I love my kids, so much that it's incredible--a love I didn't know was possible before they came along. That sounds trite and cliche and it is, but it's only cliche because it's true. I can't imagine my life without them in it.

But there are times when I mourn that other life we had, full of backpacking, late nights that went unpunished in the morning, time that belonged only to me, time alone with my husband. I feel like we knew each other as people much better back then, instead of now, where so much of our relationship is orbiting around these other humans in our lives. Happily, joyfully orbiting, you understand.

I get most nostalgic about the pre-kid days when I am stuck in the day-to-day of fighting siblings and wrestling kids down for naps and searching for the binkie under the car seat on the side of the road so Monkey will stop screaming. I miss travel and hanging out a whole lot, and deciding to just skip dinner now and again. I miss taking luxurious baths when I felt fragile. I miss going through entire weeks, months even, without arguing with anyone. Lately, I'm lucky if I can make it through three minutes.

But I think, too, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. (I'm just full of the cliches tonight!) That look in my husband's eyes when we steal a moment to hold each other in the kitchen or while brushing our teeth--it's the same. Deeper, even, because we cannot take each other for granted. I'm still stubborn as hell, which is the real cause of most of those arguments (perhaps my memory is flawed, after all, about the frequency of arguing). I still get to do my writing, even if it causes me to choose every night between writing and being crazy tired at 6:30 when they get up and not writing but getting some sleep. If anything, I think I'm better at writing because I can't play around as much, wasting time. And even though our camping and hiking is much closer to home and MUCH less spontaneous, we still get out there every so often, and I have faith that things will get easier as the kiddos get older.

I'm not sure what my actual point is with this rambly post tonight, except to say that I'm musing about the way life has changed in the last five years, and feeling a little down about friends we've grown more distant from (there are more than just one couple) since becoming parents. But then I have just two seconds of absolute cuteness from one of the little curiosities, and instantly I'm so grateful for their miraculous little selves. (Thought I'd end on a cliche, just to round out the post. Hmm?)

Ohhhmmmmmm

I would just like to say that in my world, there is precious little that cannot be made all better by a near-boiling soak in the old clawfoot. With bubbles. And a book, usually, although tonight I had to be semi-expedient so that I could attempt to balance the checkbook and pay a few bills before someone comes and repossesses my home, clawfoot and all.

I would have posted a photo of my own clawfoot tub instead of this one, which is much cleaner and has much more bathtub bling than mine, but since I am not Martha Stewart, a photo of my bathroom posted on the internet would greatly humiliate me. You may add to your mental image a tub caddy overflowing with half-empty (or half-full, dependent on your own personal disposition) personal care products and a smattering of squeaky tub toys and soggy reading material. Please refrain from adding me to your mental image, as I have enough issues around here with getting any privacy in my own bathroom.

I'm going to tell one more thing before I go pay those bills, about a sad, sad time before I had my wonderful clawfoot tub. I have always loved taking a bath, and a hot tub full of suds has always been one of my greatest solaces. When David and I lived in Oregon, I actually had a difficult time staying warm in the winter, which seems weird from a Minnesotan. For one thing, the winter there is wet and chilly, and the wet cold seems to sink right into your bones, even when it's not nearly as cold as it gets up here in the North. For another thing, whoever designed the heating systems on the West Coast was an idiot, because they put all of the heat in the ceiling. In the ceiling. And heat rises, as we have all learned in grade school science. Yeah, there was supposedly some fancy tiles or somesuch built into the floor that would radiate this fictional heat throughout the apartment, but the only way you were actually going to feel any of it was if you were to put thick wool socks on and stand on a tall chair. Then your ears might thaw out a bit.

Anyway, there were days upon end when I just could NOT get warm, and the only thing that would work was to take a bath. Unfortunately, our ghetto apartment had a hot water heater the size of a lap dog. There was only enough hot water in that sucker to just cover the very bottom of our tiny little bathtub. I remember having a very difficult day, and I was just longing, with all of my soul, for a nice hot bath to make it okay. I convinced myself that there really was enough hot water to at least get a few inches in the tub, but of course I ran out, and icy water poured in. I began to cry. Sob, really. And David did the sweetest thing ever. He began heating water on the stove, three or four pans full at a time, and steadily hauled them up the stairs and poured them into my bath, over and over, for at least an hour. I slipped down under the water until only my nose poked up over the surface, writing poetry in my head, and that's when I decided I must surely marry this wonderful man.

Lost and Found

I lost my wedding ring today. I was standing in front of my 8th grade class, giving instructions, and suddenly I realized that my ring finger was empty, bare, naked. My heart skipped a beat or ten. I made my class stop journaling and search the room. They did not really help, saying things like, "It's your wedding ring, Ms. Lissnkids, aren't you SUPER upset?" I was. I was heartbroken, truly.

Obviously from the title you can infer that my ring was found, and indeed it was. I called my husband and in a quiet voice told him what had happened, and he promised to search as soon as he got home. My next class was doing debates, and in the middle of a very convincing argument about the ethics of human cloning, the phone rang. It was David, calling to let me know that the ring was found in the bed, where it had most likely fallen off while I was getting Monkey dressed. I was so relieved!

Before it was lost AND found, my students had offered up their usual explanation for something going missing: that is, somebody stole it, of course. I explained that it wasn't really worth a lot of money but that it was extremely important to me. "You got a cheap wedding ring?" one student asked. "Well, you should make your husband buy you a better one, then." I simply smiled and reiterated that the ring means so much to me, much more than its monetary worth.

As I struggled to keep from crying while searching my classroom (I have a firm no crying in school rule), memories associated with my "cheap ring" were flooding over me. I remembered how David's friend Loren had painted a picture and sold it to David so that Loren could use the money to purchase my engagement ring--a sterling silver Claddaugh ring--and give it to David as a gift, since tradition says the ring shouldn't be purchased by the giver.

I thought about the night he asked me to marry him, how we drove toward the setting sun on our anniversary and reached the ocean just as it was slipping down below the horizon. I remembered the way we walked in the darkness then toward the sound of the surf, walked hand in hand into the unknown, giddy with the uncertainty of that sound, the distance from land to sea indistinct and blurry. I felt like I was stepping off a precipice that night, not knowing which step would be my last one on solid ground, but he got down on one knee just before we stepped off the edge of that abyss and started talking about loving me forever.

We were married three weeks later, in a beautiful ceremony that we wrote ourselves. Our altar was a fallen log on the banks of the Clackamas River, and our friend Doreen married us while wearing a wall tapestry and reading from a black leather binder that was only slightly less solemn because of the small Tasmanian Devil on one corner. We had eight or ten guests, some of whom we had just met in the woods, and one of whom was living in a tent a little ways beyond the spot we pitched our own. He brought us a wedding gift of dry wood for our fire. Another man took photos for us and then disappeared. Loren's car broke down, and he and Michelle finally made it just as the ceremony was starting, walking with us between the two cedar trees that made our archway. We passed around a bottle of wine while soaking in a huge barrel full of steaming hot spring water and Brian gave a toast while his dogs ate our smoked salmon off the bench. Shae and Jerome sprinkled rose petals all around our tent and smudged the whole camp with sage and cedar. All this loveliness is tied into that small white gold band and silver Claddaugh that I have worn ever since. Irreplaceable.