Fredericksburg, Our First

I distinctly remember one unseasonably warm day during the last days of my late winter maternity leave when, to combat a raging case of cabin fever, I molded a wee Arlo into my Moby wrap and took the longest walk around our city. At the time I was mourning the approaching conclusion of my maternity leave, facing the heartbreaking reality of returning to work and placing Arlo in the daily care of strangers. It was a depressing afternoon, filled with a long cry that lasted the entire hours-long walk. Just when I thought I was finished with the boo-hooing, another wave would crash over me with surprising strength, and again I was a sobbing mess, jamming snotty tissues in my pockets.

As I walked I sought comfort in my little town, tried to imagine my city through my child. I walked along my favorite street, Washington, and watched children play tag in its wide median, using a statue of Hugh Mercer as home base. I smiled, wondering if Hugh might serve as base for one of Arlo's future games of tag. A young boy passed me on a skateboard, and I tried to imagine a middle-school-aged Arlo zooming by. I slipped into the back gate of Kenmore Plantation--the historic home of Betty Washington (George's sister) and Fielding Lewis, and I quietly nursed Arlo in the shade of a handsome, gnarled old tree. Tulips, bright like Easter eggs, flanked the garden's pathways there. I wondered if Betty had nursed her children in that very backyard. I slipped out of the garden quietly without anyone being the wise to the fact that I hadn't paid admission to the historic site, that I had essentially just crashed a historic garden for an impromptu nursing sesh. We passed Mary Washington's (George's mother) house, and I peeked over the fence at the vegetable garden still maintained there, envious of her strapping fig tree. Arlo and I stopped into one of our favorite restaurants, Foode, and when the Postal Service's Such Great Heights came on overhead, I quietly cried into my black bean burger. Everything does look perfect from far away, I thought, especially the end of your maternity leave and your return to work. We visited the library, window shopped along Caroline Street, and eventually ended up at Hyperion, where I cried some more into my mocha as a busker on the opposite corner played Hey Jude on his acoustic guitar.  I walked home, passing an old slave auction block, the Confederate cemetery, and Mary Washington's monument, and a monument celebrating Thomas Jefferson and his ideal of religious freedom.

Fredericksburg felt perfect to me, even on that sad day, because Arlo was there nestled against me. I will go anywhere, I will do anything, I pleaded in my head, to be with this baby. Wherever he was is where I wanted to be. I could have basically been anywhere that day, and it would have been the perfect setting, so long as I had my little nucleus of Nick and Arlo.

I moved to Fredericksburg in December 1999 for an internship. Nick and I shared an apartment with a roommate, and that apartment complex overlooks the park that I now visit every Wednesday to meet up with my moms and babies group. A few months later we moved into our own apartment, a little one-bedroom deal above a green/local grocer (Anyone remember Feast-o-rama? It's now a paint your own pottery place.) on Sophia Street. Living there we became friends with many of the downtown shop owners, which felt homey in that everybody-knows-your-name kind of way. We bought our house in 2002, but Fredericksburg was already our home by then.

Fredericksburg is full of history, and it now holds our personal history. Our first apartment, our first jobs, our first house, our first dog (buried in our backyard), our first garden, the first decade of our marriage, our first child. When I was little and I imagined where I'd live when I grew up, that vision looked nothing like Fredericksburg. And yet, Fredericksburg was kind of perfect. We're leaving a bit ourselves here in the soil we've tended, the birds we've fed, the friends we've made along the way.

So, with equal measures of reluctance and excitement in our hearts, we're leaving Fredericksburg. Will we love Cape Girardeau? Perhaps. Will Cape Girardeau hold as tender a spot in our hearts as Fredericksburg? The jury is out. But my little nucleus will be there, my two handsome boys, and that's what makes a home.

Arlo the Rabbit

Nick and I have always been huge music fans, often seeing a handful of shows a week--before Arlo, natch. It used to be no big deal to download multiple albums from i.Tunes at once, but now that we're sustaining a family on a single income we've had to dispense with that kind of spending. This new financial discrimination, though, hasn't stopped us from finding new music for Arlo. We've been checking out scores of cds from the library (for free!) over the summer, slowly building Arlo's listening library by downloading those cds, making him his own little playlists on my iPod.

One of our super fave artists is Elizabeth Mitchell. My sister, Meg, loved listening to Elizabeth Mitchell with my niece, London, when she was much younger, and when I saw a couple of Mitchell's albums at the library I eagerly snapped them up. (Meg also introduced us to Dan Zanes, who we took Arlo to see over the weekend. More on that to come! It was adorable, yup.) She records for Smithsonian Folkways, and I just love her Woody Guthrie covers.

This is a song that we've been singing a lot lately, and I think it hooked me immediately because of its garden theme. Oh, how I can relate to the plundering of my little veggie patch by pesky, but adorable wildlife. In the three years we've had our blackberry and raspberry canes we may have picked a handful of berries...between the TWO. The birds fill their bellies with our berries for breakfast every morning, leaving none for us. And let's not forget Charlotte the Fat Groundhog's backyard follies. Oy.

Anyway, whenever I sing this to Arlo, which seems to be ALL the time lately, I sub his name in for John's. It's a guaranteed smile-maker. And with two new pearly top teeth--like a little rabbit, indeed--that smile is so much fun. 

"John the Rabbit" by Elizabeth Mitchell from "Sunny Day"

And on the subject of veggie stealing, Arlo, once again, graciously helped himself to some fresh produce: our CSA goodies. This time? A ripe ol' mater. Cub Creek Farms is the CSA to which we belong, and Cindy, our trusty farmer, packs us an overflowing bag each week of fresh vegetables and even throws in fabulous things like homemade tomato-basil pasta, peach butter, fig preserves, shallot-infused vinegar (perfect for our salad dressings, yum), and this week we were also given a jar of fresh Jersey cow milk and homemade feta from her Amish farmer neighbor. And we pay $25 a week for this awesomeness. Aren't we lucky little so-and-so's?

Looking oh-so-innocent, but hatching a plan to munch.

First nibble of a tomato, which, yes, is way too acidic for a baby,

but we're all about letting him safely explore with some supervision.

Hmmm...

The damage.

(Which I happily used to make fresh pasta sauce that night.)

Lake Tahoe, Part Five

A couple of weeks ago I checked out an engaging book from our local library, and while it seemed to be mostly intended for a parenting audience with slightly older children than our wee Arlo, I found myself nodding along and making mental notes as I thumbed through its pages:

Nick and I have always loved spending time outdoors, be it in our garden or on a long walk or just lazing in the hammock reading a book. For us, our backyard has been just another room in our house. Growing our garden over the last few years has fostered a special reverence for nature and the Earth. We sustain our garden  (and the helpful birds and insects that frequent it--including our own dog and cat) by avoiding all use of pesticides and by replenishing its soil with generous amounts of compost (made from our grass clippings, leaves, and kitchen scraps) and when we plant a tiny seed in its soil, it sustains us with beautiful food and gorgeous flowers. It's a relationship we find meaningful, and we hope that we can cultivate that same sense of stewardship in Arlo. 

We figure it's never too early to immerse Arlo in the sunshine and fresh air, and we love taking any opportunity we can to expose him to new outdoor adventures. And it was in that spirit that we excitedly agreed to take an early morning hike along the Tahoe Rim Trail with Nick's cousin Dave and his fiancee Kameryn during our trip to Tahoe last month. It was a crazy challenging hike--mostly up the mountain's incline and in a higher altitude than we're accustomed to here in sea-level Virginia, BUT the stunning views made it worth the burning muscles and huffing lungs!

Dear Arlo, Nine Months

I'm writing this as you sleep next to me, cozily on your belly, your back gingerly rising and falling to the beat of your rhythmic, peaceful breaths. Sometimes, after a middle-of-the-night nursing, I will lay next to you in our dark, quiet bed and listen to your breathfalls. They are a mother's own lullabye.

Tomorrow marks nine flips of the calendar's pages since your birth. You have officially lived outside of my body for longer than you lived inside of it now, and I don't know what to think about this little fact. I keenly understand that each passing day leads us both farther and farther away from that gorgeous time and space where we shared oxygen and blood, where our bodies were literally bound to each other, where you were small and safe within.  I loved every moment of pregnancy with you. You and I will never share that level of intimate symbiosis again, and if I think about that long enough, something akin to grief puddles inside of me.

The dream of you, during my pregnancy, was intoxicating. It saturated my blood, and I stumbled around drunk on daydreams. Like a teenager, tipsy on sips of wine cooler. To my wild astonishment, the reality of you--my new reality of motherhood-- profoundly surpasses those daydreams. I am tanked on wonderment. You are Mama's moonshine.

And so, it's this boozy awe of each new thing you discover, each new skill you hone, each new milestone you reach that makes this new chapter so exciting, so stunning. Seeing you grow up fills me with a raw nostalgia, sure, but seeing you grow is so thoroughly fun. We may never again share pregnancy's intimacy, but we have so many other gorgeous experiences to share in our future together. It's kind of thrilling, kid. I am so excited to see you develop favorites and talents. I cannot wait to see your personality unfurl.
In these nine months you have changed me in innumerable ways, Arlo. Some ways are visible, some not quite. It was a surprise to me, succombing to the fierce compulsion to stay home with you and quitting my job. Now, nearly six months later, it's a pure surprise to me that I ever thought I wouldn't stay home with you. Staying home, no matter how perfectly it suits us, has come with big financial changes for our family. We're living on significantly less now, forgoing many creature comforts. I think others might think we're depriving ourselves, but I've never felt richer. I think of our life before we were parents, and those feel like the deprived times to me.

You are what I never knew I wanted, and yet also what I have wanted for so long.  May you always understand the true, unfiltered love I have for you.

The richest,
Your mother

What's Your Emergency?

Wanna know how we kicked off our Labor Day long weekend a couple of weekends ago? With a long walk on the canal, with a thick canopy of verdant trees shading our journey, with butterflies flitting alongside us, passing logs studded with turtles in the reservoir, warmly greeting our neighbors and fellow baby-strollers, dog-walkers, and bike-pedalers, pushing our apple-cheeked babe in the swing at the park while he flashed us his handsome two-toothed grin, then starting the leisurely stroll home by taking in the furry spectacles at the dog park...

And then Nick frantically calling 911 while I reflexively and fiercely attempted to dislodge the mystery object that Arlo had sneakily put in his mouth and subsequently began choking on.

Oh. Lawd.
I had Arlo out of his stroller in seconds and began striking him on the back with the heel of my palm while he was facing downward. After a few blows I'd turn him upward, check to see if he was breathing, but each time found that he was continuing to struggle. At first, I went about this in a fairly utilitarian way--I mean, kids do this kind of stuff all the time right? And I was doing exactly what I'd been trained to do in these kinds of circumstances, right? And, surely it would work, right? We tend not to be the easily-panicked types in most aspects of our lives, and our parenting approach has similarly followed suit.

Except, Arlo still wasn't breathing and continued to struggle.That absolute absence of sound from your child is a deafening kind of silence.  And those few seconds felt like a slowly trickling eternity, and our laid-back take was thrust into a alarm-stricken fifth gear. In the simplest of terms, it scared us to the bone, in the most primal kind of way.

We were just a handful of blocks away from the EMS station, and as we heard the distant peal of the ambulances siren, Arlo seemed to come back to life. Whatever it was, this mysterious choking culprit, had moved. And when he began to cry we were overwhelmed with relief. The paramedics arrived, gave Arlo a checking over--a little pulse-ox here, a little chest-listening there--and deemed him okay. With an anxiety-jangled hand I signed to decline a trip to the ER.

 I carried Arlo for the entire remainder of our walk home, a comfort for us both. As we walked, Nick and I pondered aloud what Arlo could have choked on. Had he pocketed a rock? A pine needle? Grass? These are things he had picked up during our time at the park, but we had taken them away from him. There was nothing in the seat of his stroller that might present as a choking hazard. We had decorated Arlo's stroller with a sparkly star wire garland when we walked in our local July 4th parade, and had left it on the stroller's frame since the parade. Nick wondered if Arlo had possibly tugged off one of the flat plastic stars and had maybe choked on that. It remained a mystery to us.

Until the next day. When we changed his diaper. Patriotic poo. A red star, once sparkly, now poo-covered. Needless to say, the garland has since been packed away...

One of these little buggers :(



Nine/Eleven, Ten Years Later

Yesterday afternoon Nick and I visited our downtown museum and cultural center, which was hosting a free exhibit of works created by local artists in memoriam of 9/11, as well as an installation of various artifacts, gear, stories and photographs from local residents who were intimately affected by the terrorist attacks and the two resulting wars. It was a small, but thoughtful, personal and thorough accounting.

Like most people, we have precise memories of the moment we learned of the attacks ten years ago. I was attending a training in Manassas (about 35ish miles south of the Pentagon) for my old department of social services job. One of my counterparts from another county said she'd just heard from someone back at her office that a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers, and we all looked at each other with puzzled faces, assuming that it must have been a small plane and the pilot must have had some trouble or been intoxicated. And then someone told us that second plane had crashed into the other tower, and the deep confusion in the room was palpable. Shortly thereafter our instructor told us that our training had been cancelled and that we should all return home. The 20 or so of us attending the training found ourselves standing in the hotel lobby before a large screen television, transfixed by the images of the WTC in flames. When we heard about the attack at the Pentagon, I left without hesitation and drove 45 minutes back to my office, where I found it empty. The county had dismissed all of its employees that day and had encouraged everyone to go home to be with their families. I had missed this because I'd been at the training. I drove home and tried to reach Nick at his office, but there was no answer. He was out in the field. This was before we had cell pones, and there was no way to reach him in the field. I sat horrified in the floor of our small one-bedroom apartment and watched the images of the fallen towers, repeatedly trying Nick's office, relieved when he finally called back, and even more grateful for his return home that afternoon.

Nick says he and a coworker had finished a field assignment and were sitting in a gas station parking lot when they heard the news on the radio. He says they both sat quietly in the car, listening with disbelief to the newscast. They sat and listened for a long time, the disbelief never tempering.

It's hard to know what to say about this event, and I struggle now, a decade later, when thinking of how I will frame this for Arlo when he's older. How do we convey the magnitude of this tragedy without scaring him? How do we talk about the immense loss that day without overwhelming him with secondary grief? I wonder what kind of questions he will ask us, and how we can provide honest, heartfelt answers.

I've been listening to NPR's StorpCorps series over the last week, listening to the stories of parents who lost children on 9/11 and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I've heard and read many stories before (and was especially moved by the few 9/11 stories recounted in the StoryCorps book, Listening is an Act of Love), but hearing the stories this past week was different. I now see 9/11 through the lens of parenthood, which adds an exposed, raw layer of loss for me. I can think of nothing so cruel, so shattering as the loss of a child.

It's a chest-tightening, breath-halting thought.

So, as we walked through the local art exhibit yesterday, I held Arlo tight. I prayed that he never experience this kind of tragedy in his lifetime, I prayed that I'd have the honest, heartfelt answers to his questions, I prayed for the ability to model and instill the virtues of compassion and peace, and I prayed that I'd never, ever lose him.

And, then, there in the gallery, in the quietest, most tender act of peace I could think of amidst images and words of loss, I nursed by sweet son.

Lake Tahoe, Part 4

We stopped waking up to an alarm clock a long time ago. Like, say, 8.5 months ago. Because, you know, who needs a screeching little machine at your bedside when you've got a screeching little baby IN your bed? Arlo is an early riser, and when we wakes it's not this sleepy, stretching, gradual kind of waking. Nope. It's like someone has flipped his switch to on, and he's instantly, unhesitatingly bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and overflowing with enthusiasm for the day. Remember your childhood Christmas mornings when you'd wake up with electric, wild excitement coursing through you, with so much unbridled, joyful energy that you could hardly contain yourself until your parents woke up? That is Arlo. Every. Single. Morning.

His parents? Um, not so much. We do not awake with full-throttle vigor. Our zeal for the day requires formidable augmentation in form of coffee. Big, steamy, repeatedly-topped-off cups of coffee. I have developed a habit now of pulling the coffee pot off of its warmer before the pot has finished brewing, as soon as there's just enough to make a cup. Nick simply has to wait.

This remained true during our time in Tahoe. Instead of pacing in front of a percolator for that first, necessary cup of java, we got dressed and took a walk to Starbucks. These walks were so crisp and invigorating that by the time we arrived at the coffee shop we almost didn't need our daily caffeine supplement. Almost. We'd get a simple, tall cup of brewed joe and sit outside, people watch, and relax as much as any two parents with an Energizer Bunny of a baby could. I wish I could have bottled those Tahoe mornings, because they were perfect.



Those super chilly mornings gave us the perfect excuse

to pull out the ridiculously cute knit owlet beanie that Nick got

Arlo when he was brand new and way too small to wear it.

Our little owlet fell asleep on the walk home.

No worries. After a brief repose he was off to explore

the lake and investigate rocks with Grandpa!

A shovel in each hand. This kid means business.

No, I will not share my shovels with you.

Darlin' marlin.

Snuggling my small fry

Lake Tahoe, Part Three

There was one casualty during our terrific Tahoe getaway: Arlo's daily naptime routine. And, well, naptime remains rather off-kilter since then, too. Arlo used to take three naps each day--one around 8:30am, and a second about two hours after waking from the first, and a third about two hours after waking from the second. Take a three-hour time change, the excitement that comes with discovering new places and people, and our intentional manipulation of his naps for travel ease (for both car trips and our flights) and it's a wonder that Arlo managed a small measure of his typical cheer and energy. His naps were so erratic that one afternoon he napped for FOUR hours straight. His sleep was so heavy that periodically we'd find ourselves making sure he was still breathing.

We found ourselves taking advantage of the condo's pool on those days when Arlo's napping was unpredictable. The pool was a just skip away, and we could easily go between it and the condo as Arlo needed. When a full day at the beach seemed to long or overstimulating, the pool was such a bonus.

Heading out for our first trip to the pool!

(This swimsuit was given to Arlo last Christmas by Grandma Susan and Grandpa Elbe, specifically for Tahoe. The shirt says, "Can't Catch Me!" Little did they know then how so very true this would be.)

Giving his new baby float from Grandma a test float!

Float on.

These guys? Definitely up to something mischievous, for sure.

Grandma = cuddliest pool toy ever