FULL HARVEST BLOOD MOON

I juat watched the eclipse with Sophie wishing you were here but it IS after your bedtime. It ws quite impressive to watch the light disappear and then reappear, Let's definitely plan to share it in 2033 or 2018 or both. I burned a little sage just as the eclipse reached it's peak.
Now I am preparing for camping tomorrow. I dont know how it will go but I think it will just be so lovely to be in the colors and hike along some of the trails farther north. I wish you could come, but your Mama and Dady have to work.

GREAT BLUE HERON

This is your second trip to the U of M landscape arboretum. I had n umbrella stroller with no protection from the sun so you had to wear a hat. You looked adorable and loved eating your mac and cheese kid meal outside in the garden. There were a lot of elderly people, all more or less  admiring your style. And your made endless efforts to converse with them. After your snack we strollered around the pond and you got out of the stroller to play on the benches. I loved watching you watch things and creatures.

We saw this wonderful creature on the path as we headed down to the pond's boardwalk. It was very shy but majestic. I take this to be a very auspicious sign that we are meant for each other. Perhaps that is my imagination. And if so I will just keep imagining it for myself. Seeing you today was also wonderful. Being at the "Once upon a child" store was so sweet. I love watching you explore the toys and books. You are so easy to engage and love to try everything. No crying or whining or crabbiness. What a relief after listening to so many people who are in discomfort and trying to help them feel better. People are not good at taking care of themselves at certain times in their lives when it would be important to be gentle and nurturing. We worry about money, but don't see that we have more thean enough stuff, at least here  in Minnesota to be totally satisfied, yet we want more, new and different. Look at my toe-nails for example: I had perfectly wonderful, sparkle green gel polish, but I got sick of it and had this driving desire to change to a different color, but I had a horrible time trying to make up my mind. I liked so many of the colors that I couldn't manage to pick my favorite....

STROLLER

Your stroller was waiting for you at my house for almost a whole week! I added some outfits and your Daddy's jacket. He wore it when it was snowing very unexpectedly, then by the time he left, it was warm and beautiful again. He didn't need it and forgot he wore it. I liked having your stroller in the house as it reminded me of how much I love seeing you. Today was an ASL practice day. Your Mommy brought a DVD and book to help me with learning some new signs, but my memory for so many signs all at once is not reliable. I read somewhere that we can only remember 4 things without a written list. I will write them down and drill them so next time we meet for practice I can remember a few more than I did today. I am totally distracted during the practice sessions by your smile and talking. I just want to play with you, sing to you and show you things. There are so many books I want to read to you, and places I want to take you. I am hoping you can come to Lake Maria with me on Monday.

This is the cabin I have rented. We must hike across the little bridge to get to the front door and we have to build a wood fire to keep warm while we are there. This was taken Fall 2014, before you were born. I was there with the dogs but dogs are not allowed in the cabins so we simply slept in the tent on another sight. The park was quite deserted. I think we were the only ones staying there so we walked everywhere, exploring every camp site.

I love the little bridge we cross to get to the cabin. It reminds me of Goldilocks and the three bears, only there are 6 bunk beds inside and no kitchen. Porridge is cooked outside on a little camp stove or the fire pit. There are very old trees in this park and that is the attraction for me as I am a "tree hugger" or "conservationist" in more flattering terms. I just can't see cutting down trees for the sake of cutting them down. I definitely want us to save some of them as long as possible.

FIELD TRIP

The day you met your Great Grandma Joyce was amazing. It started off with a rain storm. I drank a cup of caffeinated tea and worked out for the first time in forever. Not long, but long enough to remember how good it felt to move my body in that way. Then I came in to take a shower and it snowed big fat globs of snowflakes which started to stick to all the bare tree branches and look like the wedding scene in Nanny McPhee.

I had been nervous/anxious/excited to do this trip with you and your Mom. I had been practicing signing so I could at least finger spell if I needed to communicate and I had a little notebook for back up. When I get nervous my finger spelling is super slow and I get confused. My hands start to do weird things and go to the wrong places.

Working on my clients I wanted to time to go faster and I mis-read the times of my appointments so I was finished an hour sooner than I planned. 

This mix up gave me time to mail my taxes, pick up my lost cell phone charger and stop at Wuollet's bakery for treats. When I picked up you and your Mom, it was sunny, warm and beautiful. The snow was gone and it felt like an incredible blessing for the meeting and for life in general. You slept the whole way to Great Grandma's and she fell in love with you immediately. All the stuff she said about Ethan, Nyah, Kieran, Charlie and Olivia she said about you over and over again. She repeats herself alot but she seemed just so impressed with who you are/were that she couldn't stop herself. She so loved you and insisted on holding you and didn't want to let you go. 

She told a lot of stories I hadn't heard before: one about your Uncle Mike's Dad's family paying her off so she wouldn't ask for child support. Creepy. They told her to go to school and support herself and her child. I saw her with different eyes as she was talking about her experience. It appeared that she was remembering her experience with Mike when he was JJ's age. She had a horrendous birth with Mike. She was in a Catholic hospital and had a painful, long labor. Then as she was nearly ready to deliver the obstetrician "knocked her out" and she didn't regain consciousness for 3 days! By that time her milk was unstable, nursing was unstable and he had been fed some sort of weird sugar water from a bottle for three days. Plus the fact that she was unmarried and her Dad was an alcoholic and her mother was the victim of domestic violence. What a challenging situation! And even though she was 20, it must have been confusing. No wonder Mike has trouble with relationships! She also told me he has had stents put in his legs. News to me. Usually I just feel like he has done this to himself but I found a surprising sensation of compassion for his situation. No wonder he just wants to smoke cigarettes, read fantasy and drink Baileys in his coffee with a coca-cola chaser. 

She also told me about her Dad speaking only French until eighth grade. Which I had not realized until that moment. 

There were lots of questions about you and your Mom and your Grandma Aisha. Which I didn't really know the answers to, so I just kept saying, "I don't know and I'm not sure." 

ASL is hard for me and I have trouble remembering so many signs when I don't use it everyday.

Like you, GG Joyce doesn't have any teeth. She had breast cancer, so she went through chemo and radiation. It affected her gums, so she went to Arizona and had all her teeth pulled. I guess she thought it would just be easier to use dentures. Unfortunately, they were extremely uncomfortable, difficult to find a great adhesive and cut into her mouth so that her soft palate was always bleeding. 

Now she just wears them only when she has to for show. 

And, of course, it doesn't change the nerve damage in her mouth and tongue. That will probably always be there making it difficult for her to talk clearly. She also appears to be hearing impaired so she keeps the captions on when she watches TV. 

Also, like you, she has very little hair (thank you, chemo) and she does wear diapers. I'm not sure how often, but my point is that life appears to be a circle. She talked alot about her funeral arrangements, but not about the actual process of dying. When she lived in her trailer she had an arrangement with someone to check on her everyday. Just to make sure she was alive. Someone in her building died last week and wasn't found for 4 days. She thought the woman had fallen and wasn't able to get up. The story wasn't particularly clear as she told it, but she seemed to be wondering what would happen to her in that case. 

She has spent a lot of money on her funeral arrangements and party. I reminded her that I will be singing "A dream is a wish your heart makes" as per her request. (In my second year of college I went to Europe, for my first time with a costume design class. She didn't want me to come home for her funeral but asked that I record the song so she/they could play it. Maybe she was worried that I might, for one reason or another, not return and it would be the only piece of me she had to keep.

FASHIONISTA

I have pretty much forgotten how to do the blog thing and frankly the program has changed since I was an avid blogger. Now it seems like I need to actually address an audience or I just get scrambled focus. So I will concentrate on a very small audience and see if I am more successful in my efforts. And certainly more consistent.

When we first met I honestly didn't recognize you. But then it quickly became clear who you were and that you were not so happy about the manner of your arrival. I was happy to be there in spite of the drama with your Dad. I know he was tired and scared but OMG is there any excuse for his rudeness and lack of remorse? I imagine he was just so happy to see you safe and sound that he didn't care about anything else including how many bridges he burnt in the process. Maybe men really shouldn't be included in the birthing process. There is just too much pressure to fix whatever is happening, to make the pain stop, and in that case perhaps I was very lucky that my partner was such a space cadet, and just so ineffectual in his efforts to support me through the process. Becoming a Dad is hard, and so is becoming a Granny. We have stereotypes about what it is to be a Granny and they are somewhat limiting in there perimeters. This is another area where I wish to be creative and with your help I think I will succeed. This photo is from the day you and I dropped your Mom at work and came back to my place for fun and games. She had dressed you in this super cute T-shirt but when you pooped it got a lot of poo all over it. Surprise, surprise. That was when I got the brilliant idea of keeping a few clothes here to cover emergencies. Like this one!