Sandcastles

Before...

I don't think I need to explain that things have been a little bit hectic around here.  We're all a little disheveled, more often than not.  But once in awhile, we're not.  Once in awhile, there are a few, lustrous hours of order - clean clothes, clean faces, de-tangled hair...

...and after. 

But of course, those hours are always numbered.  By the end of the day, we're usually a step behind our pajama'd beginning.  The now dirty clothes end up in a little heap somewhere.  The hairdo has disintegrated into chaos, and happiness is now a matter of pasting a sticker to our bare skin, using the best adhesive available: sooty rainwater.

At this point, I'm often tempted to ask myself why I ever bother in the first place.  It's not as though there is ever a day that doesn't end looking like a disaster.  But I just have to laugh instead, because this is life - mortality in a nutshell.

What do we do, if not build things to be decayed?  We wake up each morning and create each day like a sandcastle on the beach.  We build, often carefully, pouring our creativity and energy into the cast of our priorities, packing and shaping, and hope for the best result.  Nevertheless, whether by waves or wind, we will find that, by its end, the day has dilapidated considerably.

Especially as a mom, I've come face to face with this reality: that all of my efforts, all of my accomplishments will, at least seemingly, fade away.  Nothing but my (more and more sporadic) journal entries and occasional photographs will remain in years to come, to prove that today ever happened.  And yet, today matters.  The exertions with which I attempt to bring order or beauty into my life and the lives of my little ones are not insignificant.

When the evening has come and finds all that I have built or done in a limp state of disrepair, what will remain, but the patience that I have worked into my fingers?  The ability to endure, that has seeped into my reddened knuckles?  The new understanding in my tired eyes, of the redemption of every new morning?  What will remain of my creations in the sand are the memories that my daughters will someday carry away with them, that their mama loved them.

Surely, there is something that we are meant to learn by the cycle of creation and destruction.  Doubtless, there is wisdom behind the mortality and fallibility of our bodies and of all that we do here, calculated to allow us to grow.

My Happy Thought

In the few short weeks that have followed the appearance of our Ellie, I have found myself daydreaming from time to time.  I have caught myself thinking, half-consciously, now we're a real family...

I know that that's ridiculous.  We were a real family before Ellie was born, before she was even thought of.  Ben and I were a real family even before Addie came to us.  We were a real family from the day we were married, when we committed to be a forever unit, to build one another up and to grow together for the rest of our lives and long after.

But life is a long time - not to mention eternity - and I can't help thinking about it, envisioning family photos taken someday in a studio or on a carpet of fallen leaves.  When I was a new bride, my husband was one of the only real certainties of my future.  There would be him, me...and whatever other family members might happen along.

Almost a year and a half later, Addie came into our lives, and they were, of course, changed forever.  My imaginary family portraits began to feature her little face as well.  Alongside the baby pictures that began to appear on our walls, I saw, in my mind, other pictures - the first day of kindergarten, Christmases and family reunions to come.  And yet, in addition to Addie, the pictures included a number - no one can say how many - of nameless, faceless little strangers.

Ellie is yet another piece to that puzzle.  Now that she is here, I feel that I know something more about both of my daughters than I did before.  Each one adds a new backdrop to the other's life.  Each adds a clarifying line to the vague contour of our future as I see it before us.  All of those yet-untaken photographs are one less part imagination and on more part reality.

So, in those moments of sunshiny contentment, this is what I see - lots of murky, undefined years, but each one is filled with my girls, my husband and with abundant promise.

Venturing

I thought I had this parenting thing figured out.  Surely, being able to go about my business with a rambunctious toddler in tow, and being able to keep her happy entails some sort of motherly prowess, right?

Well, this week, with my mom gone back home and my husband gone back to work, I'm getting to really get my feet wet, on my own with both girls for the first time.  As if being at home with both of them weren't sort of a trial by fire, our 2-week well-child check-up fell on the first day of mommy's lonely reign.

I spent all morning preparing, trying to get myself and both girls in a state of being fed, clean and ready to go.  We still got out the door barely on time.  As I pulled onto the interstate, anxieties began to rise.  I felt a profound weight of responsibility hanging on my shoulders.  I had forgotten something, I was sure of it.  Reaching behind me, I found Ellie's little head with my fingertips, just to reassure myself.  It wasn't enough.  I pulled off again at the first exit and found a place to pull over, just so that I could turn around completely to see that my baby was, indeed, asleep in her car seat.  Sufficiently calmed, I took courage and we continued along the freeway toward town.

Despite its inauspicious start, the outing went quite smoothly.  We got back home all in one piece, but exhausted, and I found that I suddenly had a new respect for my sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, mother and the other women in my life who raised or are raising their children cheerfully and accomplishing and learning other things besides.

If anyone would have asked a month or two ago, whether I knew what I was getting into, I would have had to answer honestly that I didn't.  While I understood conceptually that a second child would add substantially to my stress and busyness, I knew even then that I hadn't really internalized it.  Then again, I wonder if anyone is ever really ready to have a child.  I'm convinced that it is always, to some degree or another, an act of faith.

As I walked from the clinic, I was shepherding Addie along beside me and had Ellie's unwieldy car seat slung over my opposite forearm.  A passerby observed, with a smile, "You have your hands full!"  My mind went back to words from a blog I had read years before, and I almost repeated them aloud: "Yes they are - full of good things!"

I am so grateful for my life and what it has become.  It is not what I envisioned.  I am grateful for these little years and for the opportunity to choose to embrace them.

I was blessed to come across this video a couple of months ago.  The address on which it is based is one of the things that really gave me the courage to unashamedly pursue motherhood...but that's a topic for another post.

While the Dust Settles

Through calls, texts, and Facebook, most of our family and friends already know about our new arrival.  I was overwhelmed to see just how many of our friends and neighbors were eager to help us when the hour came, and so grateful for all of the support we found among our family and friends, both here and far away.  While I have so much to say and tell about the most memorable Labor Day weekend of our lives, I am currently far behind in the process of writing it down, and there is a little girl who will only sleep between the hours of 8:00 PM and 2:00 AM if nestled in my lap or arms (it's now about 10:00 PM).  Since a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, though, I thought I'd post a little visual of our new reality and let that speak for itself while I catch up on everything else.

Sisters

Goat Head Blog

*No, this post does not contain an announcement.*

That being said, I have been promising myself for months that I would get back to blogging before Baby #2 made his/her appearance.  Gradually, that has turned into a vow that I will post at least once before I'm knocked off my feet (and probably off my rocker too) by the next little tidal wave in my life.

It has been a long summer of more things than I even want to recount, but prevalent among them, a garden that my neighbor and I have prodded and urged and muscled and willed and prayed to produce.  Alongside the garden, there is the lawn that I dreamed of, that Ben and I have watered and wished out of the ground.  Of all that has happened in the last few months, those two things have been two of the best.  They have been my escape from many less pleasant aspects of the summer, especially from simply waiting.  I hope you will understand, then, why the first thing to resurface on this blog is a gardening analogy.

Our young crops and probably the source of my sanity.

One of the first things I discovered when we moved into our house here were some nasty little thorns that inhabit just about every square inch of land outside and somehow find their way inside too.  Eventually, I found out that the spiny little pests had a name: goat heads.

The beginnings of hope...

They were at the forefront of my mind when I decided that I wanted our lawn to be a foot-friendly place, free from thorns and thistles.  Despite the weeds that had grown rampant in the new grass while Ben and I were both too frantically busy to contain them, I thought I had succeeded rather well, until my grandparents, former Arizonians themselves, came one day to visit.  While touring our garden, my grandpa knelt down and pointed out a stray weed that we spreading itself over the ground beside the fence.  "Do you know what this is?" he asked me.  "This is called goat head.  If you don't get this up, you're going to have some nasty stickers out of it."

To my dismay, I began seeing that same pernicious little weed at the edges of our lawn.  School began again, and I found that after Ben would leave for work, I would spend entire mornings in the yard, yanking up weeds by the hand-full.  The goat heads in our garden were already sprouting green thorns, ready to drop them and no matter how many I disentangled from our precious grass, there were always more.  I felt outnumbered and overwhelmed, bending over my over-sized belly to get at them, while behind me Addie whined to be taken inside.

It took a little over a week and some help from my husband, but we got the little invasion under control.  I've noticed, however, that they don't seem ever to stop.  No matter how many I throw over the fence and how carefully I gather the dropped thorns to pitch them over the propane tank, there's always at least a sprout somewhere.

Well, I've decided that this blog has been and will continue to be something like the little goat head weeds.  Sometimes, posts will be rampant (and probably rather irritating too).  Sometimes, they'll pop up here and there, just often enough to prove that we're still here, still in the desert, and sometimes, they'll disappear for months at a time, only to show up uninvited and without forewarning - quite randomly.  My hope is that someday, I'll be able to write more like I'm learning to garden, in steady, sustained and predictable patterns, but for now, this blog is going to be more like the thorns that have (rather literally) punctuated my experience here.  For now, it is merely a stubborn survivor. :)

A Much-Belated Baby Post

I acknowledge that I've been pregnant now for...almost six months.  At 25 weeks and a few days, I'm only a little over three months from our due date, and I've been meaning to make more than a casual mention of it in a post for quite some time.

The tummy.  I'm pretty sure it looks bigger in person.

I started this blog during my first pregnancy, so while my posts were few and far between, most of them focused on Addie and on the eager anticipation centered around her.  That was a different time, for certain.  I was working full-time, attending school full-time, and adjusting to a new home, new friends, and still had so little time at my own disposal that I had almost no need to figure out what I was going do with any of it.

Since Addie made her appearance in our family, my life has changed drastically.  While the decision to be a stay-at-home mom was one of the best I have ever made, it has also had a lot of unanticipated effects.  My life has become an unending balancing act.  There was suddenly so much time and so many, many important things with which to fill it, but no one looking over my shoulder to supervise.  It has probably been one of the most overwhelming things about motherhood for me.

But I digress.  All excuses aside, the facts are these: we are expecting again, we are very excited, and I haven't bothered to really blog about it yet.  Usually when people ask me how I'm feeling, my response has been that "the second pregnancy is not like the first one."  I don't know if the little aches and discomforts really are more intense by themselves or if I feel differently because I simply wasn't chasing a toddler around last time.

Not the best images of our ultrasound, I admit, but the radiologist did a pretty nice job at
sharpening them up for us.  I'm thinking this one has Ben's nose and pronounced brow...
but maybe that's just me. :)

But this second pregnancy has also been sweet in its own ways.  I wasn't sure that I felt stirrings until about 18 weeks, which was the same with Addie.  Ben, however, could detect the little movements only a week after I could.  Again, I can't say whether this little one is a more enthusiastic kicker or we just knew better what we were waiting for, but it has been fun to share those things with my husband earlier on.

We've also had the new challenge of trying to prepare Addie for the coming changes that this baby will bring.  There's no way to let her know just how it will be when Mom and Dad suddenly have someone else to hold and can't pick her up whenever she wants.  We have however, begun to work on the concept that Mom has a baby in her tummy.  She learned to say "baby" weeks ago, since that's what we call the baby doll who comes just about everywhere with us.  A couple weeks back, I started pointing to my belly and saying "Mommy has a baby in her tummy."  Since then, when we ask, "Where's Mom's baby?" she pretty consistently points to my tummy.  I do wonder how well she understands even this, though, since on Sunday, when we asked her this, she pointed first to Ben's knee, then to hers.

Either way, it's going to be an adjustment to her.  If we can just get her to lavish the same little kisses and attentions on her brother or sister as she does on her baby doll, and can keep her from trying to forcefully share her cheerios the way she does with us, I'd say we're off to a good start.

As I watched Addie grow through her first year, I constantly found myself thinking that the second child couldn't be this much fun.  I was sure I would just spend the entire infancy being overanxious to see him/her reach the same landmarks as his/her big sister.  I found it hard to believe that, having experienced a toddler, I could go back to enjoying a newborn, but that, too, has changed.  Every day, I feel more and more astonished to realize that my little girl has become such a toddler, and I'm seeing my friends' babies through new eyes.  I am looking forward to this little one and to the curve balls he or she is going to throw us.

Backyard Fantasies

Since I was a teenager, green has been my favorite color and, in many situations, it still is.  At this point, I'm not overly biased.  I haven't insisted on having every room in the house or even one of them painted in some forest-y shade and after years of complaining to my mom that I was so tired of that shade of burgundy that she used all throughout the kitchen, I can see that appeal in it.  It might even make an appearance in my own home someday.  We'll see.

However, ever since we moved out here, I have been painfully aware of the absence of my long-time favorite color from most of the scenery.  In February, I realized that it probably wasn't a healthy habit to, in a moment of homesickness, spend an hour or so researching some random, scenic town a thousand miles away, down to the house I would buy, the church I would attend, and the library I would frequent, should we happen to move there.  Instead, knowing that our plans don't include leaving this town for a couple years more, I started to fantasize about how to bring the green to me.  

It started with the day we took Addie to the track and allowed her to play in the sand.  I decided that we would need a sand box to keep her company during the summer.  My mind moved to the enclosure in which the box would sit, lest she should get any ideas about running away.  The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that the yard inside the fence should be green - and not with synthetic turf either (it's been suggested).  With real, living grass.  (The original dream actually included ivy climbing the fence and a line of sunflowers, standing sentry around its perimeter.  I've since put that vision on hold.)

The new fence, as seen from out back porch

In the background, you can see the garden we've started
planting with our neighbors.  It'll be a monster if it ever
takes off.

I acknowledge that it's sort of a long shot.  No one in our neighborhood has a lawn.  I don't know it that's for lack of trying or simply because the thing is impossible.  Nevertheless, we marked out a spot behind the house.  A few weeks ago, we got a fence.  Finally, after weeks of shoveling gravel, tearing up weeds, and a few rather vain attempts to level the small area, we spent an evening spreading top soil, grass seed, and fertilizer.

In the process, Addie rediscovered her inner mud-monkey (which had mysteriously gone missing for the majority of the yard-clearing process.  Now, the yard is wet, muddy, and speckled with oh-so vulnerable little seeds.  I have found myself going to the window or the porch every few hours or so, just to check for sprouts.

Lately, it's been Addie's thing to get a bottle and flop down somewhere on the kitchen floor to drink it.  When she ran out of steam for playing in the dirt, she finally settled down right in the muddy doorway, taking a front-row seat to watch the sprinklers work their magic.

I'm ready to acknowledge that we might never see a nice, thick lawn  covering our little strip of yard, but I'm also ready to fight all summer long to make it happen.  As much as I would (will) love to have a nice, cultivated yard, a retreat from the surrounding dust, the very act of putting my heart and hands into the project has been a healing balm.  Therefore, so help me, I will dig and plant and water and repeat until I have a lawn to show for it or until the effort puts me into labor. And in the meantime, I will learn to love this land.