The thing about boys...

So I'm still learning about boys. Like how changing a boy's diaper is different from changing a girl's diaper.

I know, this should be obvious. It's something I understand in theory, and most of the time both Matt and I are good about keeping a spare diaper handy for strategic placement when the DANGER ZONE is left uncovered. But we're prone to careless moments, because we are human and because we are not getting a great deal of sleep these days. And you know perfectly well that any child of mine is going to take advantage of those careless moments, even a sweet little babe like Isaac. So we've had those sudden little fountains erupting in the middle of perfectly ordinary diaper changes, and so far they've just made us laugh.

Until this afternoon, when I was trying to change Isaac and give Suzannah the attention she needed and get the dog fed so she'd stop barking angrily at me because I was five minutes late doing that. I settled Suzannah at her little work table with her new stamps and ink pad, got the dog fed so she'd stop bothering Suzannah who would in turn bother me, and rushed through a diaper change. Rushed too much, as it turns out, because I left my little man not only uncovered but stark naked on the changing pad in his crib while I rummaged around for a new diaper and some new jammies.

Not only did he manage to pee straight up in the air, all over me, over the side of the crib, onto the floor, and back on to his own belly, but he chose that precise moment to shoot a violent stream of seedy yellow newborn poop out of his darling little bottom. That stuff managed to get smeared all over his back while I grabbed a handful of his cloth prefolds to mop it up. (Sidenote: I love our cloth diapers so much. We started with disposables to get us through the icky meconium phase and to get used to using the cloth in general, but I won't miss those at all. I have not had one single leak with our cloth diapers. Plus, they're so much cuter.)

Suzannah appeared in the doorway and regarded us with mild interest.

"Well, your brother needs a bath before you do tonight," I told her. "Want to help Mama clean him up?"

She considered this for a moment and then replied, "Okay."

Isaac takes his baths like a man, so that was pretty uneventful. He wasn't pleased about being suddenly UNSNUGGLED and PUT IN WATER, but he settled down quickly afterwards. When I emerged from the bathroom with my swaddled little boy and his Dangerous Equipment, I finally noticed that my other child was covered in smeary pink ink from her new stamp set. She had hot pink fingers and colorful smudges all over her pants and sweatshirt. Her table was all inky, and I found myself thanking God that I'd put an old towel underneath it over the carpet because that was decorated with hot pink smudges as well. Normally, Suzannah is almost freakishly neat and tidy, but perhaps I still shouldn't leave her unsupervised with art supplies. (Which is obviously something else I understand in theory, but this is the girl who didn't even need a bib as a baby because she so disliked being messy. I'm sure Isaac will be the child who gives himself a mohawk with sweet potatoes.)

Next week I'm officially a stay-at-home mother of two children, all on my own, for the next eight months. Say a little prayer for me.

(And good grief, I haven't even changed my shirt yet. For some reason I thought it'd be better to rush in here and share this with the world first.)

This girl, this boy

(From one of my favorite poets)

Looking at Them Asleep
--Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content—and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Those four-letter words...

He's four days old, and we think we'll keep him.

I have to admit that it's a bit of a struggle to write here, not so much because I could really use a few extra arms (although that's part of it) but because it's almost impossible to complete a sentence in this household that doesn't include the words boobs or poop. These things consume our days around here. Any update I could possibly write at the moment pretty much has to include them.

We began our morning with a nice long nursing session, followed by Isaac pooping enthusiastically through his jammies and all over me. He sighed and seemed quite satisfied after that.

Little Man is nursing really well -- his big sister had a much harder time of it and we had to struggle with it for a long time before it was remotely "easy" for either one of us, so despite the inevitable discomfort of the first days of breastfeeding, I'm just thankful that he's eating well and happily filling his diapers.

We took Little Man back to Nancy on Wednesday. He promptly had his first diaper blow-out, and while I'd brought along extra diapers and wipes and blankets, I completely neglected to bring any extra outfits (clearly, I'm out of practice -- sheesh). She cheerfully scooped him up and changed him herself and pulled out a spare onesie, like this is something she does every day. Which she probably does, actually, but I laughed at the thought of our regular pediatrician (who we quite like, and who we'll be seeing at some point) just scooping up the kiddo and changing him for me.

He's lost the appropriate amount of weight, and he's eating well, so I'm not worried there. He also has not one hint of jaundice, which I admit to worrying about, even though in full-term babies it's both common and usually not something to worry about. (Suzannah, as some of you may recall, was very jaundiced within a day of birth and she quickly became dangerously dehydrated -- which was terrifying, and also contributed significantly to our nursing issues. It's amazing how much easier this feels without that added worry -- or the added round-the-clock pumping sessions.)

It was a little surreal to go back there with him and sit in the same room where he was born. I'm actually nostalgic for labor and a little sad that it's over -- which might sound crazy, but there it is. I actually got a little weepy over it, even, because I miss his little kicks inside me and labor was such a fabulous experience this time and now it's all done, it's ALL DONE, and aahhhhh. Tears.

But that's the extent of my hormonal meltdowns so far. I mentioned to Matt that hey! I'm crying a lot less this time! And right away he said, "Yeah." Poor man. When Suzannah was born, I'm sure he felt like he had a new baby and a new wife, and he only liked one of them.

But check back with me after Christmas, when Matt will be back at work and all the grandparents will have gone home and I'm alone with two children and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

And finally...

After an absolute thrill ride of a labor, we are so happy to announce the speedy arrival of our son, Isaac James Winslow!

The basics:

Birthday: Monday, December 14th, 2009
5:05 a.m.
8 pounds, 9 ounces, 21.75 inches long
Born at the Lakeside Birth Center with midwife Nancy Spencer and doula Patti Ramos
Caught by his daddy after less than four hours of labor and only two pushes (TWO!)

...pretty much perfect. We arrived at the birth center shortly after two in the morning, and we were home again before Suzannah finished having breakfast with her Auntie Morgan.

I'm looking forward to writing up the entire birth story, but for now, I'll simply say that it was more than I could have hoped for, and so is our son.

Another Still Pregnant! post

This is not a Birth Announcement. This is not even a Labor Announcement. I should just go ahead and get that out of the way, because every time I talk on the phone or send an e-mail these days the first thing I have to say is I AM NOT IN LABOR! And then I become decidedly less interesting.

Once I bypassed the crucial 37-week mark and realized I probably wouldn't be giving birth immediately, I actually wanted to stay pregnant until at least today, more than two whole weeks past the 37-week mark, because today was supposed to be Suzannah's first Christmas program at church and I really, really wanted to see her in it. The good news is that as far as I can tell, I'm not in labor yet. The bad news is that Suzannah came down with a cold late last week, and while she seems to feel a bit better than she did two days ago, she has almost completely lost her voice. She sounds, I think, a lot worse than she feels, but we decided to keep her home. She's touchy and croaky, and while I would love to see my little girl up there with all the other kids, I decided it wasn't fair to drag her out when she wasn't feeling great just for my sake. And anyway, she's three; she's not really the glue that holds the program together. There will be other Christmas programs, right?

Still, I'm in a bit of a funk over this, and I'm second-guessing our decision as well, since our daughter is not resting -- she's being an absolute pill this morning. I just love that stage where kids are too sick to go out but they're not sick enough to snuggle on the couch with movies or books; they're stir-crazy and prone to fits of whining. Fun times. Right now Matt is concocting some kind of delicious French toast brunch creation with cream cheese and apple slices, and I suppose that will help me cope.

So anyway, 39+ weeks pregnant is a lot different than 36 or 37 weeks pregnant. I know I felt uncomfortable a couple of weeks ago, but was it really just a few days after Thanksgiving that I could waddle up the street in Seattle and browse through Elliott Bay Book Company? And go to dinner afterward? I haven't left my house since Thursday, and I can hardly waddle between the couch and the bathroom. I have contractions all the time, but they have yet to settle into a pattern or otherwise do anything.

I never got to this point when I was pregnant with Suzannah, which makes sense since she was nearly a month early. I mean, I was uncomfortable. Of course. That's what happens before you go into labor. But I taught three junior classes and two sophomore classes until the day before I went into active labor. I cleaned my house, I did laundry, I drove my dog to the vet, and when I was done with all that I reorganized all our bookshelves, learned how to knit, and drafted my own plan for healthcare reform. (Just kidding. I totally can't knit.)

Now, though, my brain has turned to mush. Two weeks ago, I read South of Broad and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in rapid succession, but I've been unable to read more than a hundred pages of The Plague of Doves in a week -- and I love Louise Erdrich. I have all these beginnings of journal entries that just sort of fizzle out. I can hardly even finish an episode of Gilmore Girls, and it's not like that takes a great deal of concentration.

It doesn't exactly help to tell myself that my brain is probably going to be pretty mushy for quite some time.

But based on a few gory details I won't write about here (much to my mother's disappointment, I'm sure), I don't think it will be long. And for the most part, I'm okay with that, because I think babies know better than we do when their birthdays should be. I think it must be getting crowded in there and life might be nicer on the outside, but then again, if Baby is comfortable and healthy and wants to just chill out for awhile longer, that's okay with me.

HAVE YOU HAD THAT BABY YET?





(Thanks to Anne for the link.)

Waiting...

This whole waiting to go into labor, expecting it, is totally new for me.

When I went into labor with Suzannah, I was very much not expecting it. I rationalized everything, telling myself this is just what it feels like to be really pregnant, I guess. Finally, when I couldn't even walk to the bathroom without dropping to all fours in the hallway and panting through a contraction, I realized I had to come to terms with the fact that I was actually going to have a baby. Imminently.

I'm just over 38 weeks pregnant now, and I've already started my maternity leave, so that leaves me all this time to do the following things: OBSESS and OVER-ANALYZE. And hey, guess what! I'm super good at both of those things already! Excellent. Seriously, though, at least once a day I am utterly convinced that I'm going into labor within the day. On the flip side, at least once a day I freak out about how this baby will go to college in my belly and Matt will have to help me put on my pants for the rest of our lives. What a lucky man.

Well, I hear all babies have to be born eventually.

My guilt over not working anymore is ebbing, though, because I'm pretty wickedly uncomfortable. That, and I absolutely reached my limit of what kinds of comments I could endure and still respond in a civilized manner. I grew resigned to the usual barrage: Are you sure you're not having twins? You look like you're ready to POP, you're HUGE! No way will you make it to your due date! What is your due date? No, your EXACT due date? You're definitely having a boy. You're definitely having a girl. You're huge. You look incredibly uncomfortable. You've dropped. J., you've had four kids, look at her -- hasn't she dropped?

But the last one I heard on my way out the door WINS.

On the day before Thanksgiving, I had to swing through the office to sign some paperwork on my way out. The worst offender, the one who always makes the most bizarre and inappropriate comments (and is also a woman I really don't know, which makes her comments even more bizarre and inappropriate), walked over to me and grimaced.

"You look like you're dilating," she said.

Blink.

Blink blink.

What?

"I mean, have you gone in and gotten your cervix checked?" she asked.

I was literally speechless for a moment, and then the tiny Shari in my head screamed at her, "How can I possibly LOOK like I'm DILATING?" Finally, I just said, "Uh, no, and I'm not planning to, ever, because I don't think that information is at all relevant." Seriously, there is only one number that matters, and when I get to that number, no one will need to tell me. (I probably should have followed that with, "And how is this at all an appropriate thing to ask someone you hardly know? In an office?")

She continued to gape at me, then said, "Well, have fun," in a tone of voice that suggested I was somehow either stupid or crazy. For what, though, I'm not sure -- for dilating without checking? For being pregnant at all?

I just -- I really don't even know. I look like I'm dilating?

I ran into one of my colleagues on my way to my car.

"L. told me I look like I'm dilating," I said. When my colleague managed to gain control of her hysterical laughter, she asked, "Where -- uh, where was she looking?"

This little encounter is perhaps all I need to think about when I question whether or not I should have stuck it out at school a little longer.

37 weeks and change...

Still pregnant.
Still having tons of contractions.
Still feeling great in the mornings, exhausted in the afternoons, significantly uncomfortable at night.
Nothing terribly interesting going on.

I keep trying to compare this pregnancy to Suzannah's, but obviously that's ridiculous, and I'm only succeeding in driving myself crazy. I know perfectly well I could go into labor tomorrow or still be pregnant two weeks from now, and that's all fine; it's just hard for me, the eternal control-freak, to accept the fact that I can't predict when or how labor will start. Or how it will go. I know there's some annoying life lesson in all this.

Thanksgiving was, overall, quite pleasant. Matt baked his famous pies, my dad took care of the turkey and stuffing, and my mom cooked pretty much everything else and cleaned my house and put up my Christmas decorations. (See, Friday or Saturday would have been such a convenient day for me to go into labor -- so much help, a clean house...which is why I knew it wouldn't happen.) On Saturday, we drove up to Seattle and wandered around a bit; I wanted to hit up the Elliott Bay Book Company and we had some good coffee. I didn't think I'd make it to Seattle again before I had this baby, but suddenly it seemed like a good idea. And it was fine, but every time I start to feel guilty about leaving work before I'm actually in labor, I go out and walk more than twenty feet and realize that I'm really, really not up for working days anymore. Matt parked just down the street from the bookstore, and by the time I waddled in the door I was really, really uncomfortable. If I'm on my feet, I'm pretty much contracting non-stop.

BUT, I have officially passed the 37-week mark! Which means that whenever I do go into labor, I can head to the birth center and deliver with my fabulous midwife. It also means I can vigorously scrub the kitchen at 10:30 at night if I feel like it without worrying that I'm going to send my body into preterm labor, and that's exactly what I did last night. It took a long time, because by that time of night I am one big ball of Braxton-Hicks contractions and I actually have to breathe through some of them, but wow, did it feel good to scrub things. I haven't done much more than light dusting for over three weeks now, and my nesting urges have been pretty unbearable.

But it made Matt nervous. "Is this a LABOR PROJECT?" he kept asking.

"I don't think so," I said. But then I reminded him that labor, at this point, is pretty inevitable. And also, it's going to happen soon regardless of whether I scrub the kitchen or lie on the couch.

"Well, yeah," he said. "But you know me. I like to procrastinate."

At any rate, I woke up very much Not In Labor this morning. Matt and I headed to my 37-week prenatal appointment (I wasn't sure I'd make it this far!) and things are fine -- now we're just waiting. I vacuumed my house today (ahhhh!) and did some laundry and squeezed in a nap. It's weird not to be teaching. This morning I felt so energetic that I wasted a good chunk of time second-guessing my "early" maternity leave, but as usual, once lunchtime hit, I couldn't keep my eyes open or remain comfortably on my feet, so I guess that's my answer.

36 weeks 2 days!

Oh, heyyyy, look at this! Still pregnant! Five days 'till full-term and I can stop worrying (or worry a lot less) about a hospital birth I do not want!

I actually sort of hesitate to write things like that, for a couple of reasons: One, I don't want to jinx myself and go into labor tonight (though I should hasten to add that I don't feel at all like I'm going to), and two, I don't want anyone to think that I'm dumb enough to assume I can predict the date on which this baby will be born or that I'm just SO READY to be DONE! I'm uncomfortable in that hugely-pregnant way, but I'm not miserable, especially because I've spent the better part of the last week easing into my maternity leave. I'm finishing up at school a little earlier than I intended, but I'm trying to listen to my body's cues this time around. Sometime during the wee hours of Wednesday morning after a particularly sleepless night, I realized that I just don't have it in me to teach my full schedule anymore; I wind up exhausted and I have too many contractions. (Teaching freshmen requires a whole lot of energy, y'all.) So I went to school on Wednesday morning and asked my department chair if we could possibly get my afternoon classes covered for the rest of the week. Since I'm already on a .8 contract, taking a half-day means I only had to show up to teach my juniors, and I love my juniors, so I had a pleasant couple of days. I've also had a lot -- a lot, a lot, a lot -- of grading to catch up on, and I know that if I taught my full schedule there's no way any of that grading would happen, because when I come home it's pretty much me just hanging out with Suzannah for the rest of the day. On the couch, if she lets me. Forget grading when she goes to bed, because when she goes to bed, I go to bed. I've gone to bed earlier several times, actually. I'm basically completely useless at night.

My juniors threw me a huge surprise party yesterday. I got to school shortly before third period, tossed my stuff on my desk, and ran (or waddled) up to the office building to pee during passing time. When I returned to my classroom, I was met by three of my junior boys, who blocked the door and began to sing -- a noisy version of "Silent Night," of all things. (They were especially animated when they sang the words "mother" and "child." Also, "virgin.") I laughed, then asked if I was allowed to go inside yet. I could see that my classroom was dark...

...and when I opened the door, they flipped the lights on and yelled something -- "Surprise!" or "Congratulations!" or something I don't remember, because I was busy staring, absolutely wide-eyed, at my room. They'd all gathered underneath a giant banner they'd decorated and signed, and the room was full of pink and blue streamers and tons of balloons. And food, from one end of the room to the other -- cupcakes and brownies and cookies and chips and breads and dips and huge bottles of juice and soda. I was literally speechless. I wasn't really surprised they'd done something, but I thought maybe they'd give me a big card. The fact that they threw this room together in six minutes flat and managed to coordinate so much food and so many decorations (when? I don't know!) blew my mind. And the dorky teacher side of me thought, what a cool class -- they work together so well.

There may have been a childbirth simulation involving a backpack and a baby doll tied on a piece of string. That was fairly horrifying. There was also helium, so the boys -- well. They did what boys do, and I was serenaded some more, with their squeaky little helium voices.

They were noisy and silly and loud and I loved them, and I'm more than a little sad that I won't finish out the year with this class. (But it was nice to have some closure; when I was pregnant with Suzannah, I went into labor so suddenly over Memorial weekend that I just didn't go back to school on Tuesday after a perfectly normal Friday, and I found myself in a funk on the kids' last day of school.)

I really am ready to be done at school, though. I'm starting to let the crankiness out a little too much, and it's not even towards the kids; it's towards every adult who had children decades ago and therefore feels strangely entitled to share their observations and opinions with me. I don't actually need to know that I look like I'm about to pop because my belly has DROPPED so MUCH this time! (Fun Fact: After your first pregnancy, you often don't "drop" until you are literally in labor, but it's not at all uncommon to carry lower. Shouldn't they remember this? They seem to remember everything else.) And also, I don't understand why my pregnancy and birth experience has to mirror someone else's in order for it to be THE RIGHT ONE. And ALSO, I have no patience for people who begin sentences with, "When I was that pregnant, I was still__________." Fill in the blank with whatever impressive thing you want, and then listen to me snap, WELL PIN A ROSE ON YOUR FRICKIN' NOSE. (I really did say that to someone who has a little more, ahem, authority than me at school. Thank goodness the principal looked amused -- and also very much like he wanted to be in a different room at that point. Yeah, it's probably best that I leave now.)

More than once this week I thought, you know, it's a good thing I won't be back to school until next fall, or I'd have to listen to everyone tell me I should be stuffing my baby full of rice cereal or she'll never sleep through the night, and also, I need to be teaching her to sleep on her own. By the time I go back, I will be so deeply entrenched in my ridiculous parenting ways that perhaps people will consider me a lost cause and leave me alone.

35 weeks 2 days

Hello, my poor little neglected blog. Let's see if I remember how this thing works.

First things first: I did not go into labor last night and I am not in labor this morning! Of this I am reasonably certain! Now, you ask, why are you even announcing this, since you are not due for weeks? Because. Last night, Matt and Suzannah and I went out to dinner with Kyanne and her husband, and the last time we made actual concrete plans to do this together, husbands in tow, we wound up having the following conversation late in the afternoon:

Me: Yeah, so, I'm feeling really tired and uncomfortable. Do you think we could maybe meet somewhere closer to home? I don't know if I can handle a car ride all the way to Tacoma.
Kyanne: Uh, do you want to maybe just not go?
Me: No, I can go, I think, I just don't think I want to be that far away from home.
Kyanne: Are you SURE? Maybe we can just go another time?
Me: Well...maybe.

And a few hours later I was on all fours in the hallway, in very active labor with Suzannah. For the record, her husband totally called that I would go into labor that night, and last night when I told Matt we'd be meeting them, he called on his way and said, "Oh, by the way? DON'T GO INTO LABOR YET."

And I didn't. I wasn't even unreasonably uncomfortable. We had a very pleasant evening at this wonderful little Greek restaurant in Kent, something I wanted to do while it's still relatively easy to hop in the car and go out for dinner if we feel like it...because I know those days are numbered. (And no, I'm not exactly planning to become a shut-in or anything, but right now all I have to do is say, "Okay, Zannah-pants, get your shoes on!" and we're gone. It's nice. And don't ask me why I call my daughter Zannah-pants, because I don't really know.)

Suzannah was an absolute ham all night. More than usual. She stayed up way too late, which meant that she slept in she woke us up about forty-five minutes before we normally have to haul her out of bed on weekdays. Charming how that works.

We've been asking her if she thinks we're having a baby girl or a baby boy, since everyone always says the siblings just intuitively know. Mostly, she announces that she wants a baby girl (is this the same thing as knowing we're having one, or is she just putting in her request?) but the other morning she switched it up and said, "Um...a baby boy." That afternoon, she flung her hands up in the air and said, "I don't know!"

Perhaps we're bugging her too much.

So anyway, things are going well. I have a nice stash of prefold diapers and covers washed up and ready to go, and this weekend my plan is to get some kind of storage for them. We haven't bought any of the pocket diapers I want yet, but I think the prefolds will last us nicely for the first several weeks at least (and really as long as we need or want them to). My other plan this weekend is to get everything packed for the birth center, since, as I recall, we hadn't packed a thing when I went into labor with Suzannah. Of course, that also means that I already know I don't need a lot of stuff, so this shouldn't be so difficult. (I always laughed at the "suggested" list of things to pack that you find in mainstream pregnancy books and magazines. Really? Reading material? Thank-you cards? Anyway, if all goes well, we'll only be at the birth center for a few hours after the birth, so I won't have to worry about killing time there.)

Matt has taken over all the vacuuming for the next couple of weeks; my midwife suggested that I take it easy at least until I hit full-term at 37 weeks. Which, incidentally, is twelve days from now, or Thanksgiving Day. I don't particularly feel that labor is imminent or anything, and I'm more than happy to be pregnant as long as this baby needs me to be, but Suzannah was born right around 37 weeks so I feel like I should at least try to prepare myself for that.

I'm going to go right ahead and admit that it's hard for me to relinquish control of the vacuuming. Matt told me I'd just have to lower my standards (yeah, that helped me relax), but he's actually been really wonderful about taking on far more than his share of the chores around here. Then again, he informed me that he doesn't envy me, being the one to carry and birth our baby, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

The blessings of an ordinary life

This weekend, I:

haven't touched the papers I've been trying to grade since Thursday
haven't finished a letter I started to write in Suzannah's journal
haven't finished rereading Jane Eyre

but I have

washed and folded tiny little newborn clothes and put them all away in the baby's room
cooked up a huge pot of beef minestrone soup, which is simmering in my kitchen
collaborated with my three-year-old on various drawings on her easel
sung a lot of songs (it's been a musical day)
read a lot of books (Suzannah's, not mine -- but that's okay)
swiffered the wood floors in the dining room and living room, because wow, pug hair
added to our cloth diaper stash, which makes me feel so happy and excited

so I think it's been a pretty good weekend. Suzannah also had her first rehearsal for the Sunday School Christmas Program today, and I'm just so full of something that my heart is ready to burst. My little girl in her first Christmas Program. (My little girl in Sunday School!) We're practicing "Away in a Manger." Suzannah loves Christmas songs as much as her mama does (we sing "Jingle Bells" all year long over here).

I feel like I'm in this perpetual state of amazement at all this -- at Suzannah, this pregnancy, this family, this life. It's triggered by the simplest moments most of the time; for instance, when we were drawing together this afternoon, I asked Suzannah if I could draw on a particular part of the paper (we have a huge roll of butcher paper draped over an easel and we just work on "masterpieces" a bit at a time) -- she can be quite particular sometimes, so it's a good idea to check, lest she demand that I take it off -- and she tilted her head, studied the paper, and said, "Okay. That's fine," with an authoritative nod. And it was just so funny, to be sitting there on the floor with her, studying this paper together, deciding where we should draw flowers and rainclouds and stars and doggies and shapes, and I thought -- as I so often do -- where did this child come from? And her thoughtful three-year-face and her goofy three-year-old idiosyncrasies are suddenly superimposed over the pictures I've had in my mind all week after watching baby videos last weekend. Talk about surreal: my very bald, chubby-legged baby pushing herself up into an almost-crawl; those little baby babbles before she spoke words and sentences; those squeals and grunts that, even at the age of six months or eight months, were somehow so obviously her -- looking back on them, I can see her little personality coming through in the same way I do now when she giggles or teases or cups my face in her hands or stomps or flounces.

As I watched, I found myself trying to recall the exact moments those videos were taken. Sometimes I remembered them so vividly -- like the night Matt and I spread a blanket on the floor in the living room and laughed and laughed while she hauled herself across it in a spirited army-crawl. She was so exuberant on this particular night, so goofy and wide-eyed and silly, so amused with herself, blowing raspberries and pausing every now and then just to kick her legs seemingly from sheer silliness and joy. I remember that fuzzy yellow pajama sleeper and the way Matt tried to encourage her crawling by placing his watch -- one of her favorite toys at the time -- just out of her reach.

And then there were videos that left me perplexed, struggling to remember when they were filmed. There's one with my parents that I just don't really remember -- they're cheering her on as she scoots across the family room -- and I found myself searching through my little mental catalogue of their visits, trying to pinpoint the exact time this would have happened, the season, the month, even the date. There's a video of me standing at the kitchen counter working on dinner, wearing a t-shirt and work-out pants, casually chatting with Matt about something Suzannah's doing -- and it was such a sweet but totally ordinary moment. It could have been one of a million moments, although that's what made it so poignant for me to watch, somehow -- catching this little glimpse into the past and not quite being able to place it because it was so familiar, but so comfortable, so cozy, so exactly what I'd hope to see if someone showed me a random snapshot of my life.

At the same time, it made me wish I could record every single moment so I wouldn't miss anything, so I could remember every single little thing with brilliant, shining clarity. It doesn't seem quite right that any part of our lives should slip into a blur of ordinary days and nights, all blended together. Then again, that's rather lovely, too -- remembering the ordinariness collectively (Saturday morning waffles, extra stolen moments of sleep, cozy dinners, bumping into each other in the kitchen, dancing before bed, snuggling on the couch with books and blankets, hiking in Discovery Park, driving to and from Seattle, singing at the tops of our lungs). I can try to keep and hold as much of it as I can, and I can record as many of these ordinary moments as I can, but maybe the beauty also comes from letting it go a bit, letting it flow through me, and becoming part of it, again and again.

We have known such joys as a child knows

You know, I'd probably be writing more entries here if I could write stories about school. However, I am still gainfully employed there, and money and benefits are nice, so.

Anyway, that's not a great excuse, I know. My life is actually pretty interesting to me right now, and it's not that I don't have things to write about, I just wonder how much the rest of the world would actually be interested in things like the strange excitement I feel over prepping our cloth diapers, which is my task for the weekend. That and grading this mound of papers I've been avoiding, but there is absolutely no excitement in that -- only a hefty amount of dread and a desire to drink a lot of red wine, which I can't even do, so I guess I'll have to settle for hot chocolate.

At least it's finally hot chocolate weather. This is possibly my favorite time of year -- the rains come, the leaves turn, the air cools. My feet are cold at night again now and I bundle up in sweatshirts and pajama pants basically as soon as I get home from school. (And then I joke to my husband that he's really getting a raw deal. We've been watching a lot of Mad Men lately, and I'm no Betty Draper. Don Draper gets a wife with perfectly curled hair and a flouncy dress and doe eyes waiting for him every night -- well, every night that he's not rolling around with one of his mistresses. Matt gets a wife in pajama pants. However, Matt is no Don Draper, either, and he insists he would find it kind of creepy if I greeted him him way every night.)

My students believe this weather is unbearably cold because they are delicate little flowers, and every day they beg me to close the windows and turn on the heater. Which I don't do even when I'm not pregnant, because I like fresh air (even cold fresh air) and I strongly dislike hot, muggy classrooms, and also, I sort of think that this would be an appropriate time to wear long pants and shoes that are not flip-flops. And I'm apparently heartless. ("I'm the one who has to be happiest in this room," I tell them. It's true. Keep the cranky pregnant teacher holding the gradebook comfortable.)

(That did not count as a school story. If I could tell school stories, I would tell them about freshmen. But I can't.)

So I'll talk about my daughter instead. She's been sleeping in her new bed for a few weeks now. I wasn't entirely sure how she'd react to giving up her toddler bed for the new baby; we converted it back into a crib and moved that, along with her dresser, into the baby's room. So we really talked up her New! Bed! and New! Dresser! and read a lot of The Berenstein Bears and the New Baby, because that book is all about how Brother Bear and Papa Bear go out into the woods one day to get wood for Brother's new bed (and oh, how cute, after Mama Bear feeds them breakfast she pats her tummy in a most self-satisfied way and pops out Sister Bear sometime before dinner). Suzannah loves that book, and she seemed to enjoy "helping" us pick out her new bed. She was so excited and proud the day it was delivered.

"That's my bed," she kept announcing.

And then that night, what did we find?


Thankfully, that only lasted one night (you know there were all the predictably snarky comments about what we should have spent money on instead of a new bed if that's where she was going to sleep). She actually sleeps really, really well these days. She's going to bed at least an hour earlier than she was this summer, and she cocoons herself in blankets to the point where I have to peel back the covers to make sure there is, in fact, a three-year-old bundled up in there. (Often, I'll find something bizarre clutched in her little fist -- last week, she insisted on sleeping with a little plastic ear of corn that normally resides in her shopping basket.)

It would be appropriate to post a picture of Suzannah snuggled in her new bed, but alas, I haven't taken one yet. So I'll give you this instead:


(You can't see from this picture, but picture a very tall man doing somersaults in the hay nearby. That very tall man would be my husband, and believe me, he wasn't in there for the kids. The man had a blast, and I'm also pretty sure he had hay embedded in his scalp for the rest of the day. Two weeks later I am still picking it out of the carpet, despite vacuuming the house about seventeen times.)

Matt and I both blew off our professional obligations and went on our annual daycare trek to the pumpkin patch at Remlinger Farms. That's just not the kind of experience I'm willing to miss, and it was such a sweet day -- sunny and autumnal. The colors are brighter outside the city, splashes of orange and red and yellow in the mountains. The outlines of trees are crisp, the air sweet and smoky. This is the third year I've taken Suzannah, and what a change from the first year when I carried her all day in a sling on my hip. Now she sings "Old McDonald" with such gusto, jumps wildly in the hay, shrieks with delight on the rides in the security of her daddy's arms, exclaims over the bunnies and goats and chickens and sheep, and holds her friend Ava's hand. There was a moment when Matt and I were walking towards the pumpkins, the two little girls between us and holding our hands, a chain from me to him, and I felt such a deep, happy contentment -- maybe it was imagining this moment in any of a million future forms when we have our own two children between us.

Our pumpkin patch outing is going to be our last Big Day Out for awhile, I think. Walking around all day long was fun, but a bit much for my very pregnant body, and Matt spent the rest of the night worrying that I was going to go into labor. (I wasn't and I'm not.) He's been absolutely wonderful about making sure I get enough rest, especially in the evenings when I get more Braxton-Hicks contractions. And he does none of the sleeping-in around here. Although this morning, I didn't either, because Suzannah piled into our bed to "snuggle" and then demanded that I get up.

"Get up, Mommy," she said, tugging on my hand. "Here, I'll help you."

But it was okay, because it is Saturday and there are pumpkin waffles and coffee and my sweet girl and I pretty much just love everything about our lives right now.

In "honor" of Columbus Day...

So posting has been a little light in the last week or so -- between prenatal appointments and trips to Seattle to see Margaret Atwood (MARGARET ATWOOD! Who signed my book!) and trips to the pumpkin patch and grades being due soon, I've been caught in that place between having a lot to write about and not giving myself the space in which to do it.

But I've been meaning to post this link for awhile, and I really encourage you to check it out. My friend Nikki is one of three contributors at Irene's Daughters, and it's one of the most worthy reads I can recommend. I keep trying to come up with something even remotely adequate to say about it, and I keep failing miserably. They write about exploring race relations, systemic racism, and prejudice, and they encourage open and honest discussion, which is something we really need. It's really, really difficult to discuss race in this country. It's hard and uncomfortable and really easy to get defensive, because let's face it -- we've all got some baggage, and that can be pretty tough to confront. (Write the word really a few more times, Shari!) I feel like I'm just about ready to stick my little toe in the water, and this is perhaps a pretty good place to start.

I would say you should take some time to read through all the entries they've posted, but let's face it, we exist in the era of Facebook-style "blogging" and no one seems to have the attention span for much more than single-sentence updates these days. I do, however, want to at least point you in the direction of one of the earliest entries: A Beginner's Guide to Anti-Racism for White People. Start with that, and go from there.

Just Be

I think any mother will testify to the fact that it can be a huge challenge to take young children out into the world on an ordinary afternoon when errands need running. I've certainly experienced this; we've left more than one store because Suzannah had just had it, due to being tired, or overstimulated, or just a young little sprout in a world made for big people.

But usually, I really love having her with me. I always have. It's not always easier, of course -- it's never easier, actually. Alone, I can buzz in and out of a store (I am so not a shopper) and be done. I can be quick and efficient. But there is nothing particularly special or enjoyable about running errands alone, save for those times when I feel like I just need a moment of clear headspace somewhere and Matt keeps Suzannah while I go out, but then, that's not about the errands or anything I need to get done. It's just about needing a moment to clear my head.

I needed to buy sheets today. My favorite sheets -- our red ones -- are completely threadbare, so I've been planning to head out and buy some replacements before I have to change the bed again. Instead of running around after school and leaving Suzannah at T.'s house a little longer (which she wouldn't mind, as she is always happily engaged in reading or outside play or dress-up with her friends when I pick her up), I decided to go this morning and take her with me. What would have been a quick jaunt turned into a few hours of just -- being out in the world with my girl. The sheets were really the least of it, an afterthought tagged on at the very end before we headed home.

And it's not like we did anything extraordinary. It was actually a very ordinary shopping trip. We drove to the Supermall; we ate lunch together in the food court; we watched the kids ride on the carousel; we wandered around a bit; we had coffee (she had milk) at Seattle's Best -- and then we picked up our sheets. That's really all.

But I found myself just enjoying it. Just being. I held Suzannah on my hip so she could see a little better as we watched the kids ride the carousel and she pointed out the different animals -- "That's a zebra! That's a bunny! That's a rooster!" She wrapped her arms around me and rested her cheek against mine, and standing right there in the middle of all the bustle of a Saturday at the mall, I thought, this is good, this moment, this life. Instead of walking by myself with my hazelnut toffee mocha in hand (which was not as delicious as the picture made it look), I sat across from my three-year-old daughter and we smiled at each other and talked about things we saw -- a sweet little preview, I imagine, of having conversations over lunch or coffee with her as she grows older. We wandered into Bath and Body Works and she wanted to smell everything. ("Mm, that smells good," she'd say every time I held a bottle of lotion to her nose.) At Bed, Bath and Beyond she very seriously helped me pick out sheets and imitated me when I touched all the pillowcases they have hanging from the shelves to demonstrate what this threadcount vs. that threadcount feels like. (She seems to have a thing for texture, like I do.)

We bought our sheets, and we headed home. That's all. I can't explain what was so nice about it, except that being out in the world with my daughter, even if we're just eating lunch at a food court somewhere, makes everything seem colorful and new. I notice things and people in a way that I don't think I do when I'm just on a mission to get something done. And it feels good to just be.

Good things

Since I know you're all on pins and needles, let me just update you on my glucose tolerance test.

I came home to a message from my midwife's office: Please call. Which, in my brain, instantly translated to: Your numbers were high, you have gestational diabetes, you are going to need to start treating yourself with insulin and see a dietician, and also, your baby will be fourteen pounds by your next appointment and we will need to schedule an induction STAT, and also, you suck.

I don't know, I just assumed. I didn't remember them actually calling me to tell me I passed when I was pregnant with Suzannah. I thought they just told me at my next prenatal appointment or something -- no news is good news and all that.

So I called them back, and the nurse wasn't at her desk, so I had to wait. During my eight minutes and fifteen seconds of waiting, I sent Matt a couple of hysterical instant messages at work -- something along the lines of, I'm sure I failed, they're going to bully me into doing terrible and unnecessary things to my body and my baby, I suck, they suck, everything sucks.

He responded mildly, "Baby, I'm sure it's fine -- let's just assume they're calling back to tell you that you passed." He's just so reasonable sometimes. It's kind of maddening, really.

The phone rang. I snatched it up.

"Hi, Shari. We got your numbers back."

"AND?"

"They're totally fine."

Well. I knew that.

So let me share the other things that have made this a really great Tuesday:

--a vanilla rooibos tea latte on my way to school

--getting a wicked amount of grading done today

--blustery fall weather

--which means that I can finally wear the cute sweaters I picked up back in early August

--and Suzannah can wear her new pink sweats, which make her so huggable. More than usual. I can't stop cuddling her. And also, she says she has "comfy pants like Mama." LOVE IT.

--waffle fries with our veggie burgers (I have a serious thing for waffle fries)

--buying tickets for Kyanne and me to go see MARGARET ATWOOD read from her latest novel, The Year of the Flood

This last one is huge. This is my rock concert. Sherman Alexie is reading from his latest collection of short stories the night before, and normally I'd be all over that, but two consecutive trips to Town Hall, on school nights, during a week in which I have a prenatal appointment in Tacoma and a trip to the pumpkin patch at Remlinger Farms -- well, it's a bit much. Besides, I've seen Sherman Alexie a handful of times now, and all of my books are autographed, and I've had my picture taken with the man. I love Sherman Alexie, but, you know, he's not MARGARET ATWOOD.

I have loved Margaret Atwood since I was nineteen years old, when I first discovered The Handmaid's Tale -- the first book to keep me company during my summer in Alaska after my freshman year of college. And whatever, everyone has read The Handmaid's Tale, and it's not even my favorite Atwood, but it will always be my first, and I have such clear memories of reading it, shivering in my fleece pullover while the wind raged outside my shoddy little room at Rainbow King Lodge. (Wait, what? You haven't read it? Then what are you doing here, reading this useless blog? GO GET YOURSELF SOME ATWOOD. RIGHT NOW.) Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride were both airplane reads that stuck with me long after I climbed off the plane. The Blind Assassin is one of my favorite books, period -- my favorite of hers, so far. Lady Oracle was a purely wonderful Spring Break escape several years ago. The Penelopiad is razor-sharp, funny, and haunting. I love her essays. I love her shorter pieces in Good Bones and Simple Murders. And I should probably reread Oryx and Crake, since The Year of the Flood apparently picks up where that one leaves off, and I haven't read it since 2003.

Margaret Atwood on The Year of the Flood (via amazon.com):

I’ve never before gone back to a novel and written another novel related to it. Why this time? Partly because so many people asked me what happened right after the end of the 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake. I didn’t actually know, but the questions made me think about it. That was one reason. Another was that the core subject matter has continued to preoccupy me.

When Oryx and Crake came out, it seemed to many like science fiction--way out there, too weird to be possible--but in the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world? What can we do to reverse the damage? How long have we got? And, most importantly--what kind of "we"? In other words, what kind of people might undertake the challenge? Dedicated ones--they’d have to be. And unless you believe our planet is worth saving, why bother?

So the question of inspirational belief entered the picture, and once you have a set of beliefs--as distinct from a body of measurable knowledge--you have a religion. The God’s Gardeners appear briefly in Oryx and Crake, but in The Year of the Flood, they’re central. Like all religions, the Gardeners have their own leader, Adam One. They also have their own honoured saints and martyrs, their special days, their theology. They may look strange and obsessive and even foolish to non-members, but they’re serious about what they profess; as are their predecessors, who are with us today. I’ve found out a great deal about rooftop gardens and urban beekeeping while writing this book!

Another question frequently asked about Oryx and Crake concerned gender. Why was the story told by a man? How would it have been different if the narrator had been a woman? Such questions led me to Ren and Toby, and then to their respective lives, and also to their places of refuge. A high-end sex club and a luxury spa would in fact be quite good locations in which to wait out a pandemic plague: at least you’d have bar snacks, and a lot of clean towels.

In his book, The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton proposes that our interest in narrative is built in--selected during the very long period the human race spent in the Pleistocene--because any species with the ability to tell stories about both past and future would have an evolutionary edge. Will there be a crocodile in the river tomorrow, as there was last year? If so, better not go there. Speculative fictions about the future, like The Year of the Flood, are narratives of that kind. Where will the crocodiles be? How will we avoid them? What are our chances?

If you've never read Atwood, I think fall is the perfect time to start.

So what did you do with YOUR Saturday?

I had to take the horrible three-hour glucose tolerance test today, and it did not make me a happy camper. First of all, the test itself is stupid. The "failure" rate for the one-hour test is absolutely ridiculous, and most women go on to pass the three-hour just fine. Obviously, I have no idea what my numbers are yet, but I suspect that I will be among those women. I wasn't shocked that I had to take the three-hour test; I "failed" the one-hour when I was pregnant with Suzannah as well, but just barely. This time when the nurse called to break the news, she didn't even want to tell me what my number was -- she suspected, correctly, that I'd be pretty pissy about it.

"If it makes you feel any better, I've seen way higher numbers than yours today," she said.

"I still have to drink that sludge after FASTING," I grumbled. And that's the absolutely stupidity, right there. In what universe does it seem like a good idea to have a pregnant woman fast for twelve hours and then drink a bottle of syrupy grossness, get her blood drawn about a thousand times (okay, four), and continue to not eat for three hours? Because I will tell you right now that almost the first thing I have to do upon waking up is EAT SOMETHING or I will still get sick, in a noisily heaving way that does not scream HOW SEXY AM I? to my husband on the other side of the bathroom door. That's just the way I do pregnancy.

Anyway, I was so tempted to decline the test altogether. But one of the drawbacks of delivering a baby in a hospital is that they come up with all kinds of ways to bully women into submitting to their standard procedures, and I'd really prefer to keep my label of low-risk pregnancy. I'd also like my insurance to continue to cover me and blah blah blabbity blah. (I should add the disclaimer here that I'm as comfortable with my hospital as it is possible to be, and I'm pretty appreciative of the care I've received there. But I had to do my homework -- all hospitals are not created equal.) And in the grand scheme of things, it's not the end of the world, but it did mean going without food for a very long time and getting up way too early on a Saturday morning. I wanted to be there when the doors opened.

I stopped at the clinic first to pick up my paperwork, then hiked across the street to the hospital. The lab was closed. What? My midwife's nurse specifically told me I could do this on a Saturday! Why was I reading a sign that told me that FOR MY CONVENIENCE the lab was open Monday through Friday, 6:30 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.?

I hiked back across the street (since the hospital was also completely deserted; no one was stationed at the information desk yet, and I didn't see anyone who looked like they'd be able to tell me if there was another secret lab somewhere). They told me they thought there was another lab on the ground floor. They gave me a map.

I hiked back to the hospital. I found the second lab. IT WAS CLOSED.

I hiked back to the clinic, sweaty and irritated. I did not wake up before dawn and drive all the way to Tacoma for the lab to be closed. (Or to walk back and forth between the hospital and the clinic eighty-five times.)

The receptionist had no idea what to say; she was very nice, though, and started digging through phone numbers to try to track down someone. Then a nurse appeared and said, "Oh -- there's an after-hours button around the corner. You have to push that, I think."

"Will an actual human being appear?" I asked, only half-joking.

I hiked back to the hospital. (Did I mention I was carrying a bag full of papers I planned to spend three hours grading? You wouldn't think they'd be so heavy, BUT THEY TOTALLY WERE.)

I found the after-hours button. I pushed it. SOMEONE OPENED THE DOOR. He looked as though he'd slept there and it took him a moment to process what he was seeing: a sweaty pregnant woman frantically brandishing her lab paperwork and possibly making some desperate threats. He let me in. Told me to have a seat. I flopped onto a moderately uncomfortable chair while he disappeared into a back room for five minutes. When he reappeared, he said, "Okay, I'm going to send you to a different lab -- they'll take care of you there."

I was skeptical at this point. But I followed his directions and hiked across a skybridge and into the medical plaza connected with the hospital -- and found yet another lab. With people behind the desk! And one or two bleary-eyed people in the waiting area! Hallelujah! And I'd only left my house a mere ninety minutes ago!

My treat for all that work, of course, was a bottle of lime-flavored glucose solution that didn't taste all that horrible but left my throat burning from the syrup overload. And then I got to spend the next three hours trying not to throw it up. It actually wasn't too bad after the first hour (during which I felt shaky and awful); I'd taken a Zofran before I left the house. The lab technician smiled approvingly after my second or third blood draw when I told her I felt pretty okay; she said my body "seemed to be handling this really well, and that's a good sign." (Uh, okay!)

My last blood draw was at 12:06. At 12:07, I was hightailing it out of there to meet Kyanne and Becca for LUNCH! with FOOD! that I could EAT! We met at Mary's Burger Bistro and downed enough fry sauce with our homemade french fries to service the homemade french fry needs of an army. And I ordered a milkshake, which I never do, but today? Today I deserved a milkshake. An Oreo milkshake. (And they're the perfect size there, not like the giant milkshakes that come in a huge glass plus a container of extra. I was so justified in ordering this milkshake. Oh, and the baby wanted it. AND I've eaten roasted vegetables with polenta or brown rice about eight times this week.)

I felt shaky and tired for the rest of the afternoon, but I'm mostly fine. Fine enough, anyway, that I decided I absolutely had to do paint touch-ups in Suzannah's room, our bedroom, and the kitchen tonight. Can't really blame that on pregnancy, though -- that is my normal.

I stand corrected

Me (to Suzannah): Are we Daddy's girls?

Suzannah: No. I'm Mommy's girl. I'm Daddy's kiddo.

Just call me Miss Merry Sunshine

Yesterday morning I allowed for a little extra time to stop for coffee on my way to school. It was a Friday at the end of a long week and I wanted a hazelnut latte.

So I turned into the sprawling parking lot that houses a Walgreens, a strip mall, and my favorite little espresso stand, the one I discovered in the weeks before my first year of teaching back in 2001, the one with my favorite baristas, the one where I discovered the black-and-white mochas that sustained me through my overcrowded sophomore class at the end of the day. (Back then, I lived much closer to school, and I used to run home on my lunch break to let my still potty-training puppy out.) And a lady driving a huge SUV cut me off. She tossed me a little wave and raced to the espresso stand. Whatever, I thought, someone seems to really need her coffee this morning. Shrug. I didn't really think twice about it.

But when I finally pulled up to the window, the barista said, "That lady felt so terrible about cutting you off that she paid for your coffee. Actually, she left enough money to get whatever you want -- like coffee and breakfast."

I was a little dumbfounded -- her "cutting me off" didn't seem particularly aggressive to me, but then, I was having a pretty chill morning.

"Wow," I kept saying. "That's so nice!"

I ordered my coffee, and the barista talked me into some biscotti. I hadn't planned on having anything to eat, but she said, "This is a great time to try something!"

"I really want to keep this going," I said. "But there's no one in line! I could leave some money for the next person..."

"You know, just take it and enjoy it today," the barista said. "You can pass it along next time you're in a line."

It made my morning. This happened to me at Starbucks once last year; the person in front of me paid for my drink for no reason at all, and I happily paid for the person behind me. I hope it kept going; the line is always long at Starbucks, and it must be kind of fun to work there and get to tell a bunch of people, "Your coffee is already paid for." I just have this idea that sending all these happily surprised people -- some of whom might have really needed a little boost -- on their way is somehow really good for the world.

When I got to school, I told my junior class all about it. And then I told them their homework for the weekend is to do something kind for someone else, for absolutely no reason at all. Bonus points (BUT NOT REALLY, NO, YOU DO NOT GET EXTRA CREDIT YOU LITTLE GRADE-GRUBBERS) if the person doesn't actually know you. They don't need to thank you to your face, I said, but do something to put a smile on theirs. Pay it forward, right?

And if you're reading this, do the same thing. You don't necessarily have to pay for someone's coffee in a drive-thru line (although that's such an easy way to do this, and the chances of keeping it going are pretty good), but do something unexpected and kind and good for the world.

Keeping it simple...well, trying to.

This pregnancy is flying by. At the same time, last May -- when I couldn't even sip water without throwing it back up -- seems so long ago. I only have one more monthly appointment with my midwife before I move into the every-two-weeks phase, and I might get three of those before I go once a week if I haven't delivered by then.

Just, wow.

So things are looking good. Baby's heartbeat is strong, and Baby is moving a lot. I'm carrying absurdly high, which is exactly how I carried Suzannah. I'm so grateful for my midwife, who doesn't fret much about fundal height, and especially not in my case when it appears that this is simply normal for me. I've seen far too many women post on pregnancy boards and communities that their doctors recommended inductions or suggested possible C-sections based on that alone, which I find pretty horrifying since it's such an inexact "science," especially at the later stages (Oh no! Your baby will be too big! Surely, you can't birth her normally, so let's just scare you now so you won't give us too much trouble later!). I'm sure I'll be measuring, like, eighty-five weeks ahead the next time I go in. Whatever. As long as Baby's feet aren't in my esophagus, and I can still breathe, I'm cool with it.

The Braxton-Hicks are more intense this time around, but I haven't experienced anything painful or terribly uncomfortable. Matt does worry about me when I overdo it, though, and last night I went to bed at eight o'clock while he took over kitchen clean-up and all the nighttime parenting. The extra rest was wonderful, though, because I'm still trying to find my groove at school and it's taken its toll a bit. (Happily, though, I've been on top of my game enough this week that I don't have any weekend planning, just my very first stack of grading. Give me an hour with a pumpkin spice latte and it'll all be good.)

I feel like I have so many things to update about, but I'm a little overwhelmed by them. Either I think that no one really wants to read about, say, our foray into the realm of cloth diapering (you guys! We are really excited about this!) or what I'm into cooking these days, or I think I should really watch how passionate I get about whatever it is I happen to be passionate about, because someone might get uncomfortable or defensive or whatever. On the other hand, I'm getting over that, because every time I freak myself out and expect hate mail, I'm pleasantly surprised. (Then again, I have disabled anonymous comments here. I don't mind dissenting opinions, but I do think you should be brave enough to own your words.) And anyway, I like having a space to write, and I've been writing online in some capacity for over eight years now -- people come and go and not everyone in the world will love me. That's okay. (True confession, though: Sometimes I really do think I've let my desire to be liked override my desire to speak or write what I feel, and while I don't necessarily want to go out and alienate my friends and family, I don't want them to like me just because they think I always agree with them.)

Perhaps I am over-thinking this. I do that sometimes.

I'm trying to keep it simple tonight, anyway. Matt was home early, and we've spent a cozy evening cooking together while Suzannah runs a grocery store out of the family room. Okay, I am going to talk about cooking, which is probably really boring, but I love reading about this kind of thing in other people's journals: I've been really into roasting huge pans of vegetables -- carrots, broccoli, parsnips, brussels sprouts, zucchini, yellow squash, and whatever else I happen to feel like throwing in -- and we eat those for dinner all the time now. Toss 'em in olive oil with a little salt and pepper, roast them until the broccoli turns slightly black and crispy -- aww, yeah. We've had them with polenta, with brown rice and a little lemon juice, with chicken breasts cooked in white wine, and tonight Matt threw in some diced sausage and potatoes and we topped it all with carmelized onions. Next I want to try them with quinoa, a la Bread and Honey, my latest cooking inspiration. She calls it Hippie Chow, and it's so ridiculously simple and exactly the sort of thing Matt and I like to eat. It's so funny, though. When I was pregnant with Suzannah, I wanted Clucks 'n Fries from Red Robin. I wanted huge milkshakes and chocolate sundaes. Mostly, I just wanted food all the time, but I really never got over my morning sickness-induced distaste of vegetables. This time around, I thought for sure those aversions would stick around since I was so much sicker at the beginning of my pregnancy, but to my happy surprise, nothing has made my pregnant tummy happier over the last month or two than roasting up a ginormous pan of veggies that will last us through at least one full meal and several sides. (On the other hand, the takeout that I found the least repulsive five months ago is still on my DO NOT WANT list. I think this is a good thing. Huge pans of roasted veggies are infinitely cheaper, and also, I feel pretty great.)

(And on another side note: I grew up hating brussels sprouts, probably because you're supposed to hate brussels sprouts. But guess what! They are actually really good, especially roasted! You can even prepare them in ways that make them taste nutty and almost sweet. Want to know what else I've been eating? Sardines. That's right. I've never eaten sardines before because no one is supposed to like sardines. But they're full of protein -- and I've definitely been craving protein during this pregnancy; in fact, I still get pretty queasy if I don't eat it regularly -- yet lack the mercury content of tuna. And they're light and delicious, and I really need to get some good crackers to eat them with. Trader Joe's is my friend.)

Anyway, dinner was simple and fabulous. Our daughter is hilarious and sweet and full of hugs and surprises and imagination and laughter. After she goes to bed, we are going to eat cupcakes and watch Mad Men. Baby Winslow is kicking away. (Seriously, I love, love, love this part of pregnancy. Even though when a certain someone saw my belly jump a little the other day, she yelled, "Aaah! Alien Baby!") I'll save the processing of my latest anxiety attack(s) for another day.

Indoctrination...

I have a headache. And it's not because I'm teaching two huge sections of freshmen for the first time in my life -- actually, so far, I really like them! No, my headache is the direct result of the uproar over President Obama's address to students, scheduled to air on September 8. Conservative parents are practically rioting in the streets over this clear attempt to indoctrinate their children with his Socialist Agenda. And okay, I know I'm really generalizing here. I'm going to assume that "conservative" doesn't equal "insane." As in, there have to be plenty of conservative parents who may disagree with the president on any number of issues but don't think it's dangerous for their children to ever hear a single word he says. Right? Right? I think it's perfectly fine to criticize a political leader. I think it's freaking CRAZY to flip out about your children hearing a presidential address, and REALLY freaking crazy to scream "Indoctrination!" Because listening to a televised speech about the importance of staying in school and setting educational goals is going to undo all of the values you've worked so hard to instill in your children or something? Seriously?

I was standing in line at Starbucks this morning reading the headlines in various newspapers, and I was honestly floored by how much attention this is getting. Schools are requiring permission slips to be sent home before students watch the speech. Some parents are keeping their children home that day. (Congratualations on Making a Point! Nice flounce!) I'm going to suggest that if you're honestly worried that merely hearing a presidential address will cause your children to become baby-killing socialists, you should possibly consider keeping your children at home not just on Tuesday, but all year long. Definitely don't let them watch any unsupervised television, listen to radio stations, and for the love of God, keep them off the Internet. Make sure you do background checks on everyone who speaks to your child without you in the room. I promise, they're going to be "indoctrinated" by something, somewhere. And when they're trying to iron it all out in therapy years from now, it's probably not going to come back to this address they listened to in school.

If I sound rather crabby about this, it's because I am. I am a public high school teacher, and back in January we had to send home permission slips before we allowed our students to watch the Inauguration. Guess what? I was nine years old when the first Bush was inaugurated and my parents didn't have to sign anything for me to see that. (Unfortunately, Bush was miserably unsuccessful at indoctrinating me.) And I was only nine, but I still remember it, and I still found it fascinating, even if I didn't fully understand everything. I was in the eighth grade when Clinton was inaugurated. My class watched from the library, along with the rest of the students in the K-8 school I attended that year. I was just beginning my student teaching in 2001 when George W. Bush was sworn into office, and guess what! I didn't send home any permission slips for that, either! Because that's crazy, and also, it never would have occurred to anyone!

Permission slips. For the Inauguration. We were to treat it like a documentary, the e-mail said (and whatever, I think permission slips for documentaries are stupid, too, and I always "forget" to send them home. I haven't lost my job over it yet).

Except it's NOT A DOCUMENTARY, it is the INAUGURATION of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, otherwise known as HISTORY IN THE MAKING. I mean, people, this sort of goes beyond who you voted for, and political agendas and all that. This is history. And also, have they ever required permission slips for them in the past? OF COURSE NOT.

We were on the evening news, of course, looking absolutely ridiculous. Which caused the district to issue statements about how it's "not a big deal" or anything, they just want parents to be EQUAL PARTNERS in this "opportunity." So basically, we should be sending home permission slips with every unit we teach? Why did I even bother getting all those useless degrees if I have to run everything by parents who can tell me how to teach? I'm sorry, if you are that parent, keep your kid at home before teachers like me get our filthy, corrupt hands on her. Who knows what ideas we're putting in these kids' heads. (You should probably know that I'm a big fan of banned books and I'm vehemently opposed to censorship, too, if that influences your decision at all.)

So anyway, the insanity has spread. I thought my district was just particularly crazy when they required permission slips for the Inauguration, but now I'm reading all over the news about these parents and their outrage over this INDOCTRINATION! I mean, sure, they say it's a speech about the importance of staying in school and setting educational goals and working hard, but if you listen very closely, and then play it backwards, the Socialist Agenda is totally right there!

(Augh, I have to stop that. It's not even funny anymore. Guys, I don't know how to break this to you gently, but Obama is actually a very middle-of-the-road Democrat. Do you know anything about socialism? Okay, then, you know he's NOT ACTUALLY A SOCIALIST. Calm down. Truthfully? Honestly? He's been somewhat of a disappointment to me on a few issues I care about because I was hoping he'd be a little more left of center than he has turned out to be. And no, I'm not going to talk about those right now, or possibly ever. But relax, he's not a socialist. And for the record, I'm not either.)

This is not the first time a president has addressed students, and it's not the first time students have watched a presidential address on television during their sacred educational time. One of my colleagues and I were discussing this today, and we both agreed that if there had been this kind of uproar about watching anything Bush said on television, people would have been branded as traitors or something -- they definitely would have been labeled as "unpatriotic." But, inexplicably, I've never heard of such widespread freaking out. What's worse -- schools are listening, and suddenly, a speech about studying hard and staying in school has become Evil Socialist Propaganda. We're losing all room for considered debate and critical thinking, and that, frankly, should scare people much more than hearing a speech from a president they may not agree with.

The end of summer, the beginning of everything else...

I'm sitting here sipping my tiny cup of coffee, enjoying the quiet before my daughter wakes up. Matt is having a swim at the gym, and I'm enjoying the peace -- I try to be especially conscious of moments like this because I know that soon, for awhile anyway, I'm going to have to find my peace in different places. (That's my way of saying I know this house will never be quiet AGAIN, for YEARS, probably. But today I'm okay with that.) It's also nice to be awake and showered and doing things before Suzannah wakes up, especially on a weekend. Everyone with kids knows that they're somehow programmed to wake up far earlier on weekends than they do on weekdays, no matter what time they went to bed the night before. Yesterday morning, my wild-haired little girl marched into the bedroom and said, "Mama, get up get up get up." Well, good morning to you too.

I've really been savoring moments in general -- I'm particularly conscious of the dwindling time we have as a family of three. Yesterday we all piled into the car and drove to Mt. Rainier for a somewhat spontaneous day trip, and all day I found myself thinking things like, "This will be the last time we go hiking here as as family of three," or "The next time we drive by this place, we'll have two kids in the back." I don't feel sad by this, although sometimes knowing that my time with just Suzannah is nearly over is a little bittersweet; I say it more with a sense of wonder, I guess, because I am already so aware of this little person kicking away inside me and he or she already feels like such a part of our family.

Matt has been feeling the baby kick from the outside over the past ten days or so, which is cool because I love sharing this part of pregnancy with him. He has to be a little patient sometimes, because this kid is a stinker -- she'll be kicking so much I can see my belly moving everywhere and I'll go, "Matt, get over here, Baby is having a PARTY IN MY BELLY." And he'll put one hand on me and Baby's all, okay, naptime. (I wonder if his hands will have the same calming effect when we can actually hold our baby? He doubts it.) But last night after Suzannah went to bed, we curled up in the family room to watch an episode of Mad Men and Baby woke up big-time. So I grabbed Matt's hand and moved it to my belly, and pretty soon we both felt those little feet pushing back up at us.

"Whoa -- wow," Matt said after a particularly forceful kick. "That's...weird." I just laughed, because I've actually never met a man who wasn't a little weirded out by all the tumbling around in a pregnant woman's belly, like it's a little alien invader. It's still my absolute favorite part of pregnancy.

Other things I'm savoring: my last Sunday morning before school starts For Real. I head back on Tuesday for two days of in-service/professional development/mind-numbingly boring and depressing stuff that doesn't matter and makes me want to quit every year, and then the kids come back on Thursday. Don't worry, I cope with the boring and depressing stuff by ignoring it. I learned years ago that if I want to feel hopeful, energetic and excited by the first day of school, I have to literally put my head down and pay ABSOLUTELY NO ATTENTION to all the things they throw at us about what we have to do to save public education, which involves more and more work and is usually nothing that actually matters to kids. Once I'm in my classroom, doing my thing, it all falls into place and I fall right back in love with the romance of September. My other coping mechanism this year is to remind myself that I only have to do survive for a couple of months if it's really that bad. I'm teaching two sections of freshmen for the first time, although I'm actually pretty excited about this. I'd rather teach freshmen than seniors any day. I loved my juniors last year, but when they whine about why I'm not teaching senior English I have to explain that it's because I would like to continue to love them, which would never happen if I had to listen to them whine about how THEY'RE SO DONE by the middle of September.

Class sizes are apparently huge this year. Thank you, budget cuts.

At least I have new notebooks.

In which Shari writes an entire entry about notebooks

We're trying to watch our spending these days; there are certain expenses we need to allow for before the new baby is born (a new bed and dresser for Suzannah, a cloth diaper stash, a doula, etc.) and we're trying to plan for the tighter budget we'll need to follow when I'm not earning any income for at least eight or nine months. I bought all of my school supplies last spring, so I can bypass my usual school shopping this fall. However, if you've ever spent five minutes around me, you know I have this serious thing for notebooks and pens. I absolutely never leave home without at least one notebook and about twelve pens. Which is why Levenger is kind of a dangerous catalog for me to get. They sell "Tools For Serious Readers." And heeey! I'm a Serious Reader! I need their stuff.

Except that most of it is really high-end, expensive stuff. It's good stuff, but I can't quite justify spending $200 or more for the sexy leather book bag I want. (I don't care about "purses" or "handbags." I also don't care that the sexy leather book bag -- did I mention it's red? -- is essentially a purse or handbag, but they advertise all its room for BOOKS and NOTEBOOKS!) Especially since the only bags I'll be carrying for awhile will be diaper bags. Not that you can't find great diaper bags, but I'm not about to spend two hundred bucks on one of those, either. Nor can I justify spending sixty dollars on a fancy rollerball pen, especially when I have a fondness for a very specific kind of blue Papermate -- which come twelve to a box at Office Max.

A few years ago, I did splurge on an expensive journal. It would have been the most expensive journal I'd ever bought in my life, but it was on clearance for over 50% off. And I loved it. Blank books, notebooks, journals -- those are truly my weakness. I'm always on the lookout for the "perfect" notebook, and when I find it, I buy it. I've filled several leather journals from Barnes and Noble and I love Moleskines, even though people complain that they're overpriced for what they are. Don't care -- still love them.

Last week, I was flipping through my Levenger catalog -- usually I do this quickly and toss it in with our recyclables so I'm not tempted to accidentally order a Pelikan Tradition R200 Rollerball Pen or something -- and the most fabulous set of notebooks caught my eye. Behold:


I wasn't going to do it. I don't, strictly speaking, need any more notebooks.

But I couldn't stop drooling over these babies. They were the perfect size -- large enough to write in comfortably, but small enough to slide into my bag (which I love, and which didn't cost me two hundred dollars). They had the right amount of pages -- not too thick (although it's hard for a great notebook to be too thick for me), not too thin. And the colored paper (which, being from Levenger, I knew would be of high quality) intrigued me.

But I wasn't going to do it. I informed Matt quite virtuously that I would not be buying these notebooks EVEN THOUGH I REALLY, REALLY WANTED THEM. LIKE REALLY BADLY. He was like, that's nice, you know I'm not the boss of you. His refusal to acknowledge my SHINING VIRTUE kind of chipped away at my restraint.

The next day I sent the link to Kyanne. Again with the wanting and all of my shining restraint. (Actually, by then I might just have whined, "I waaaaaants it." I can't remember.) Kyanne replied, "Whatever, I would SO have had those forever ago."

And then? I don't know what happened, but my fingers? They were suddenly disconnected from my body or something. I really couldn't stop them. They flew out and just punched in my credit card number and ORDERED THE NOTEBOOKS, and oh crap, I bought them.

And you know what? I didn't regret it. Sometimes when I have an "Oh, crap, I just bought something I don't need" moment, I have this instant pang of regret. I didn't have that with these notebooks. I felt nothing but sheer elation, and the only thing I regretted a few days later was not spending two more dollars for slightly faster shipping, because a week later, as I was still waiting for them to be delivered, I decided I had suffered much more than two dollars' worth of waiting angst. Maybe this is one of those opportunities for a stupid life lesson in patience, except that I am a mother of a three-year-old and soon I will have a newborn, so I'm pretty sure I don't need my journals to teach me about PATIENCE. I know, patience is a virtue, my mother always, always told me that, I HAVE TOTALLY LEARNED. Anyway (and here are my impressive rationalization skills at work), I think I'm a dying breed; I still write as much or more on paper as I do anywhere else, and when I buy quality notebooks and journals I actually do fill them. (I've often thought that perhaps that's why I like writing. It's nothing to do with actually writing, which, let's be honest, can really just suck sometimes, especially when I don't feel like it, but what can be better than cracking open a great notebook in a coffee shop and spending an hour alone there? I ask you.)

I had this whole speech planned for Matt about how I accidentally bought these notebooks, but! I got three of them, and for three, this price isn't bad -- they cost about what Moleskines do, plus shipping, and did I mention I ordered the slowest, cheapest shipping? Even though the wait would likely TORTURE ME?

"Well, I'm glad you're happy with them," Matt said mildly. Then he smiled. "And patience is a virtue."

And they'll know we are Christians by our love

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." --Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

I wasn't going to write this entry -- at least, I wasn't going to post it here. I had this idea, I guess, that my public blog should be reserved for fun, light stories about motherhood and anything else that wouldn't make anyone uncomfortable. And I thought that if I gave it a few days, and got it all down on paper somewhere, that I'd be able to take a deep, cleansing breath and let it all go. Usually, that works. But last night I was awake for most of the night, and this morning I scrubbed my kitchen from top to bottom, did three loads of laundry, vacuumed the house, washed the hardwood floors, tried to organize odds and ends in the baby's room, and started dinner in the slow cooker -- and I still couldn't shake it. And then I thought, what am I so afraid of? That people won't like me? I've been disliked before. That my family will stop loving me? I've done worse than voice my Disagreeable Opinions, so possibly this won't get me disowned. That people will stop reading? I know a handful of regular visitors, but there are also a lot of hits here that I don't recognize. For all I know, I could be pissing off a ton of people, and for whatever reason, that makes me pause, even if they're anonymous people. I should probably get over that, because stifling my thoughts really isn't me. And I don't want my daughter to be afraid to speak her mind, especially when she's taking a stand against bigotry and ignorance or voicing her passions or trying to make sense of this often very stupid world, even if it rubs some people the wrong way. Which it will, because it always does. But to me, this is too important to sweep under the rug or pretend I don't have an opinion about it.

So here I go.

Recently, the ELCA voted by a two-thirds majority to allow the ordination of sexually active gay clergy (as opposed to celibate gay clergy) and the blessing of same-sex marriages. I wasn't surprised, because it's hardly a new issue in the church -- it's something we've wrestled with for longer than I've been around. I'm also thrilled. I understood that many of my fellow Lutherans would not be so thrilled, and I truly am sorry that many of them feel disheartened right now. It's a little like the fallout after the presidential election, I guess, but the difference between the political scene and the Lutheran scene has generally been that Lutherans can debate and disagree passionately, vehemently, and at the end of the day, they come together in a spirit of love and respect. Or so I thought.

I shouldn't have been so naive, I suppose, but I've been genuinely shocked -- shocked, horrified, sickened -- by some of the responses I've come across by fellow members of the ELCA. I've loved the ELCA for many reasons, not the least of which is that its members tend to be educated, thoughtful, and respectful. There's plenty of room for doubt, for questioning and discussion. I thought (rather childishly, it seems) that "we" were safe from right-wing nutjobs, surely the only kinds of people who still hurl slurs about fags and homos. We don't have the kinds of people who proclaim that things like the tornado that touched down in Minneapolis that day was a manifestation of God's wrath (I swear, there's nothing I love better than arrogant Christians who know what God is thinking. And also, really? THAT'S the thing that would inspire God's so-called wrath? Out of everything there is to choose from? And also, hello, Pat Robertson?). Of course I knew there would be people unhappy with the vote, and I fully expected to read plenty of that old cliche, WE LOVE THE SINNER BUT HATE THE SIN! (How big of you! Here is some polish for your halo.) But surely -- surely I wouldn't encounter people comparing homosexuality to pedophilia, for crying out loud. Members of my church wouldn't do that. They wouldn't say, "What's next, we let people marry their dogs?"

I was wrong. I read a lot of that. The comments got worse, but I'm not going to quote them; I'd prefer not to spread such things, even to illustrate a point.

I see enough of this in the world; I can't stand it from members of my church. If you honestly think that ridicule, abuse, harassment, and threats against the LGBT community aren't a daily reality, you haven't spent much time in a high school lately -- or, I don't know, in the world? With your eyes open? Although I will also say that while high schools are pretty universally homophobic -- trust me on this -- high school kids also give me a tremendous amount of hope, because the good ones, and that's a lot of them, more than you think, are the ones who will rage passionately against injustice. And they can often debate emotional topics with maturity, compassion, and empathy that puts most adults to shame.

Anyway, I just thank God I didn't hear these comments at the church I attend, and I don't really expect to; I read them online. But I read them in a lot of places -- online forums, discussion groups, Lutheran blogs. I should have stopped reading, because I get really, really worked up about this stuff -- my poor husband had to endure a full day's worth of my sputtering and ranting and raving. But it just sucked me in and gnawed at me. I feel a little like Meg Ryan's character on You've Got Mail -- I rarely know what to say in the moments in which I'm confronted with such horrible, ignorant statements. The responses come to me later, when it's too late to say anything and possibly too late to matter. This frustrates me to no end. Many of my friends articulate their thoughts on such matters so much better than I do, though, and the fact that they do gives me a little hope that someone is saying the things I really want to say but haven't found the words yet. (But if you know me, or if you ever speak to me, and you believe or say these kinds of things, kindly try to hide that from me or I'll do my best to channel Barney Frank. It won't do wonders for our relationship.)

I'm not really interested in debating my position, at least not right now -- that's not really why I'm writing this. If you want to argue that you're a better Christian than me, you may very well be right, okay? I know perfectly well that I fall short in a lot of ways. And normally, I do enjoy a rousing theological discussion -- but I've found very few people on the "other side" who are truly interested in discussion anyway, which I suppose is often true of such emotionally-charged topics where it's so important (on both sides, to be fair) to be right. Here's a little food for thought, though: You might remember that people on both sides of this issue have read and studied the Bible. You're not going to impress me because you can quote a passage from Leviticus, and you're definitely not going to convince me that you're "right" if you act like I'm too stupid to understand the Bible. (Again, to be fair, yes, I know this goes both ways.) I'm never a fan of using scripture in an argument anyway, because scripture has been used to justify an awful lot of horrible things and because people who brandish the Bible that way are often champions of manipulation while their arguments lack weight. And another thing -- when you're having an argument and you resort to shaking your head sadly and saying you'll pray for the other person (to see the light, I presume? For the state of her sorry, sinful soul?) it's neither loving nor Christian; it's condescending and arrogant and you know it. (On a sidenote, sometimes I wonder if the few people who send me forwards warning me that Obama is somehow both a baby-eating Socialist and grandma-killing Nazi are praying for my soul because I voted for him. On another sidenote, by Christmas I fully expect to be receiving e-mail forwards warning me that he's actually a vampire with a taste for NRA members and preschool children.) I recently had a conversation about this very thing with someone I'm growing to consider an important spiritual adviser, and he smiled and said, "How arrogant -- to presume to know what God is thinking, or who's saved or not. Or even worse, to take credit for it."

Okay, sorry, little tangent there.

I freely admit I don't understand the mentality of people threatening to flounce out of the ELCA over this, but I don't understand the mentality of people threatening to move out of the country after every presidential election, either. I am saddened by it, and I'm saddened by the rift this will inevitably create in the church. And frankly, it seems that many of the people who are so deeply upset and focused on ALL THE EVIL SINNERS and what roles they should or should not have in the church have lost sight of what matters so much more -- being the light of Christ. Spreading His love. I remain somewhat encouraged by the way I've seen the Christians I know and love actually treat each other, even since THAT FATEFUL HOUR, and I hope and pray that none of them are the ones posting the comments that leave me quite literally sick to my stomach. (I'm also encouraged by the elderly lady who chuckled and said, "Oh, I remember when people threatened to leave the church because we adopted the green hymnal. That was really out there, you know.") And I'm also infinitely more excited that maybe now, people who have left the church because they've been scorned, humiliated, judged, and rejected (even as I'm sure they're being "loved") will find a new home there.

I'm not going to end with a Bible verse or quote a Biblical scholar, but I do like what NPR reader Emily Kann had to say:

To me, having faith is a constant struggle and full of doubts. It is the journey of growing in faith and facing those struggles with doubt and sin that unites us with God. I am a member of the SE Iowa ELCA, but I don't believe that any religious order, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc. gets it 100% right all the time. No single person or group of people will ever be able to get it right or pierce the veil of God's mystery. I believe that a religious community is one of three critical elements to building faith- the other two being prayer and the writings of God. The purpose of a religious community, like the ELCA, is to grow together and support each other. This decision reflects that process. We are a family, trying to figure out the best way to be faithful, to be just, to be compassionate and to serve God, by serving others, together.

I want nothing more than for my daughter to grow up in a world more compassionate, merciful, and loving than the one in which we live now. We have so far to go, but I believe this is one step in creating that world.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming soon, I promise.