good housekeeping

sorry for the long absence.  I’ve been busy, mainly just trying to keep the lid on things around here.  It is summer (finally) and we’ve been trying to spend a lot of time outside just soaking it up.

anyway, by way of getting down to business, here is a (somewhat photo-journalistic) recap of what the last month or so has looked like:

1. First, we went camping.  It was the middle of june, and seemed like a reasonably safe time to plan a camp-out, and so we went to the coast for a weekend of hiking and car-camping.

unfortunately, the weather didn’t really cooperate.

cora was a really good sport about it.  and yes, that is a full-body fleece bunting.  in june.

It helped that it was so pretty.  It is hard to believe that we live in a big city but are less than 2 hours away from All Of This.

which came in handy when we packed up after only one night and went home to eat thai takeout in our living room in front of our fireplace and appreciate how dry it is inside our house.

2.  Also, in May, Cora’s cousin Grey turned 1.

the party was somethin else.  Grey’s mom, (my cousin) Carrie, is really good at that sort of thing.

cora’s favorite part was the bubbles.  and, obviously, the party hats.

3.  Then, a couple weeks later, uncle ben challenged uncle henry to a rib-off.

ben was feeling smug.  and ready to go to town on those ribs.

We ate an ungodly amount of ribs.  In fact, somehow between the four of us we polished off four racks of ribs, a pot of beans, a large bowl of potato salad and a lot of beer.  There weren’t any leftovers.

Henry won the rib-off, but just barely.

4.  Last week Cora and I took another trip to Lake Tahoe to visit my parents (who increasingly just think of/refer to themselves as Cora’s Mimi and Granddaddy) and also my dear friend Stephanie who was out for a little vacation.

Lake Tahoe is pretty breathtaking in the summer.  The lake changes color (navy to teal to aqua to silver back to navy) over the course of the day, and is perfectly clear… you can see (supposedly) sixty feet below the surface.

my hair is getting progressively shorter.  I should probably take Henry’s approach for a while and just not go to the hairdresser.

that red house is my parent’s new digs.  their house is altogether adorable and homey, and the view is magnificent… camp is just below them.

we had a great time.  it was so good to catch up with stephanie and just get to relax at mom and dad’s.  henry stayed in portland and got a lot of studying done for his licensing exam.  I’m glad he got so much work done, but I would just like to say *for the record* that travelling alone with an infant is hard work.  especially when both parent and child have come down with respiratory infections and are feeling tired and surly.

5. Otherwise, we are just going on about our business.  Spending a lot of time in the yard trying to keep Cora from eating dirt and grass and pushing her in the swing… cooking a fair bit (though I have hit a creative slump in the kitchen and begun to hate it– I’m hoping to have a breakthrough sometime soon)… working on a revolving list of house projects that include sanding/painting the ginormous round dining table I scored off of craigslist recently… watching Cora flirt with the idea crawling and enjoying her increasingly coherent babbling and laughing.  Here are a few more recent pictures of her for Those Of You who keep asking:

and I think that about does it.  I’ll try to be a more responsible blogger in the future and not cream you in the face with a whole month’s worth of posts.

but, on the other hand, considering it has taken me a whole day just to put this one together, maybe not…

people. seriously.

holy adorableness.  take a look at this blog I just found. and the clothes she has made for her daughters. someday I will be this cool, I am sure of it.

we are having a splendid morning… cora woke up at 7:30, and by 9:30 was down for her morning nap… and is still down an hour and a half later.  she is complying nicely with this new Schedule (thanks to the recent trip to the east coast and the ensuing jetlag.)  I don’t know what to do with myself… I painted my toenails, repotted a tomato plant that Genie obligingly left on my stoop yesterday… this followed by a vase of tulips cut from the garden! we have the nicest neighbors.

by way of catching people up, she is turning into a proper Baby… slowly figuring out how to sit up on her own, eating semi-solid food (and enjoying the wearing of it and the smearing of it on henry’s glasses even more…), and sleeping reliably through the night.  photographic evidence below.

she passionately loves rice cereal, which smells/looks to me like wallpaper paste.  she does this hysterical shark-attack routine where she tries to fall onto the spoon if we’re moving too slow for her.  I’m glad she’s happy anyway.  I’m about to go steam some sweet potatoes and see how that goes over.

apparently the pregnancy brain is permanent

4 months post-partum and I’m still having trouble finishing sentences promptly, getting the hair done and the makeup on and my shoes on the right feet every day.  Not to mention the laundry folded, dinner on the table, clean clothes on the baby… and this is only with one kid.  I know I’m not the only one, and I feel that I understand my mother so much more now than ever before.  But I’m wondering… when does it get better?

or does it?

whacked.

all I have to say about this is that post-baby hair cuts are easily as cathartic as post-break-up cuts, but sooo much happier.

and many thanks to carrie for doing the honors.

I miss miami.

“It’s been cold this week, speaking of sorrows.  It got really really cold– what we call ass-burning cold.  Your butt gets so cold it’s hard to resist the temptation to sit down on a fire and people do and then your pants catch on fire and then you have to make that choice between modesty and survival.”

–Garrison Keillor, this week’s News.

photo stolen from the selby.  go there and check it out if you haven’t.

she’s awake! and smiling!

… which we have been waiting for.  I remember (vaguely) a small uproar when Angelina Jolie referred to one of her newborns as “just kind of a blob,” and I can identify with how she felt.  It is so nice to finally get some feedback.  A good laugh now and then (although I’m not sure she knows that’s what she’s doing) and some nice interactive smiles… it makes it all worthwhile.  (and, as Henry put it, keeps us from drop-kicking her at 2 in the morning.)

That said, the sleep deprivation is killing me.  Us.  This very lovely child is porking up and wants to eat every 2-3 hours, and I am constantly feeling slightly unravelled psychologically as a result.  (thus the scanty posting on the blog).  The above picture was unfortunately taken at about 6:30 this morning, obligingly tinkered with by the veeery cool PhotoBag iPhone ap while I watched the sun come up over the valley and waited for the wee one to fall back asleep.  After a grand total of 3 hours of sleep for me for the night.  Sad but true, but look how pretty the sunrise was:

and, yeah, that’s the view from our living room.  Pretty incredible, and worth at least half of what we’re paying in rent.  (on nice clear days, anyway.)

In other news, I have started creeping back to work here and there, mostly just four hours at a time when Henry is at home… he is doing a great job holding down the fort with bottled breastmilk, etc., and Cora seems to have “attached” very nicely to him.  It occurred to me the other day when I traipsed off to the ER for the afternoon and left the two of them to eat, get cleaned up and out the door to bible study that I didn’t even feel like I  needed to leave much instruction other than “milk’s in the fridge.”  Which is such a profoundly nice (and rare?) way for a new mom to feel going off to work and leaving the baby.  And it is soooo awesome to be back at work.  Contrary to many other nurses, I actually really like my particular job and love the folks I work with.  It is a busy, upbeat, and constantly changing scene, and it feels good to go in there and be good at what I do, to laugh at all the absurd stuff that rolls in the door, and to make some gravy money before the holidays.  I wasn’t sure when I’d be ready, but find that it really helps to have the aforementioned able/willing/supportive/competent spouse holding up the other end of the line to make it happen.

sooo… here we are.

5 weeks out, and not a lot to say.  Cora has been sleeping, eating, and pooping, as all newborns do.  Occasionally we get a smile out of her, and she seems to be acting a little more “awake”, holding her head up some, etc, but for the most part, she is still in the sleep/eat cycle and growing like a weed.  I more or less sit around and watch her go through these cycles, and try to get things done in between… cooking, reading, laundry, re-discovering daytime television (Oprah!  Ellen!  Martha!  Regis!)…

We are gearing up for thanksgiving, divvying up the recipes– I am most excited about this cream-corn-casserole-concoction that Henry’s mother makes and which my mother got the recipe for last year when we were in Michigan for the holiday.  We have a running joke in our family that all good things in life start with the letter C… cokes, cookies, candy, cake, caramel corn, coffee, caramel… the list is extensive… and we will probably have to add this one to it.

And that’s about the sum of it.  I’m sure there’s more in the brain-pan than that, but it’s going to have to wait.

3 weeks and counting.

sorry for the graininess, but this picture was too funny to pass up.  Henry took it with his phone…

By way of catching people up, things are going well:  I have healed up nicely and actually was in the mood for Exercise today (which happened only about twice a year anyway prior to getting pregnant) and the weather is exquisite (highly unusual for Oregon in November).  Cora is a perfect newborn– gaining weight like a champ, breastfeeding like her life depends on it (huh. I guess it actually does.), and sleeping a LOT.  Like, so much that I’ve twice consulted Dr. Sears (author of a great owners manual for new babies) to find out if it’s normal.  It is.  I’m just paranoid.

Henry (ahem: that’s Dr. Henry Nelson to you) has started and is liking his job, finally. He’s been treading water for the last month at this alternate facility while all the paperwork and building permits and etc, etc got finished up for the facility he’s actually going to be working at.  In short, it is a small (i.e. 15-bed) inpatient facility that is transitioning brittle, chronically mentally ill patients from the State Hospital out into the community.  These folks are more or less considered a throw-away population and are sometimes referred to as “unrestorable,” so he has his work cut out for him.  But, he likes a challenge (or thinks he does anyway)… in any case, he is doing well and has taken to fatherhood like a fish to water (or is it a duck?).

And that’s about it.  The house is slowly getting unpacked, and hopefully I’ll have more to say in the next week or two.

bah humbug.

The problem with the above picture is that I had big plans to be in New Orleans, eating good food and seeing old friends and generally living it up.   On Monday and Tuesday.  How unethical is it to pray that this thing swings northeast and nails northern florida?

a public service announcement for henry

Henry would like whoever put him on John McCain’s email list to know that he will be voting for Obama this fall.  Please cease and desist from further pranks of this sort as they only aggravate him and make him lose sleep over the prospect of Republicans continuing to run the country.

That is all.