I’m really doing quite well. The biggest concern has been staying cool enough. So far I haven’t had any morning sickness although there has been quite a bit of heartburn and I still have the dizziness.
Food Cravings: I’ve had several people ask me if I’ve had any strange food cravings. I would stand there on the phone (barefoot and pregnant in front of the stove) telling them “no, no food cravings at all” while I’m making myself another cheese and cranberry quesadilla. I eat at least one of these a day, sometimes more. I was actually thinking of writing up the recipe and posting it to my blog. It took a while for it to occur to me that this food pairing might be a little strange.
We went to the doctor last Monday and they gave us a couple books and a bag full of brochures, sent us on our merry way and told us to come back at the end of the month. I really thought they would have checked me out at that point, but aside from checking my blood pressure, they just asked a lot of questions about my health history. It was a little frustrating, but I guess it’s normal operating procedure to do the first real checkup at week 8 or later.
We are nearly at week 6, the baby is due April 8.
The Husband has been wonderful. Yesterday he sent me to my mom’s house so he could disinfect the house. He didn’t want me to breath the cleaning fumes. And he holds my hand when I cross the street. A little protective?
Aaron and Rufus: I had forgotten to pack any toys for Rufus, so Aaron took one of his socks and filled it with sand.
It amazes me sometimes how the simplest things make the best toys. The $40 toy for your toddler is no match for the box it came in.
It was on this weekend that I realized that I was in love with the man who was to become my husband (although I didn’t know about the husband part yet). I knew that this was something real, something special, and something that was going to last a very long time.
When my Grandfather moved to Alaska in the 40s, he needed to find a house big enough to hold his wife and seven children, and pronto. The Matanuska Valley had been colonized in the 30s as part of the New Deal. My Grandfather bought a nice little Colony House on a hefty bit of acreage from a family that just wasn’t able to cut it as colonists (nothing against that poor family, but winters in Alaska were probably a bit more than they had bargained for).
Then he set about expanding the house to make it big enough to fit his kids.
It turned out plenty big.
McKinley Farm
The picture above shows my Grandparents and mom with her brothers and sister. Notice the airplane out the window to the left. Grandpa was a dentist and he used that to commute to work in Anchorage. He would also fly out to the bush villages to treat the villagers, often for free.
The fireplace was built with river rocks. The second floor windows on either side of the chimney (below) were close enough to reach out and get a good toe hold on the chimney, yet far enough away that falling was a very real possibility. Of course, I know nothing of this because I would never consider sneaking out of the house.
The lower roof, right above the ground on the picture above, covered the cold room. Aside from being a dentist and a politician, my grandfather was also a very skillful butcher (that’s how he worked his way through college.) We didn’t just have a cooler for keeping meat, we had an entire 400+ square foot cold room. We didn’t mess around when it came to meat.
In my mind, the crowing jewel of this home was the swing set.
It was the reason my friends came to play at my house. And on hot summer days, we would drag a water hose to the top of the slide and turn it in to a water slide.
(That’s me in front with the braids)
My Dad took the following pictures from the top of the slide, then pasted them together. The two little buildings behind the van were very important as well. The white building was the chicken coop and the little log building beyond that was the pig pen.
I lived in that house for most of my childhood. It was a pain to clean, we lived in the delta between two glacier fed rivers so the fine dust of glacier silt was always passing through the walls. Vacuuming and dusting were never ending chores. As was mowing the lawn.
And lest you think it was a mansion of some kind, I want to be clear that the bedroom walls were plywood, and we woke up many times to find frost on the inside of our bedroom walls. Oh, and the roof leaked so much when it rained or the snow melted that walking down the hall was an obstacle course of buckets and drips. I miss that house.
My family sold the house a few years back and since then it has fallen into disrepair. It looks so sad now.
Most days, the fact that Mr. H and I go to different schools with different schedules is not an issue. This week has been a different story. As I mentioned earlier, Mr. H graduated from UW on Saturday which has had him in party mode since he turned in his final paper on Friday. I, on the other hand, still have finals and papers due this week.
The party/not to party debate has been raging for the past five days.
Aside from the fact that I still have a serious amount of studying and writing to do, there is also the fact that Mr. H is a good five years younger than me and much less of a lightweight when it comes to partying.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good party. It’s just so much easier to enjoy when I’m not stressing out about whether or not I will be able get my #$%& together and finish this quarter with adequate grades.
Obviously I lost that battle, because this is just one quarter for me and its Graduation for him. The last, and coolest, party we attended this weekend was on Sunday night and it was thrown by one of the students in Mr. H’s Persian program.
Those students in the Persian Studies program know how to throw a party.
I’ve been busy this week.
I have one final final and I’m done for the quarter. Then I can breath, sleep, party…
My father passed away in October, so today, I’m facing my first fatherless Father’s Day. I had a hard time figuring out what to write; there is so much that I’m just not quite ready to talk about yet. I decided to come up with a list of things that I learned from my Dad.
1. Be creative. Improvise.
Dad could fix anything with duct tape, although that’s not the only thing he used. He never let the lack of the proper tool slow him down; not having the proper tool is just an excuse. Sometimes he would invent a tool on the spot to do what he needed. And come Halloween, if he didn’t have a good pumpkin, he might just go with a turnip from the garden.
2. Tell your stories.
Family stories are a gift. They help you understand what made your parents the way they are, what made you the way you are. They are the structure that defines the culture of your family. The paragraph below was excerpted from a 30 page autobiography Dad left for us before he died. It paints a picture of family life in 1950s Los Angeles, it also paints a picture of my grandfather, whom I never really got to know but was so instrumental in shaping my father into the man he was to become.
“One of my favorite memories of this time was Wednesday nights. That was payday and Dad would bring home a big load of groceries. He was a deputy for the L.A. County Sheriff and drove a blue 1948 Buick. I remember French bread and celery and we usually had spaghetti because that was Dad’s favorite dish. He would also like to have some red wine with his spaghetti. He would take his first glass and take a sip. He would screw up his face like it tasted worse than castor oil, vinegar, and turpentine all mixed together and as he unscrewed his face he’d say, “Man, that’s good!” About this time he told me he wanted me to sit on his left. He explained (kidding, of course) that it was so he could “come across with this one” making a fist. Mom sat on his right so he could pat her on the shoulder so she would know he had just said something funny and (perhaps apologizing for being so corny) it was time to laugh. It was at this age, perhaps, that I began to appreciate how much my Dad loved my Mom.”
3. Read bedtime stories to your children.
In my earliest years, Dad was a full time college student working two part time jobs. Mom would adjust our bedtime to fit his work schedule and he would come home between shifts to read us a bedtime story and tuck us in. Bed time stories were a sacred tradition in our home. My parents had five kids and we would all pile up on someone’s bed every night for the bedtime story. He didn’t just read Dr. Seuss (although there was plenty of that, and Richard Scarry, and Where the Wild Things Are). As we got older he moved on to the classics like Heidi, The Swiss Family Robinson, Kidnapped, Treasure Island… We learned to love reading and stories. I learned to read by watching him read and following his finger as it dragged across the page. And every night we had that bonding time.
4. Be Happy.
Dad used that phrase a lot. He would often sign off on his letters saying “be happy.” He taught us, and modeled for us, that happiness is a choice and not an accident of circumstance. Choose happiness. Have fun. Laugh. Joke. Be Silly.
Defrosting the freezer can be a chore (remember when we had to do that?) or it can be a blast. The choice is yours.
5. Send Letters.
It didn’t matter if it was Toledo, New Orleans, or another city in our state, whenever Dad went somewhere on a business trip he sent us postcards. Not one card for all of us; each of us got our own postcard. It wasn’t a big expense, and it didn’t take a lot of time, but the payoff for us kids feeling loved and appreciated and remembered and valued – well, you can’t put a price on that. He wrote letters too. Whenever Mom would put together a care package for one of us, Dad would pack it up and include a note. It usually wasn’t very long, a few paragraphs, but I always read the note before I looked to see what else was in the box. Don’t underestimate the value of these letters. They meant enough to me that I still have a box in which I keep all the postcards and letters from Dad. And don’t confuse letters with emails. There’s something about the handwriting that makes it more personal and more meaningful.
This is the last and most precious letter I received from my Dad right after he died.
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