Fall

It's time to write again.

My, how the time flies by, when you're spinning in circles all day long and then it takes an hour to make the lunches for the next day after dinner clean up because you're so tired. But it's all good work, for good people, and while I'm wondering who is going to make Liam's octopus costume and when, I'm still managing to hang onto my surfboard as the ocean undulates below me. Thankfully, Aoife has decided once again to be some variety of fairy princess for Halloween which means I can, with gratitude, send her to the gigantic dress up basket on the 31st of October to choose her own get-up.

This weekend was our town's fall festival. We live in a very small town up in the hills, and it's important for me to attend this festival every fall to remind myself how incredibly adorable this community really is. Of course there's the beautiful white church, town hall, and pristine library that comprise our town centre and sit perched atop a hill with panoramic views of the Connecticut River Valley. But on Festival day the back lawn of the library becomes a hubbub of activity with little tents, pens with all varieties of baby and adult animals, a cow pie bingo pen, lots of food tents, fairy house building, a craft table, and bounce house... and all the activities are free. Open to the public, and free. Amazing.

This festival consists of a kick-off 5K run through the hills (Liam completed his first 5K run, I'm proud to say, with Greg, Maeve, Grandpa and me!) followed by a variety of music, tours of the old blacksmith shop museum, home made sugar donuts, pies for sale, tractors to climb on, corn to grind, wool to spin, cider to press, and lots of animals to visit of course. There was a woodsman's competition and a trebuchet slingshot contraption flinging squashes into the forest.

The highlight of the festival comes at 4 PM when the Great Pumpkin Roll happens. At this time, all children get a small pumpkin and go to the top of the hill, and after singing a song, which is of course called, "The Great Pumpkin Roll," the starting gun fires and everyone pitches their pumpkin forward, and then great chaos emerges as each child rushes down the hill after his or her pumpkin. There are always a few tears as pumpkins are lost and kids trip on the incredibly steep hill on the way down, but there are way more smiles and cheers as the kids run sometimes half a mile down the hill after their pumpkins. One can easily imagine how quickly the 10 year old boys begin smashing pumpkins on the street on the way back up the hill and how shocked and horrified the 8 year old girls act as they compare how their pumpkins survived the journey and cradle them, hoping they will make it home for a good jack-o-lantern.

This year, our competitive by nature son was prepared to run all the way home if necessary (we live 1 mile down), and thrilled at the prospect of doing so. Aoife was almost going to opt out, as the throng of over-excited bodies pitching quickly downhill is always terrifying to her (and who can blame her, she's still barely 40 pounds) but a schoolmate's enthusiasm convinced her to at least pitch the pumpkin, and send Grandpa after it. Fiona spent the whole day saying, "Frow pumpkin down driveway, want to frow my pumpkin NOW down driveway, want pumpkin, want pumpkin NOW!" and then, in typical almost-two year old fashion, clung to her pumpkin and would not budge when the time came. It was an amazing day together, spent as a family, and it helped me to center in to the cute little community that I may have only lived in for 9 years but that has been my children's home for all of their lives.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how small our house is going to seem in 5 years, or maybe in only two, and how at some point we might actually consider the thought (just consider) of moving somewhere else. It really could only happen if we found the exact homestead that we envisioned originally, the dream that was too high to aspire for when we scraped together just enough to buy the tiny cottage that we were able to renew and expand to become what we call home today. It would have to be the farmhouse with acres of land and an attic to renovate into our bedroom, with a barn big enough for a swing and an existing place for our hens and enough room so that we could have a dog or two without wondering where even the dog would sleep. But I'm starting to realize that if we did, or could find that place at the time when our house was feeling too small, it might have to happen.

I know many people who have moved after their babies died, but I can't shake the feeling that I would be leaving Charlotte behind if I ever left this place. I think there's also a piece of me that feels so attached to this house because I feel like I absolutely became the woman I am here. I moved in here a slip of a girl with a basketball under my dress and I've become a wise, aged mother over the years, and more than feeling like I couldn't leave, I can't bear the thought of somebody else taking over this domain which is so sacred to me.

Maybe I'd have to be one of those weird sellers who would only sell their house to a family they really, really like.

And what of the placenta of the daughter I lost, which now lies encompassed in the root system of a very successful, 25 foot plum tree? What of that?

Little Fi

What Fiona loves best is when, after her tub, I let her climb up with me into our sleigh bed and nurse her while she's bare naked, lying down.

Fiona slept with me every night of her life until she was nine months old, you'll recall. She was the snuggliest, coziest, most delicious little baby to snooze with until suddenly she wasn't. Suddenly she was a wretched bedmate, thrashing and moaning, nursing and ripping the nipple out of her mouth in frustration, only settling when I would jump out of the bed in utter despair, not knowing how to soothe her. It took me a few weeks to put two and two together and realize that this child craved space, and she's slept very happily in her crib ever since (albeit not through the night until the dawn of the ever-so-ingenious nightlight).

So, to snuggle with her cozied against me, naked to boot, is simply a delight.

She's so tiny, Fiona is, she's almost two but she's just over 20 pounds and just petite all over. She has this fluffy head of baby curls that are getting quite long and she's so wiry and strong and amazing to lie with. She still absolutely loves to nurse and I love to nurse her. It's such a sweet, quiet way to love each other.

Lately when we're nursing in bed after her bath, she's taken to gazing upward at the photoframe above the bed with all the photos of Charlotte in it. She knows it's Charlotte, but obviously can't understand who Charlotte is, or what happened to her. Her comments vary, and I don't even really try to rationally explain it to her because I know she's too little.

"Charlotte's asleep."

"Charlotte's sad."

"Charlotte's nursing."

"Charlotte wake up. Mimi have bandaid."

"Charlotte happy."

Once, a while back, before I had specifically identified the photos over our bed as Charlotte, she thought they were photos of me holding a dolly. At that point she probably thought Charlotte was a candle we lit on our dining room table, as her context was "Let's light Charlotte's candle".

It's funny for me to compare her knowledge of Charlotte at this point to Liam's when he was her age. When Liam was a baby, and it was just the two of us, I told him the story of Charlotte over, and over, and over. It was like a book we read, the story of the mother and father who wanted their baby but she died, and then they had this amazing little boy to bring joy back into their lives. His information about Charlotte was her story over and over again. Fiona has probably never even gotten the whole story, all laid out in a straight line like that. She gets whispers of it in her ear, she gets photographs all over the house that everyone in the family refers to and tells her it's Charlotte. She has everyone going around saying their wish for Charlotte before we eat. She even chips in now, saying, "We love you, Charlotte, we miss you," and I'm sure she wonders who it is she's talking to. When Fiona was tiny I was having such awful PTSD (if I may call it that) that I could barely think about Charlotte let alone tell her story out loud to the baby in my lap who lived.

I feel like I should make her a book about our family, explaining who everyone was, who came first, who came next. There's just so darn many of us now.

And I love it.

10.3

I did have one, teeny temper tantrum the other night. It would be simple for all of you who have been blessed with living children to guess what it was about, and harder for those of you who long for sleepless nights to fathom...

of course, sleep.

I'm tired, quite.

Maeve Eloise sleeps quite well, sometimes. There were nights when she'd do 5 or 6 hours at a time, leaving me wondering how I could possibly feel so rested. I'd been up 3 or 4 times a night with Fiona up until a month or two before Maeve's birth, and now they were neck and neck, each getting me up once or twice.

(Fiona, incidentally, who has been up at least twice in the night every night of her life suddenly sleeps through the night due to my ingenious idea that perhaps a night light would help).

But some nights, she's nursing every ten minutes.

Like tonight, when I thought I could sneak down and do a blog post. But two minutes after I came downstairs, she's awake.

She wants to go to bed at 6:30 PM, with me.

No can do, girlfriend.

That's all I've got for tonight. My little Mae-mae calls, and my beautiful images of myself snuggled in bed with her, tummy to tummy, feeling her tiny little belly rise and fall against mine, will have to wait until tomorrow, or some other night when I might get five minutes instead of two to tell you about what things are like in the happy, happy (sad) house.

9.29

I am itching to write, to capture moments, and I have to surrender: while I started this as a loss blog four years ago (almost), now my joys outnumber my losses four to one, and thus it only makes sense that perhaps my posts should begin to reflect this.

I am overwhelmed with happiness right now. I absolutely love having four children; I love so many things about it I can hardly begin to wrap my head around expressing what makes it so wonderful. I feel so lucky that I was physically able to pull of this feat of having four living children in my house, but I also feel lucky that I was emotionally and mentally able to open myself up to the chaos that this big family entails*. I feel, somehow, that being "busier" has liberated me somehow, and opened me to just really embracing how amazing it is to have these four people to live with, and to raise, and mostly to enjoy. I absolutely love their company, each and every one of them. I love taking care of them and watching them grow and I'm just so giddy and thrilled that I get to love FOUR of these little walking, talking people (or maybe not quite walking and talking yet....) which is four times as many people for me to love.

I am almost operating on a new theory, which is that suddenly now that there is barely time for me to do anything other than take care of them, I'm forced to just embrace that as the joy in my life as opposed to trying to find other things that are my own, personal things that I crave to do. I also have this sudden, alarming context to it all: (and could this be the result of having the second child enrolled in full-day school?) which is, that childhood lasts for such a brief flicker, and if I don't pay attention, it will be gone, and forever. I have so many years of my life to do other things, but only now to do this. It is not work to take care of them, it is my privilege. (oh, okay. So it is work, a lot of work, but that work is my privilege) And it makes me so happy.

Last night the rain was blowing in. The river was riding high, sounding like a fan on high speed as it rushed over the huge boulders outside my bedroom window. A cool breeze blew in the windows as I climbed into bed onto smooth bedsheets and lifted baby Maeve, who had been sleeping on the bed, into my arms to nurse her before I went to sleep myself. She was swaddled in her turquoise blue flannel blanket with wavy coloured stitching around the border, and her little fuzzy head stuck out the top. I latched her on and grabbed my book and suddenly became aware of her feet, which had come out of the bottom of her wrap and were now settled on my thigh as she nursed. The soles of them were flat to my skin, and as the wind blew across our bed they radiated warmth into my body. It felt so, so warm, so beautifully warm on my leg, and it was in such sharp contrast to the night air that surrounded us. As I laid down to sleep, I inched her carefully down by my side and tucked up my legs around her so that her feet stayed there, warm on me, as we fell asleep together.

I love this.

* Yes, there is a financial piece: I suppose that if Greg and I, who ourselves could barely send our children to nursery school, didn't come from families who can and will help us to conquer whatever pieces of university we can't get paid for elsewhere, we might have had to reel it in a little earlier. I just have to state that because obviously kids cost money; I will also say that we do sacrifice somewhat in order to have a big family: i do not buy myself a juice if I'm thirsty, and we don't get take out food or go to restaurants on any sort of regular basis or buy new things for fun. We share bedrooms and get our toys at our town dump's swap shop and we have a great time doing it!

There he was, just sitting on a picnic blanket in front of me.

It was a man, we'll call him Rich, and I'd worked with him 10 years ago, the year I became pregnant with Charlotte.

I had known for several months that my new acquaintance Kellie had a husband named Rich, but I'd never met him or seen a photo.

Then suddenly there he was, right in front of me. He had a new 5 month old daughter and I had my new 4 month old daughter and it happened so fast, because he and his wife were leaving the picnic as I arrived, that I almost could have missed the fact that the last time I laid eyes on him was the day I left work, on the second of May, to have my baby girl.

"You're Rich?" I staggered, so caught off guard to know this man already. I was frantically doing the math in my head at the time, trying to figure out which pieces of my life story were known to him.

He was, of course, Rich. And as he and his wife left with their baby girl I wondered if there was anyone else on earth who I had known up until the eleventh hour of my old life and had not seen since.

I cannot think of a single one.

(typed with one hand)

Baking Cookies

I'm making cookies right now, while both girls sleep. There are about 7 baskets of unfolded laundry and wet clothes in the dryer and toys strewn about my feet as I bake, but I really, really like to eat cookies, and so I'm baking.

This is another thing I've adopted lately, as my life has become more and more consumed with caring for others: I try to be really nice to myself in the little ways I can, like buying myself peanut M&Ms at the grocery store checkout before my girls are old enough to ask for a packet themselves, and sometimes sneaking in a quick read of the paper while I'm nursing Maeve during Fiona's nap instead of nursing her in the Ergo while I do housework.

Do you know that in 7 years of being a stay at home Mom I have never once just done something fun or nice for myself while my children napped? I hesitated to write this, because I had to spend quite a few minutes thinking carefully to make sure I was not conjuring up some sort of lie. But I think it's really true, I don't think I've ever just sat in a chair and tucked into a good book or started a sewing project (unless I was working frantically on the project for somebody else) on a weekday. You could look at that and say, "Wow, she's a really devoted mother and housekeeper" but I look at it instead and say, "Wow, what an idiot. All those hours where she could have had just half an hour of self-care and she's racing around like a madman and probably crabby by 5 PM as a result."

I remember that when I was pregnant with Aoife in the winter of 2006, Liam had a swimming class on Saturday mornings and Greg and I took turns bringing him. I vividly recall that somehow, since it was the weekend, I felt this gave me license to sit in the yellow glider in the sunroom with my book. It was so delicious to be alone in my house, just reading. I remember so well, it was Catherine Newman's book "Waiting for Birdy", and while it was a book on parenting (which usually annoy me to no end because the authors are so entitled and oblivious of the possibility of either loss or gratitude) this book did not strike me this way; one because I knew Catherine and she was so kind and emotional during Charlotte's death and Liam's birth, and also because her writing is neither assuming of her own good fortune nor annoying in any way. I read on those mornings and I felt no guilt because it was the weekend; yet I have not been able (or has it not even occurred to me?) to do this during the week in all those years. Why?

On those mornings, what I wanted to do was read, and so I read. But somehow I was under the (false) impression that since others (namely my husband) were at work, I also should be working.

But won't I work better, and more efficiently, if I'm happy and fulfilled? I say, YES, heartily and fully. So in the oven they are, delicious cowboy cookies, and if you're so inclined you could go and bake them yourself.

Enjoy.

1 cup sugar

1 ¼ cups packed brown sugar

1 cup shortening (I use butter)

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp. salt

½ tsp/ baking powder

2 ½ cups quick cooking oats

2 cups chips (flavors of your choice!)

Combine all ingredients in bowl in the order given, mixing by hand after each addition. Place on greased cookie sheet (I use the parchment paper instead).

Bake at 350 for 15 minutes or until light brown…..Cool on wire rack…

I love this now.

This here, right now in my home.

Logically this seems odd, because I am far busier than I have ever been in my life, but it's caused an almost calm. The kids are in school and Greg is at work and the dishwasher is broken and the list is so long that I don't care anymore if I get it done. I don't have fleeting thoughts of time alone or a sewing project I'd love to tackle; right now what I crave is little spots of time with each child alone and quiet moments and times when we're all laughing together, usually at Fiona, and by now even little Maeve's eyes are lighting up when the room is afire with joy.

I sat tonight, in Aoife's room. She was having trouble falling asleep so I came and perched on the edge of her bed and scratched her back, ever so lightly in small and then bigger circles, just like I myself crave. She settled into her nest of pillows and finally, finally drifted off. And I could have stayed there, and it seemed like almost the first time ever where it didn't seem like there was something I wanted to try to get to after bedtime, I was just savoring bedtime. Savoring a warm, relaxed girl beneath my hand, and the quiet, and the dark, and the peace of being with her.

Why is this?

Tomorrow I might feel differently, but tonight, I'll take it. It's a magical feeling because you know, this is it. In 10 years I will be sewing and Aoife will have shut her door tightly and she'll be asleep in there alone and she won't want me (or maybe, if I'm lucky, she will...) to go in and lie with her in the dark for twenty minutes, just thinking and feeling calm. Or it will just be another night when somebody else needs me and I'm itching to get away but tonight it was just her, a little girl who couldn't sleep, and my lucky job was to sit on her bed by the night light and scratch her back.

Aoife will never be five again, and this point in my family's history is not going to repeat itself. The children will grow and be different stages of children and then they will be gone, and I will have the rest of my life to have a clean house, and cook intricate and fabulous meals, and sew interesting things, and have a fulfilling professional career. But this is it, this is the best. There will never be anything more beautiful than this.

Tonight, I nursed Fiona and Maeve together in the rocking chair after their bath. Maeve was sorely exhausted, and I snuggled them in on my lap in the tight little chair and began to rock, singing their little lullaby (a slight variation on the tune of Go Tell Aunt Rhody):

Good night Fiona,

Good night Maeve Eloise.

Good night my sweet girls,

It's time to go to sleep.

I looked off into the darkness of the room as I sang, rocking hypnotically, and when I looked down I saw that they were curled into each other while they nursed, and were clutching each others' hands. Maeve had fallen asleep.

I will leave you with that beautiful moment. Tomorrow there may be tears of frustration, I may fling a dish towel across the kitchen in frustration and shout at the top of my voice but today was full of things that made me glad to be just where I am, here, and now.