Saturday, June 26, 2010

Portland continues

The longer I am in Portland, the more I love it. I'm sure that this enthusiasm is in part related to the fact that I really needed a break. Some of it is the company of an old friend who is happy to let you be yourself. Some of it is surely related to the fact that we're on vacation. There's still that "grass is always greener" aspect that touches all of us periodically. Still, I love it here. Every day that we are here I find one more reason to love it. It's nice to have an answer when Tim asks me, "If you could live anywhere..." There's no telling what might be in store for us but I am completely working away on that dream I mentioned earlier.

A few pictures from the trip...

Dinner at Mama's
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Lunch at Fuller's. Best tuna sandwich ever...tasted just like my Mom used to make.
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Anthropologie. I like to foster a good self-image for my sweet, sweet heart.
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Reading the paper with Daddy in the hotel room. This was after she puked on the bed. Smells great in there...
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Berries at the Portland State University farmers market, the most beautiful produce I've ever seen.
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Powells bookstore. Look at this kids section. I mean, look at this!!!
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Katie & Anson
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Happy family. I love it that I'm part of this.
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Anson pretends that he is a rap artiste and Ada loves it. He used to be in a hair band. That's awesome.
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This is why we tip so well. Well, this and the fact that I waitressed for a really long time and I get how bad it sucks to get a sucky tip.
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Why are baby piggies so freakin' cute? I love it that her middle toe is her longest toe.
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Along with Mt. St. Helen, the volcanic one that blew up in the eighties, Mt. Hood watches over Portland.
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Back seat self-portrait.
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Friday, June 25, 2010

Dream a Little Dream

I recently wrote about the law of attraction, which basically states that you attract into your life the people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts. I have always put a great deal of faith in this principle. The idea of it is terribly fantastic:

your dreams will come true.


It's been a while since I've lost myself in a grand-scale, future-changing, drive-your-life, consume-your-imagination kind of dream. Somewhere in the process of defending a dissertation, taking several exams on a weekly basis, boards, more boards, moving, working, etc. I fell out of the dreaming habit. Or I might have been too damn tired.
I know what happens when you fail to create a life through your dreams: the result is stagnation, frustration, restriction. It's terrible and I want to avoid it. So I've forced myself to list my goals and the like but the exercise lacks passion. It has been a half-hearted effort because I haven't known what I wanted outside of te really fundamental things like Tim & Ada. Like so many things, it's an organic process: you can't rush the creation of a good dream.

Thank God, it looks as though the dream-free dry spell is officially over. The re-awakening started with the birth of Ada. It's impossible to not have a child and have dreams for them, to imagine your life with them, to visualize the home you want to create for them. Since then I've been stretching my dream muscles and the pieces are starting to fall into place now. Oh, beauty!! Movin' on to better things...


Portland. Who knew? We arrived yesterday few expectations. Tim has an NIH grant-writing workshop so Ada & I are on our own to explore this city that our friend Katie has called home for a grand total of 5 days. Today we walked Tim to his thing and went on to walk around downtown Portland. Ada fell asleep so Mama kept walking.

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What I found was a breath of fresh air: this place has real good energy. I like it here. People smiled at me and my child. This is a departure from our trips through the Castro where the best we can hope for is to be ignored but typically we are glared at while "breeder" is mumbled under breath. Nobody knocked into us. I wasn't cut off even once. Common civility reigned.There was cleanliness. I saw only 3 homeless people and none of them heckled me for money. There is a humility to the people here. I'm not one for much sparkle or flash. I like good people. Real people. From what I've seen it wouldn't appear that the vast majority fancy themselves as the exception. I half expected for little singing birdies to bring me a coffee while little bunnies put slippers on my feet.

I learned something about myself today. I was leafing through a real estate booklet and I saw a beautiful craftsman style house, so common here. My first thought when I saw the picture of that house? I love it. My second thought? I could never live there. I caught myself thinking this. Why not? I asked myself. Then I realized....when I see a house like this - a house that a FAMILY lives in I see all the stability that I have always craved. Somehow, in my mind to live in a place like this you have to have some kind of stable family history to give your efforts some credibility. It's ridiculous, I know it is. But there it was, unearthed from my psyche by a real estate magazine. I can examine that thought now and have decided to dismiss it altogether. If I want to live in an old farmhouse then that's exactly what I'm going to do, damn it.

Our first full day in Portland peaked with a picnic on the soft, green grass under the shade of a tree next to the Willamette River. It was a perfect day.

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The other thing that I love about this city is how I feel here. Dreamy, is how I feel.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Ada's Birthday & Father's Day

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My girl turned one year old yesterday. I must have pinched myself a million times over the past 72 hours cause I just can't believe it's been a year. A whole beautiful, magical year of Ada. I'm not enough of a wordsmith to make the magnitude of this past year make sense. By all other measures it has been a rocky time but this little girl saved me for sure. I would have become completely insane without her to keep me grounded.

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So I threw her a little party. I made the invitations myself, I enlisted help to make strings of flags, and I baked 10 cakes before deciding one was good enough to be her birthday cake. It seems silly, even to me, but this party was extremely important to me. It felt a bit like giving the bird to the bad parts of the past year and saying,  
"Look!! The good triumphed!!"


The preparations:
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Pre-party lovin':
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Visits with new friends:

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Presents!!

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And, of course, CAKE!!!

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Strangely and sadly I have no "good" pictures of Ada with her grandparents or Uncle Colin. She moves too fast or our camera sucks too bad, doesn't matter - the pictures are all too blurry because she was so excited and moving so much. I'm not much of a photographer and truth be told, I often forget to reach for the camera. I hope these will put together the story for her when she's older. I looked like this after the last guest left and she was napping:

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Happiest, happiest birthday, my heart. Love you so. 

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FATHER'S DAY

I always say that my man is a good egg. And he is.

I hear stories from women whose husbands won't stay with the baby or the woman is too afraid to leave them alone. Not my man. He is all Daddy, all day, every Sunday. Today he celebrated Father's Day alone with Ada - they went and did a very father/daughter activity: bought diapers and formula. It doesn't get much more authentic than that. Then he came home and grilled out for us on his new Weber.

With Tim it's something more than being a great team player with Mommy: I love the way he loves our daughter. He has a squeeky voice he uses only for her. He can snuggle her close to soothe her. He carries her as if she were feather-light. He talks to her, teaches her, cares for her...and she responds like a fish on a hook. I think she knows that she is completely safe with him. She adores him.

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Today we said goodbye to Violetta. I will miss her so much. It as great to be with her again - I love my friend. My daughter loves my friend. And my V loves my A. In my estimation, my daughter's community of loving people could never, ever be too big. There is always room for one more. Is it possible to get too much love? I think not:

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Same, same

Life isn't always uplifting. Sometimes the shit hits the fan. I just can't think of how to make this be something positive. Sorry about that.

Over the past month 6 people in my life have died, including my beloved Marge. I wish I could find the time or energy to dive into this because I'm sure there are lessons here to be learned. Their realization will be slow as things (read: unwanted feelings) continue to percolate under the current of the daily chaos. In the meanwhile, my experience of death continues to be painful and full of awkward exchanges for the living.


I read an article today called, "My Watershed Moment". The author writes of her mothers death:
"You look like you did on the day you were born," Nana had whispered to my mom on the day she died. I remember how my mother looked: bald, thin, like a baby bird. Now I know what Nana must have thought:  

My baby. So beautiful.

My mother looked that same way: bald, thin, like a baby bird. Ada was only 11 weeks old and still very much a newborn on the other side of the country without me. Same, same.
The hospice handbook explains the stages of death. They are exactly the same as the stages of giving birth, so recent and so raw to me then. Same, same.
They were the same, birth and death. They were exactly the same.

I think that this must mean something, right? I mean, it could be circumstance but I feel like the universe must be trying to tell me something.
If anyone has any insight here, I'd love to hear it. I'm getting close to not answering my phone again, which is a shame considering that I just upgraded to this a week ago:

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Life marches on. Even in my garden the little plants do the only thing they know how: grow and thrive in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Smart. We have been harvesting salads, which is really exciting!! The warm weather last weekend burned my chard though... we'll see if it can bounce back.

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Unlike the plants in my container garden we humans are endowed with the great gift of creating our lives. With every choice we create ourselves. I used to be a master of the law of attraction. I fell out of the habit but I still believe in the power of it. It's beautiful, that promise of directing your own future. 
I am creating new dreams over the past week. I thought a few days ago that one of them might be close to coming true. I'm not so sure now. I will have to wait and see. I was giddy with the thought of it though. That alone was a good thing to recognize: my attitude changed as a result of my thoughts and not my situation. Speaking of positive thinking...

My little French girl is here to visit! She is about the most delightful person I know. Everyone who meets her grows to love her. You can't help yourself, quite frankly! She is good people. What is it about old friends? That thing where you can not see them for a while but the moment you do it's as if no time had passed at all. Scroll on down to engage the playlist if you want to know how my house is this week. She sings little french songs to Ada and Ada loves it!! My girl is over the moon for her Auntie Violetta and my sweet V can't be anything other than her loving, fabulous self. Aren't I lucky? My daughter too.

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My in-laws are also in town. Maiken walked for her PhD (GO MAIKEN!!!) and it's Ada's birthday so they took a little vacay to escape the craziness that has swallowed them whole lately. On Tuesday I went to work while the rest of my family (that includes V, but not Ada) went to Napa. First stop: the Andretti winery. I think my father-in-law, a huge racing fan, was in heaven. Did it make up for the fact that Ada screams at him in horror any time he speaks? I don't know about that, but they had a nice day nevertheless. Oh, and Ada tried to make up to him by stacking her toys next to him on the couch when he napped. Sweet gesture but as soon as he woke up she got scared again.
Poor peanut :(
Poor grandpa :(

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Yes, life carries on. This means my wee one turns a year old on Saturday. It's been a great excuse to do some crafting, which  I love to do. It also gives me some quiet time to reflect - I feel oddly emotional about this birthday. I'm loving it and loving her - every single moment, don't get me wrong. It's just that...well, where did the year go? Dang. And I was trying to slow it down, savor the moments....all of these things people tell you to do because it "goes so fast."
Lord have mercy. Yes, it does. 

I think I've mentioned it, but this party is the old-fashioned kind. I think I've spent a total of $20 on it. This is a direct response to my mother-in-law telling me about her hairdresser who is spending somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000 on a cupcake themed birthday party for her one-year-old. I want to know how much my MIL pays for her haircuts!!!Party prep...

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And then there's this one. My very own heart. God, I love her. I never knew it could be like this. Her tiny head is about to explode with all the loving from me, Tim, Alicia, Violetta, and Grandma Judy. She has been so happy!

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