Park Morning

Hey, it's time for my annual blog post!

I just made a new schedule for myself now that Catherine is sort of, kind of, once in awhile, sleeping or playing long enough for me to accomplish something and the new schedule includes blogging a bit.

We've been enjoying the mild spring days (the few we've had in between the rainy days).  One of the best things about home educating is getting to the park in the morning when it's relatively empty and the air is cooler.  The kids are really into climbing lately.  The top picture here is Gregory (3.5) at the top of a complicated, twisty ladder.  The other had been scared of it for awhile and one day he called me over and said, "I just climbed that."  I didn't believe him until he did it again.  Within five minutes the three middle kids were chasing each other up it repeatedly.

Catherine Rose is almost eight months.  We are still working our way through a list of potential nicknames for her but "Rosie" is the current favorite.  She is a maniac.  Constantly on the move and seldom sleeping.  She's pretty cheerful but I spend a lot of time chasing her around and picking "choking hazards" and making sure she is not about to fall on something sharp.  Our house currently has no carpeting and she's developing a thick skull.  She is happiest when standing but, as you can see, the little boys are always very nervous about her falling--even though this playground turf is much softer than our wood floors.

William is 5.5 and is really struggling to find his place.  He continues to swing between extreme sweetness and extreme storminess.  He can play equally happily with his younger or older brother, playing elaborate imaginative games with Gregory and building with physics sets with Joseph.  He has energy to spare and loves to race around the park on his little bike.

Margaret is 7.5 and really determined to master all the physically demanding parts of the park this summer.  She's been working on various sections of the climbing wall.

And teaching Rosie to do the same . . .

 
And she has now officially conquered the lower set of rings.  Eric and I marvel at this since neither of us could do this as kids.  She's working now on a much higher set.  I've been really pleased to see her patient determination with these since that is not generally characteristic of her personality.

A few days after the rings she made it to the top of the climbing wall.

How does Joseph keep busy at the park?  Sometimes by making up imaginative games, often by bird watching.  He is an avid birder and recently began a nature journal.  His first entry was a starling and he's looking forward to cataloging our entire park and journaling on our trips this summer as well.

Sunday in the park, with garden

Sunday afternoons are so lovely. It's especially wonderful when we get up and out early enough to get to Mass at 8:30 so that we're home early with the whole day ahead of us. But what to do with that whole day? Typically we either take the train into Manhattan and wander around or go for a drive. Margaret was strongly lobbying for the latter this past Sunday. Eric pulled up a map and made us a list of parks we'd never been to while I put together a picnic dinner.

Making dinner has been a blast lately. Our garden is doing really well. All the lettuce sprouted but between our late start (we could have planted in mid-March) and slugs it was awhile before we got our first harvest. The slugs had us stumped for awhile: they'd emerge each evening just after dark and munch our young leaves down to nothing. After a bit of research we decided that hand-harvesting was the best bet. We--and by "we" I mean Eric unless the kids are up late--keep a slug stick stuck in one corner of our planter box. Each evening we head out, use the stick to pull off any slugs we find and drop them in a cup of salt water. I love animals but I love lettuce more.

Once we got on top of the slugs the lettuce went crazy. We've made lots and lots of salads and we just pulled out some bolted plants and started a second planting. We'll see how that goes. One of the lettuce varieties didn't do as well so we put some parsley in that space.

And we added a mint plant to one end although we hear that mint spreads so we might move that to a dedicated planter.

We also have cilantro and basil on the roof of our shed.

Between our garden and our weekly produce deliveries we've been eating well: lots of salad, lots of pesto, a yummy caprese salad for our picnic last night. We are definitely planting a much bigger garden next year. I never would have thought that container gardening would work so well.

But back to our Sunday. We opted to explore Palisades Park which is on the Hudson River, straddling the George Washington Bridge on the New Jersey side. It's a long, skinny park and it is very pretty but it is largely hiking/biking with some small marinas along the water. We were hoping for more of a "picnic spot with picturesque view." The first place we stopped seemed to promise this but after a few minutes we noticed that the water on the path was rapidly encroaching on our bench. Who knew the Hudson River was tidal?

We found a nice little picnic area and enjoyed our dinner. We are still loving Joseph's FreeWheel. It's great to see him getting around on sloped, bumpy, thorn-riddled terrain.

And here's a couple shots of my new haircut, courtesy of me. I've tried a couple hair salons since leaving Minnesota and the results was always a bad hair cut and less money in my wallet. So I did a little googling, got out my scissors and had at it.

I needed to do a couple of rounds over a day or two to get close to what I was going for but I'm pretty happy with the result. And it was free! Can't complain about spending zero dollars on a decent haircut. Eric has proclaimed it the best haircut I've ever had.

How do I do it?

Love these rings . . . .

I get this question a lot and I've gotten it quite a bit the last few weeks. How do I renovate an apartment and blog about it and not neglect the children? Am I superwoman?

I thought it might be helpful to take a minute to try and clarify some of the behind-the-scenes logistics that go on around here. First, pretty much anytime "I" am doing something involving long stretches of concentration or power tools, you can assume that all the kids are asleep (rare) or that Eric is watching them. He's a teacher, remember, and doesn't have busy summers. His summer course was canceled last minute this year and that was the final impetus that decided us in favor of spiffing things up in the rental unit. He has plenty of independent work he'd like to be doing but we both knew that being landlords would be equivalent to taking on a part-time job and that's what we've been doing the last few weeks.

Look how I only sort of tip to the side when I'm in a highchair.

Even smaller projects, like building a nightstand, are things I do on the weekend when Eric is putting in time with the kids. It's a fun hobby for me and Eric supports it and it's the kind of thing I tend to blog about. But it's not like I'm operating a furniture store on the side or anything.

Also, the work we put it on things like this is pretty evenly divided. I'm the main blogger around here because Eric has plenty of writing projects of the sort that earn money or advance his career. It makes for more interesting reading to write in the first person so I only write about my half of things. I also tend to do the more interesting stuff. Anyway, I'd certainly rather read about paint color than about the experience of extracting 8000 staples from a wooden floor. But Eric is very generous about taking on some of the grunt work and (literal) heavy lifting that I don't want to--or physically can't--do so that I have the freedom to do fun stuff like finish floors and paint. He is also more gung-ho about plumbing and electrical work which are two things I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. He's pretty aware of the risks involved and he doesn't do anything too complicated--we're not afraid to call professionals for the hard stuff. But no way do I want to hook up a dishwasher.

And we both kind of enjoy this sort of work. Not that we have very long experience, of course, but I think we're a pretty good team. Our approaches to DIY projects complement each other nicely. I like to do things "right" and Eric likes to figure out how to make do and rig something up. Usually the best solution for our budget and skill set is something in between. Our too-short kitchen counter, for example: If money and time had been no object I would have had us remove the counters, pry them apart, level the base cabinets, buy a new short section and cut it correctly the second time around. Eric thought we should just leave it or maybe jam something in there. In the end, we did use his solution but then I made it look nice and it worked out fine.

Wonder how many fingers I can suck at once . . .

So how do I do it? With a lot of help and by temporarily making these sorts of things a high priority. We didn't do any school during June. I didn't clean my own house at all last week. We didn't order take out but we didn't eat any very impressive meals. Eric didn't get any independent writing projects done. But it wasn't necessary to neglect the children. We only had a babysitter on Friday when it was really crunch time. The kids sometimes hang around when we're working on something but they respect power tools and they are good at keeping their distance. We're very careful to unplug things immediately and the kids have shoes with better toe protection than mine.

I couldn't be happier that our early adventures in home improvement are going so well. I've always been extremely over-optimistic and Eric is always very pessimistic when it comes to these sorts of things and I think we are starting to meet more in the middle (though he did just ask me to research how we could install a roll-in shower--maybe we'll try something simpler next!)

The little guy

Gregory has been busy outgrowing his clothes and generally charming our socks off lately. He's a little smile factory and the flock of surrogate grandmothers at our church all know they can get a big grin out of him if they run over after (or during) Mass.

He has his moments, of course, but I would say he's our most easy-going baby so far. Maybe I'm just getting better at being a mom. He sleeps for nice long stretches day and night. He mostly puts up with his violently affectionate older brother. He lets Margaret over care for him. Joseph has developed a real knack for entertaining babies lately and he's been trying his tricks on Gregory. We're all pretty smitten with him, even Robyn:

Who can hold Gregory while teaching my children anatomy:

In the top picture you might notice two items of interest. The first is that, yes, that's my baby in a basket of (clean) laundry. What can I say? We're baby furniture minimalists. All of my children so far have hated those little infant seats after the first three minutes or so. Plus those rocking seats are just too tempting for two-year olds. So I don't choose to take up valuable square footage with something that is mildly entertaining at best and life-threatening at worst. But I was really sick last week and needed to get some work done on the computer while home alone with Gregory. On a whim, I plopped him in the laundry basket and he played there happily for about thirty minutes.

The other thing you might notice now or in future pictures of Gregory is the big red spot on his chin. That's a hemangioma (sometimes called a "strawberry" or "stork bite"). These spots are fairly common but more often seen on the scalp or back of the neck. Joseph and William both had them on the backs of their necks. Gregory's is a bit worse and in a more concerning spot. Very rarely, they can grow large enough to interfere with feeding. Our pediatrician sent us for an ultrasound which we had today and it doesn't look like we have anything serious to worry about. But the spot could get quite large and red over the next year or so. Typically the spots fade and completely disappear by age five. So, now you know that that is and you don't have to wonder if Gregory's taking it on the chin from his older siblings on a regular basis.

I hope to have more fun house pics this weekend. I have a slew of exciting projects including Unpacking the Bedroom! Installing Hooks in the Entryway! Hanging Lamps for the Kids! And all sorts of other excitement. Stay tuned.

We're moving! Again! And more cute baby pictures!

It's official! Finally. We are moving into our own house on Saturday. Yes, I know, we moved less than a year ago. And less than a year before that. And the year before that. And the year before that. And the year before that. It's not that we love to move--most of those were completely necessary moves that are a normal part of graduate school and new-professorhood. The move we made last summer to our current apartment was completely voluntary but we were very excited about it. We'd spent a year prowling the neighborhood and trolling Craigslist for a rental that could be made accessible for Joseph. We wanted, if possible, a home all on one floor and, most definitely, an outside door low enough and with enough surrounding space to add a ramp. You would not believe how much space a ramp takes up. It's incredible. So last May when we found this apartment that was all one floor with only a few steps from the back door to a spacious patio and was even less rent we were thrilled. The landlord's agent who showed the apartment to us assured us that a ramp would be no problem. We moved in after our big road trip last summer and finally got around to building the ramp in September.

The ramp was actually a pretty fun DIY project for Eric and me. We studied lots of ramp and deck plans, Eric did all the math to come up with the design and we had at it. Just the two of us built it over two weekends and the end result was a nice, solid ramp that even looked nice. But far more wonderful than the satisfaction of building something together was seeing Joseph use the ramp. He was, then, almost six years old and for the the first time in his life could get in and out of his own house independently. We cried watching him finally able to follow his 18-month old brother in and out. It was incredible for him and for our whole family. I'm crying now remembering it, if you want to know the truth.

Just a couple of days after finishing the ramp, and on Margaret's birthday, our landlord ordered us to remove it immediately. It would take pages and pages to relate the entire story of our fall from that point but it was ugly. The ramp, as it was, had to be torn down though we do, of course, have a legal right to accessible housing. We explored lots and lots of options for recourse and solutions but over the course of the fall it became clear that for accessibility reasons, and other reasons that I won't enumerate here, we had to move on from this apartment. We were subjected to unreasonable demands on all sorts of unrelated issues, harassing encounters that frightened our children, and--I don't think coincidentally--stolen property. We briefly considered moving quickly into some sort of emergency housing but then decided that the situation wasn't that dire. What we did do, instead, was figure out how we could buy a house.

The nice thing about having our own house (other than not having a completely unhinged landlord) is that we can modify it any way we like for accessibility. But you'd be surprised how many houses cannot be made accessible no matter how much you own it. If we lived in the suburbs the housing stock would be a bit more amenable to ramping but one of our many reasons for living in the city is because the outdoor space is all accessible. Yards and wheelchairs are not a great combination. Our current neighborhood is also one of the most affordable places to live in North Jersey. Eric's commute is definitely shorter than average among his colleagues. But the need for "rampability" and a bathroom with at least the potential for accessibility really limited our options. We also had a strong preference for having all--or at least most--of our living space on one level. We didn't want to create a situation where everyone except Joseph had a bedroom upstairs. In the city where houses are built "up" more than "out", this pretty much ruled out all single-family homes. Two-family homes tend to have bigger floors.

A two-family home also, of course, greatly increases buying power because of rental income and in our neighborhood they tend to be the norm and don't cost any more than the available single family homes.

So once we established our price range and found a realtor we looked at the two dozen or so two- and three-family homes on the market. We ruled out several of them as "unrampable" right off the bat. Several more were fake short sales a common--and very frustrating--situation these days where a home owner in trouble is "listing their home for sale" to buy time with the bank but mysteriously becomes unreachable by phone if you want to actually view the property. In the end we got inside about a dozen homes and seriously considered three of them. Our first choice turned out, on a second look, to be more of a fixer-upper than we wanted, our second choice sold while we were thinking about the first one. So we ended up with our third choice home. In retrospect, as often happens, this one now seems like it should have been the obvious first choice all along and we are quite excited about it. We decided that trying to move quickly would not allow us to search for the "perfect house" but we are confident this house will serve us really well for long enough to make buying it a sensible move.

Getting a mortgage these days is a nightmare. The banks are skittish and picky but everything was finally settled last week and we are closing this Friday, moving in on Saturday. We are all very, very excited to be moving into our own place and into a place that is permanent. I'm looking forward to indulging my furniture making hobby once again (first up--adjusting the floor to ceiling bookshelves for the new dining room). Margaret is looking forward to having an entire finished basement to herself for nap time. Joseph is looking forward to the ramp. Eric is excited about having a home office in the attic--two whole floors away from the chaos that always interferes with his work on days he'd rather not go into campus. There's a lot of excitement all around.

I'll post a photo tour as soon as I can. Until then, I better get packing!

Gregory Augustine

I'll tell you what the biggest obstacle to my writing more on this blog is: pictures. I never think to bring my camera anywhere. If I do think to bring it, I don't think to use it. If I think to use it the pictures are usually terrible. And then I have to coordinate myself enough to upload the terrible pictures and choose a few to publish. It shouldn't be such an obstacle, but it is. I'm sure someone out there understands. Eric is of the opinion that most of you, dear readers, would love to have more updates about our family, pictures or no pictures. So I'm really going to try and post more even if I can't illustrate what I'm saying.

As for now--I do have a few decidedly mediocre shots of our newest addition. This is one seriously sweet baby and if that doesn't come through in the pictures, well, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Gregory came into the world on January 13th at about 5:15 in the morning. He was almost our smallest baby at 7 pounds, 4 ounces. (And if you read this just for the stats and don't like long birth stories you can skip ahead now to the last couple paragraphs). I had initially planned on this one being born at home as Margaret and William were. Honestly, after my 45 minutes of labor with William we didn't think trying to get to a hospital was even a very safe decision. I would rather have Eric deliver my baby and know that a professional is on the way than deliver on the freeway in January. We had a few hurdles, however. First, a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) at home is not really allowed in New Jersey. We found a midwife who was willing to help us given my history of very fast labor and we saw her for awhile. But then around 30 weeks we found that I had a low blood platelet count. That is a fairly common "complication" of pregnancy and doesn't really cause any problems--unless you bleed to death during birth. In a modern hospital that isn't too much of a risk but my home birth midwife thought I was no longer a good candidate for home birth.

We did a little research into local hospitals and found that the closest hospital actually had a group of midwives practicing. I called them up and immediately liked the woman who ran the clinic. She took me on as one of her private patients and we took it from there. Honestly, I liked the new midwife more, she and the hospital were more conveniently located, and her services (unlike the home birth) are covered by insurance.

I was a little apprehensive about birthing in a hospital. I (obviously) prefer natural childbirth and low intervention with regard to both mother and baby. Many, many of my friends have had horrible experiences of hospital birth and being a VBAC really ups your risk for unnecessary procedures and interventions.

There'd been lots of dickering about my actual due date for most of my pregnancy but we finally settled on January 25th. Two of my previous three babies were early so I expected to go early again. I wanted to give birth before Eric's semester started on January 18th and the string of snowstorms we had in early January had me on edge. The evening after one of the bigger storms I was feverishly doing house-buying paperwork at my desk when I got up for a snack and suddenly realized that I'd been having pretty regular contractions. I sat down to time things a bit and realized they were seven minutes apart. Seven minutes is a long time for most people but I'd gone from seven minutes apart to a baby in less than an hour before and didn't want to take any risks. We called our babysitter, called my midwife and took off for the hospital. We arrived to an almost silent labor and delivery ward in the middle of the night and settled in. My labor progressed steadily but (for me) very slowly. I refused to go to sleep because once I'd arrived at the hospital I didn't want to prolong things. But I ended up laboring for seven hours anyway. Most of it was very manageable and I stood around chatting with Eric and the midwife. By early morning I was exhausted and extremely hungry but Gregory was born fairly easily in the early morning. I couldn't have asked for a better setting for a hospital. The room was quiet and dimly lit and only Eric and my midwife were there. Even the nurse only showed up in the last moments and she was a quiet, calm presence who took great care of me immediately after birth as well.

Gregory was perfectly healthy right off the bat and the two of us settled in for our hospital stay. I had initially thought I would stay at the hospital for the full time allotted (48 hours) to maximize my rest. I realized after the first night that there is no such thing as a good night's sleep in a hospital where they feel the need to come in hourly to check someone's blood pressure. I had to argue with a few people for an early discharge but I was able to go home late in the afternoon on the second day.

Despite my ardent love for birthing at home, I have to say that my experience with a normal hospital birth was pretty positive. If we are blessed with another baby I would definitely be inclined to go back to the same hospital midwife.

Gregory has been a wonderful addition to our family. He is a very easygoing baby. The kids just adore him. Margaret has been a huge help holding him for me for short intervals and always ready to grab a clean diaper or change of clothes or make sure he has enough blankets. William is constantly trying to cover the baby in kisses--more kisses than any newborn can reasonably handle, in fact. He is mostly okay with not being the baby anymore though we have a few kinks to iron out in that department. I have noticed that since Gregory was born William seems to be attaching himself more to Joseph which is good for both of them.

I have had the easiest recovery from childbirth yet. I love having babies but I do not love being pregnant and it is very wonderful to be able to move quickly, bend over, hold my kids close, and generally have enough energy to get through the day again. My house is starting to get clean, dinner has gotten on the table, and I'm not even too worried about packing up the house in a couple weeks. Life is very good!

More soon on house developments. We are planning to close on a house in a few weeks and though there is no very great risk of things falling through, I'd rather save the details at least until we have the closing scheduled.