2011: Love

To celebrate the five year anniversary of my blog, for five days I am reposting one of my favourite posts from each year.

In 2011, after weeks of waiting, Felix was born and changed everything. I will never forget the day of his birth. My grandparents visited, all the way from Australia. We stuck around in Norway just long enough to taste the first hint of spring, before disappearing to America for six months. We did some awesome trips, and I had a blast visiting a blog-friend in Seattle. Michael took some pretty great photos. We capped the year of with sunshine and family in Australia. But this is my favourite post of all.
                                                                                                    

September 2011: Love

Last week you turned seven months old. And I just love you so much. (Though sometimes I am ragged with tiredness and just want someone else to take you for an hour.) I feed you to sleep for most of your sleeps. And when you fall asleep, I just gaze at you, your lashes and your soft cheeks. You are so beautiful. Michael took these photos at a lake in Montana. Usually you are too distracted to feed when we are out anywhere, but this time you were hungry, and relaxed, and you fed for a long time, making sure I kept looking at you.

You can sit like a pro now. You are nowhere near crawling, but you have grown adept at sort of launching yourself from sitting towards the direction you would like to go. You are also very good at letting me know what you think about things. Tonight after your bath we read a book together, and you were having a fabulous time chewing and scratching and whacking it. Then I could see you were tired so I said ok, lets go to sleep now, and you smiled at me so sweetly. Then I started putting you in your sleeping bag and you cried with such bitter disappointment and rage, before snuggling in for your evening feed and drifting off to sleep.

At the moment you love to click you tongue, blow raspberries, and shake your head rapidly from side to side. I tried it, and it actually makes the world look quite funny – I wonder if you do it for the thrill of it, as well as to show us how clever you are. You love when I sing ‘open, shut them’ and ‘insy winsy spider’.

This morning we walked along the river, and stopped in the coffee shop before storytime at the library. This is pretty much routine, and a good one. Since you’ve gotten into eating solids you don’t need to feed as much when we’re out, but you seemed to want it. I realised you hadn’t had any since 5.30, and it was nearly 10, so we cuddled together in the corner of the sofa and you fed for a long time. I guess it felt special because normally when we’re out you have about two sips and then wriggle around to see if you’re missing anything. But walking over to the library, both of us satisfied with our morning drink, I just felt so happy.

 

On the way

Well, we’ve left. We’ve made it to LA. I am so, so grateful we have two nights here before flying onto Norway. Felix did pretty well on the plane and slept for more than half the trip. There were several spare seats so due to Michael’s forward planning we managed to sneak the car-seat on, which made all the difference. It would have been uncomfortable for both of us if Felix had had to sleep on my lap all the way – he’s such a big little guy now! I’m also glad I’m still breastfeeding, it really helped to keep him happy. Everyone on the flight was pretty impressed with him; someone told me ‘ your baby was divine!’ He had a fabulous time exploring Sydney airport before the flight, and entertained everyone by crawling around everywhere and climbing on the baggage trolleys. As we disembarked in LA, he said ‘bye bye’ to all the passengers. I’m still pretty wrecked, but we have a day to recover before the final legs (LA – New York, New York – Oslo). And the longest flight is over already, hurrah.

 

Go West

In the weeks before we left Norway to come to America, Michael listened to ‘Go West‘ as he walked to work every day. Going west was an adventure, with wonderful parts and difficult parts. It is strange, in the days before we leave here, to be in a place which so soon will only exist for us as memories. I think Michael’s favourite part of being here was all the photo opportunities. The images take on lives of their own, often more resonant with suggestiveness than the moments themselves had been. The dogs panting at the Interstate Oasis, the fierce red rock of Moab, the cross-hatched textures of earth in the Kennecot Copper Mine, and the mountain-tops, lakes and deep forests of the Glacier National Park. Below the fold are images that didn’t make it into earlier posts – a montage of doorways, cars, characters, creatures, and, always, the open road.

 

Packing up

Felix has been getting into the spirit of things. No, really. This week, for the first time, he has been all about putting things inside other things. The other night in the bath, he spent a good ten minutes assiduously stuffing his squeezy sheep into a plastic cup, and then immediately scrabbling it out again. Michael, I said, come and look at this! And he sat on the bathroom floor, and we cheered and cheered, amazed at our son putting a toy in and out of a cup, over and over. Clearly a genius. (This is not to discount the pleasure of putting a baby in a box.)

We have only two days left here. We are mostly packed. We’ll ship our last two boxes tomorrow, and somehow fit everything else into our bags (maybe Felix will help). We’ve started cleaning our apartment but there is lots more cleaning to go. It will be a relief to get on the plane, despite the fact a long flight with a nine month old may not be terribly relaxing.

Today was Thanksgiving, and we had dinner with two of the women from my Mom’s group and their families. It was a lovely way to conclude our time here. The Mom’s meetup group has been, for me, one of the best things about being here. They even held a farewell meetup for me on Tuesday; I was so touched.

The past few days I have been walking my familiar paths, stopping in my familiar places, feeling like a ghost of myself.

On Monday we said goodbye to my friend Katya and her daughter Willow, who is almost exactly Felix’s age. Sharing our entry into motherhood over the past six months has been wonderful and I felt so sad after saying goodbye. We have decided to rectify the situation and see each other one more time before we leave. And I do so hope they visit us in Norway someday.

But this time next week we’ll be in Australia. This sounds too good to be true!

 

Destruction

Michael took these pictures back in September, but we thought they were too good not to share.

 

November Garden

On one of our days alone in Salt Lake City, I took Felix for a walk around the Red Butte Garden, which was just behind our hotel. It was beautiful, and I could have taken lots of great photos, but Felix wasn’t too happy about the cold cold air. He perked up considerably when he could look at all the shiny things in the gift shop.

 

Our last trip to Salt Lake City

We couldn’t help but come down here one last time. We may come back one day, but it won’t be for a while. When we were here in May, the snow hadn’t yet melted on the tops of the mountains, and just now it’s begun falling again.

The mountains are covered lightly, so you can still see their textured skin, and the autumn leaves look like frosted glass.

Felix looks like a very big, very warm teddy bear.

 

Little pumpkin

Warning: gratuitous cuteness ahead.

My plan was to dress Felix as a pumpkin, get him to hold a pumpkin, sit him down among the autumn leaves, and get Michael to take pictures of him. (These are the discretions we allow ourselves as parents.) But he was more interested in the leaves. And the leaves, I admit, were pretty great.

 

More thoughts on Halloween

I was thinking on the weekend that Halloween is great because it’s so different from Christmas and Easter. It’s not about the nuclear family. It’s wild and irreverent. In the middle of winter it feels right to come together quietly and light candles and dream about the return of the light, but this is such a fitting way to mark this particular change in season – a crazy party before it all falls down. A much more urgent affair when you know the winter will be long and harsh. This is something I could barely imagine when I lived in Australia, when autumn always came as such a relief.

Over here is an interview with the wonderful Jeffrey Jerome Cohen about Halloween and monsters. He says:

I really enjoy Halloween, and I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s not as if I dress up as a monster—actually I don’t, I almost never do. But there’s something about Halloween that’s just celebratory and fun.

The only thing that I’ll say has changed about Halloween for me, as I’ve gotten a little bit older, is it does strike me that—despite all of the fun that happens—Halloween is really also a brooding on our own mortality and that it’s got a deeply sad component to it.

Part of it is trying to overcome a fear of death by having celebration in the face of death. But it’s also an acknowledgement that death is a part of our lives and we don’t get this on any other day. Our contemporary lives are so lived in denial of our own mortality that it’s the one day that it’s actually out there.

Which is true. But for us, this year, it was just a great excuse to dress Felix up as a pumpkin.

 

Happy Halloween!

So far we’ve been loving the build-up to Halloween. We went for a walk this morning around one of the older neighbourhoods here in Idaho Falls so Michael could take some pictures of the decorations.

It is really quite lovely having such a popular celebration of Autumn – it feels like a good thing to do (and it postpones the encroachment of Christmas paraphernalia!). Halloween doesn’t really work in Australia because it is utterly the wrong season.

I don’t get into the really scary stuff, but it is nice to have markers of harvest and the encroaching shadows. The bakery has been flogging its choc-chip pumpkin bread lately, and I must admit I have become a bit of an addict.

Everyone is going completely nuts for candy. In the Walmart there’s a huge aisle devoted to combo pack bags of sweets and chocolate bars, just for Halloween. Michael was there the other night and he says there’s a worker employed full time just to re-stack it, as customers crowd around it like honey bees.

Last night I took Felix to ‘Boo at the Zoo’. The Zoo has special late night opening hours for three nights, and is completely decked out in Halloween decorations. Local businesses are running little stalls handing out candy for trick or treating, and the zoo is utterly over-run with mini pirates and lions and spider-men and witches and ghosts and princesses and strawberries pointing at the animals and lining up for candy.

I’m not sure what the zoo’s regular inhabitants made of it all. Taking Felix in the stroller was the wrong move, as there were so many people we could barely get through the crowds. The turtle’s enclosure was taken over by pumpkins, and the penguin cove was decked out with a pirate theme.

Boo!