imaginary outfit: newborn daze

Easy does it is the motto around here. As someone who has always had trouble not worrying about what's next or what's past, I've found having a newborn surprisingly relaxing. They are the definition of immediate: everything is in the moment.

All this moment-to-moment living makes even the most mundane things wonderful: an extra ten minutes to linger in the shower; the feel of crisp, clean sheets at the end of the day; the warmth of a sun-warmed porch floor or the cool of an air-conditioned room; someone bringing you a glass of lemonade. And of course, the baby is a daily marvel. I'm happy just to watch him be.

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One of the downsides of life are for-your-own-good truth/doom-sayers: the people who tell you cheerful things like 'Once you have a baby, you'll never see a movie/read a book/shower/travel/wear your old jeans again...' etc. etc. etc.

For the record (in case you, too, are expecting or even thinking about a baby and have encountered people determined to take the shine off your life): I've read several books and a number of magazine articles since Hugh arrived on the scene, watched a few movies, made numerous meals, taken a few walks by myself, showered daily, and had lovely conversations with my husband. Old jeans and traveling may take a bit more time, but I'm hopeful. In the meantime, there are always televised travel specials and jumpsuits.

around here

Dahlias are blooming, blueberries are ripe and we are getting to know a new little person: Hugh Clarence Madewell-O'Hagan, born (after a few inducements) on the thirteenth of July.

We're singing songs, taking naps, washing bottles and learning something new every day. He is the dearest thing, and Sean and I can't stop marveling at him.

inducements

We've drifted past the baby's estimated due date, and we are waiting, waiting, waiting; wondering how exactly this story will start.

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On the day you were born, it rained buckets, and I sat with my watercolors and tried to paint a fox.

On the day that you were born, your dad read you baseball essays by Roger Angell, and you kicked like crazy whenever he mentioned the Mets. 

On the day that you were born, I woke up in a bad mood and ate three pieces of toast with raspberry jam before I felt better.

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Moving through these months, I've realized that a fair amount of information about pregnancy and labor is anecdotal. There is a lot of choosing what to believe. No one gets to A/B test any one specific pregnancy/labor/parenthood experience, and every woman and baby are individual beings with an individual relationship and set of circumstances. Correlation and causation are tricky bastards, and no one can predict how things are going to be for you. Every story is unwritten, until it isn't.

Believing X caused Y does make for a good story, though, even if it isn't exactly true, so I've made my own list of ways to induce labor. If I do any one (or several of them) and lo, the babe appears, who's to say they didn't work?

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Buying opal rings for every finger.
Reading books about summer on islands.
Floating in chlorinated swimming pools until fingers and toes are as wrinkly as raisins.
Drinking three frozen cokes in a row.
Walking up and down the stairs seventeen times.
Getting a peck of peaches, and taking just one bite out of each.
Picking Japanese beetles off the azaleas.
Standing on the shore, and letting waves break around your knees until the sun shifts in the sky.
Eating surskullar (only the yellows) until your eyes water and tongue burns.
Sharpening a pencil to its pointiest point, and drawing a single, continuous line until the lead is completely flat.
Laying very close to the person you love best, and matching your breath to theirs.
Watching for 100 firefly flashes, then wishing.

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Louise Bourgeois: Pregnant Woman, 2009.

the waiting

imaginary outfit: fried chicken and fireworks

We had a family friend who used to say summer only lasted from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July. This year, after a cool and rainy June, it feels as though summer is just getting started. Either way, there are fireworks and I hope to see as many as I can. I am also thinking of making a batch of biscuits. They are perfect multitaskers for this time of year, equally great sandwiching a piece of fried chicken with pickle slices and a drizzle of honey, or acting as a base for macerated fruit and piles of whipped cream.

Other summery things:

• packing for the perfect picnic
• mixtapes for the Carefree Highway
• lost roads
• swimming holes
• posts with pyrotechnics
• huaraches: 1 / 2 / 3 

Happy weekend.

imaginary outfit: a momentary balance

We are in the waiting weeks, and everyone is watching the calendar. I expected to hate this time, to feel big and ungainly and impatient, but I'm finding that I enjoy it more than all the time before. While I do feel big and ungainly, it's less of an aggravation and more of an amusement. Every morning, I'm surprised again to discover I can find some kind of equilibrium, moving this different body through space. This full-moon belly gives me reason to be still, to move more slowly and be deliberate, and it won't last forever — a handful of days, a week or two at most.

People keep asking if we are ready, as if having your first baby is like planning a road trip to Arizona. It's a kind but silly question, and I never know exactly what to say. You can prepare to a point, but it's a Rumsfeldian situation, with known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. We're approaching it more as an exercise in mobile-making: improvising and adjusting until the necessary pieces hang in some sort of balance. And of course, the whole thing has to move with the wind.

Speaking of mobiles, we put one up in the baby's room this week: tiny wooden Viking ships with paper sails that bob and dip with slightest breath of air. Watching it move is one of my favorite ways to pass the time.

In other news of baby preparedness, we've re-upped our subscriptions to a number of printed periodicals (hoping, foolishly perhaps, that our kid's earliest memories of us won't involve ambient screen-glow), bought a better camera, stashed batches of blueberry muffins in the freezer, boiled bottles, gotten car seats installed and laid in Prosecco for celebratory toasts. I also have extra jars of maraschino cherries in the cupboard for emergency hot fudge sundaes and stacks of freshly laundered PJs for me, Sean and the kiddo. So the important stuff is as ready as it can be.

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Snack of the moment: fresh cherries and icy carafes of lemon water. I am missing shoes with laces and pants with buttons, but it is only a matter of time.

imaginary outfit: sun, swollen ankles and vintage treasures

There's something about the serendipity of miscellaneous sales: yard sales, antique fairs, church bazaars and jumbles. I used to be much more methodical about the things I wanted to find, but now I go and let myself get carried along in a gentle swell of random discovery. Without trying too hard, the randomness usually sorts itself into a pattern. I'll notice something particular — a brass pipe holder with a scottie dog couchant, a worn work table, a porcupine quill basket — and the rest of the sale turns into a parade of terriers or pipe accessories or workshop furnishings or handmade baskets. Tomorrow, we're heading to the Burton Antique Fair, and while I'd love to find a stash of Creative Playthings, I'll be happy to just poke around and see what's there.

I'm knocking on the door of 37 weeks, and swollen hands and ankles have gone from an occasional curiosity to a daily fact of life. Stretchy tank dresses and soft leather sandals, plus many, many breaks for icy drinks and elevated feet are how I'm getting by.

On the agenda:

• strolling and shopping
• dinosaurs
• new wood floors in the nursery
• naps

Happy weekend.

imaginary outfit: strawberry season

June strawberries are thing of beauty and a fleeting joy. Eleven months out of the year, my strawberry consumption is limited and jam-or-smoothie based (though I have been eating fresh berries out of season with reckless abandon throughout this pregnancy), and then June rolls around like a revelation, and I realize just how good fresh strawberries can be. I'll miss picking them this year. My current round-bellied condition is not conducive to bends, stoops and squats, so we'll have to resort to farm stand quarts.

Strawberry things:

• dumpling
• jam
• pudding
• conserve
• scones

Other things:

• bees and hives
• watercolor peonies
• wood engravings on handmade paper
• fireworks and dollar dogs

Happy weekend.

imaginary outfit: bare legs

Since I haven't had much luck finding maternity clothes I like, I've been glad to realize that there are a lot of roomy and surprisingly stretchy clothes out there (and hiding in my wardrobe). I'm thinking dresses will be key these last two months, and after a long winter of leggings and stretchy-waisted jeans, swingy dresses and bare legs feel wonderful.

This weekend, we're headed west to eat noodles, watch warblers, stock up on veggies and treats, and poke around a favorite shop. There's also a crib to buy; whoa.

Other things:

• a man, a horse and a mobile library
• a day in the life of Pinterest: 'She feels more alive than the time she painted the vestibule an unexpectedly bright accent color'  
• Bathsheba Everdene
• shiny sandals
• gelatin prints
• eco-friendly balloons filled with flower seeds

Happy weekend.

As ever, click on the image to get links for all the items pictured.

imaginary outfit: digging in the dirt

The sun is out (most of the time), the air is cool, the ground is soft, and the bugs haven't appeared on the scene, so Sean and I are trying to get outside as much as possible to tackle all the planting, pruning, weeding, mulching, raking and mowing. I can't do quite as much as I would like thanks to the belly, but I help where I can.

A lot of my garden time is spent with my mom. It's one of her favorite activities. For years, we would tease her that half of the photos she took on any vacation were of flowers, trees or plantings. A few years ago, we unearthed a stack of 1950s honeymoon photos taken by her dad, who passed away when she was very young. Half the stack were images of flowers or plants. About the same time, I started to review the photos I was taking of our days in New York, and discovered that a sizable percentage were of plantings, trees, and flowers. Family ties can take funny shapes.

When my mom and I work in the garden, I always learn something: how to divide a hosta, cultivate asparagus or propagate black raspberries. Most of my questions have to do with finding out what things are. Plants have Latin names and common names and folk-tale names, and my mom knows many of them.

Names are in the air. Sean and I don't seem to be able to land on a name for the baby. It feels like an imposition, to name a person sight unseen. We had family friends who could not choose a name for their baby, so they went home from the hospital with "Baby Girl" on the birth certificate. After a year or so, they decided on Alice. That feels a bit like a cautionary tale, and I am hoping that once we meet the baby, name inspiration will strike. Maybe we should treat them like a plant, and give them a Latin name, a common name and a nickname. Options can't be a bad thing.

I'm looking forward to next summer, when they can spend time with my mom and me in the garden.

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Other odds and ends:

• A stand of quaking aspen is one of the largest living organisms on Earth
• The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning
• turquoise earrings (similar to the pair Anne Boleyn wears at her coronation in Wolf Hall)
• oatmeal cream pies (I baked a half-batch this week— delicious)
• wee wooden mugs and enamel bowls and plates
• good company

Happy weekend.

imaginary outfit: freeze and thaw

Yesterday, the ice in the creek broke up. After a few warm(er) days, it went from a solid, snow-covered sheet to a damp, semi-translucent slab laced with rills of water. I was hoping to be nearby when the ice finally broke, but I missed it. When I came home from work yesterday, the big ice was gone and the little eddies and whorls of creek water had become a fast-moving mass studded with blocky ice chunks like mini icebergs. For a sudden half hour, it turned into a giant slushy machine, and soccer ball-sized pieces of ice and slush filled the creek from bank to bank, rushing away downstream. Now it is running relatively clear and high, and it's nice to have creek sounds back in the valley.

Otherwise:
Things I have read and enjoyed: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra.
Things I have read and not enjoyed: pregnancy books. The tone see-saws between the apocalyptic and patronizing, and they don't seem to offer much beyond a catalog of everything that can go wrong. We checked a tall stack out of the library and didn't find a winner in the bunch. We'll just have to go the old-fashioned route and trust the doctor.
Things I have seen and liked: musical drawings and prints at the Cleveland Museum of Art; turquoise pebble earrings; patched jeans; recipes for beautiful and intimidatingly healthy food.

I am also laying plans to increase the number of overalls and rompers in my collection. They are very kind to expanding midsections.

imaginary outfit: slow expansion

It is bitterly cold here, but the sun is shining and the birds are singing. Birdsong is not something I associate with bitter February days, but they sing like mad in the early morning. The river is frozen, and I can sit at my work table and watch the squirrels bounding from bank to bank, creating narrow paths on the snow-covered ice.

The days are expanding. Every night, sunset falls a little later, and there are a few more minutes of light to enjoy. I am expanding, too. It's a curious thing. Though I understand the developmental facts, can check diagrams and use online calculators to convert week-by-week changes into familiar grocery store produce (this week: banana), pregnancy feels like a mystery I am living. Unseen things are happening. Even now, as I am getting rounder and feeling odd occasional flicks and twitches from within, a baby still seems closer to an article of faith than a fact.

I find myself wondering about how women thought about pregnancy in less scientific and fantastical times. My doctor calls the baby something of a lovable parasite, taking all it can from my blood and bones, and many friends have described pregnancy to me in sci-fi terms: alien and host, strange and surreal — hands and feet appearing just below your skin, the growth and movement of something other. But before we imagined these things, there had to have been other ways of thinking and feeling about it. In a time before aliens, was the process less alien? It's interesting to consider how easily ideas are bound by relatively new metaphors, and how quickly other ways of thinking vanish.

Clothes-wise, I'm trying to balance a yearning for far-away spring with the fact of freezing days and a body that's slowly shape-shifting. Some softer colors and subtle gleam are helping to lighten all the unavoidable sweaters. I disregarded all advice about hair elastics and belly bands and made the jump to maternity jeans as soon as my pants got uncomfortably tight. They won't last forever – maybe not even to the end — but since jeans are a daily staple for me, it was worth being comfortable. Part of this whole thing is stepping into exhilarating ephemerality. I'm using it as practice for making the most of the moment I am in without getting weighed down by the uncertainty of whatever lies ahead.

the dog house

It's hard to believe it's been a month since I've posted anything here. To tell the truth, I have been in a bit of a storybook state. Sean and I are expecting a baby. For three months, I was the dormouse from Alice in Wonderland, sleepy all the time. Now I am Rapunzel's mother, insatiably craving green leafy foods. We are only about half-way through, so there is plenty of time for more tales to unfold.

This weekend is Valentine's, so I think I will have to make something with pink frosting and sprinkles. Also:

• lunar new year + kurentovanje
• themes and variations
• brunch with friends
• a vampire movie I can't wait to see

Happy weekend.

Silver dog house with reverse-carved rock crystal intaglio by Thomas Johnson for Collingwood & Co., 1880, available from Alastir Wood Tait.