Happy Birthday, Sweet Baby Maeve!

My baby is one today. She was born by c-section at 9:40pm after a 15 hour trial of labor for VBAC.





This past year has gone really fast - but in a wonderful way.






She is a bright little ray of sunshine, very happy and calm.





Happy birthday, sweet girl. May the year ahead bring you joy.

Valentine's Day

It's not a day we go all out for.

I did buy Freyja an adorable Ariel hair bow, since she's just the tiniest bit obsessed with the Titian-haired mermaid.

DH is getting a more adult oriented treat - after all, the day after is the Lupercalia, an ancient Roman fertility festival (also commemorates the founding of Rome). Why not celebrate both?

As for me, DH is pretty good at buying presents that really communicate "I love you for who you are, not who the diamond ads say you should be."

That's right, chickadees. I get video games. Two years ago we got a crazy huge tax return and he came through with a Game Boy Advance SP. That was lovely. I still use it frequently. This year it was Kingdom Hearts II. I did ask for Lego Star Wars, but apparently it's nowhere to be found.

He could buy me jewelry, I suppose. And it'd just sit there unworn. Video games, however, get lots of use. As would lingerie, but I prefer to pick that out myself and consider that more a present for HIM than the other way around.

Something more

This is my entry for August's Pulsate Olympics.

The first time I laid eyes on my husband after he packed up and left his family home like a thief in the night was on a hot summer afternoon. I had spent the morning baking blueberry muffins (the blueberries picked from the patch at my then-boss's house) to quell my nerves. We had met two months before in Chicago, on neutral ground - this would be our first meeting on my home turf, as it were. I paced between the kitchen and living room, looking out to the driveway at the slightest noise of cars going by. Finally, finally he pulled into the driveway and clambered out of the tiny car.

He had been driving for thirteen hours straight in a Chevy Metro. He was sweaty and tired, dressed in jean shorts and a tee shirt with a lizard on it, and he was the most beautiful and welcome sight I'd ever seen. I remember flinging open the door and wrapping myself around him before he could even say a word - claiming him, in my own way, as my own - this man who would leave his family and friends to travel across three states in hopes of building a relationship with me.

We had spent three years getting to know each other online and by letters and infrequent phone calls, first as friends. We had helped each other through breakups and betrayals with others. When I'd had my heart broken by a boy who I thought would be "the one", he had commented on his sincere regret that he was in a relationship at the time. A year later, that relationship was over and we were building a tentative courtship. Being courted online was a singular experience - it was easier for me, a shy bookworm, to express my feelings through the written word - and by the time he arrived on my doorstep we knew each other very well indeed.

"You're here, you're really here," I whispered as I wrapped my arms around him, wanting to commit him to memory. And he was. And he stayed.

We're celebrating our fourth anniversary this September. I won't say it's been all sweetness and light - but whenever I think of him standing there on the doorstep on that July afternoon, I remember what he gave up to come to me, I remember both of us shedding our vulnerability in hopes of finding something more.

Mini-Vacation

Freyja is away for the next two nights - she stayed with our DCP tonight and will stay with my mom tomorrow night. Kerwin had today and tomorrow off. I still have to work, but I can actually sleep without being kicked and elbowed by a two year old for the next two nights!

Tonight, we went a town over to browse in the shops and have a coffee. We were walking back to the car when Kerwin called a friend of ours, who happened to be at the bar across the street! It was dueling pianos night, so we stopped in for a drink and ended up staying almost three hours. So much fun - we NEVER do anything like this. I think we were overdue. I keep forgetting that we're not "old and married" - we can still have fun. It'd be fun for a MNO, too!

Swoon!!

It was a busy weekend for our little family.

Friday night, we stayed at my folks' house overnight so we could go to the renfaire on Saturday near their house. While we were there, we broke in my mom's new blender with frozen margaritas and BS-ing around the bonfire (no margaritas for Freyja, she was already in bed). Nice time. Glad I get along with my folks! I also did a little baking for the Midsummer ritual our group held on Saturday and the picnic afterward.

Saturday dawned hot and sunny, and we suited Freyja up in her garb (I didn't take any pictures, I know I'm a schmuck) to head over to Derbyshire. Kerwin and I, unforutnately, have grown too soft and large for our garb, but here's a picture from six or seven years ago of me at another festival:



I make a sexy wench, no? I still think my shirt is too high in that photo.

They had this nice little event called "Soak a Bloke/Drench a Wench" to raise funds for breast cancer research. Freyja and I both got in on this fun. We threw water soaked sponges at a group of blokes in garb - several knaves, a couple peasants, a few dirty pirates - and got kisses in return.

Freyja was apparently the only little girl all day who "permitted" herself to be kissed! My girl was trying to kiss all these guys on the lips - hilarious. I don't know if the Jack Sparrow lookalike was TRYING to kiss me on the lips or if he just missed, but da-hamn. Swoon! It is well known around these parts that I am a "kissing whore"- I'll kiss anyone, given half an excuse. This, thankfully, amuses Kerwin instead of infuriating him. Freyja got lots of attention in her little Irish dress - she got a rose from the wandering rose guy (he was cute, too) , a necklace from a merchant who said she was "too cute", and "jewels" from the Queen of the festival. Next year we plan to take her one weekend, and go by ourselves the other weekend. Next year I also plan to fit back into my garb. Rawr!

We had a nice Midsummer ritual on Saturday as well, and a picnic with friends at a local park.

Sunday was uneventful - we got a nice afternoon nap and Freyja and I hit the grocery store, where she proceeded to tell me how to choose a watermelon - "Daddy says you gotta THUMP it!"

I'm still thinking about Jack Sparrow's twin. . .swoon!

Arrr, Mateys!!!

Kerwin and I were talking about idiot parenting this morning - you know, helicopter moms, people who refuse to challenge their children to grow, or use imaginative play, etc. Somehow this led to talk of Freyja and her VERY "Type-A" personality - and that if we give her the support and resources she needs, she'll grow up and do whatever she wants, and kick ass at it - and we'd never tell her "No, don't get a music degree, get a math degree."

So Kerwin asks her, "Freyja, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"Wanna be a PIRATE!!!!" She growled, brandishing her cereal spoon. Now, this is not surprising in and of itself, since we've been talking about a pirate birthday party for some time now, but what she said next was classic.

"What did she say? Did she say she wants to be a pirate?" I said. "Freyja, if you're a pirate, Miss Chelsie (our DCP's 14 yo) won't like you anymore. She's scared of pirates, remember."

She thought about this for a minute (and I wondered if I'd gone too far with "won't like you anymore", then pointed her finger at me and shook it - "Well I will just tell her to GET OVER IT!!!"

I almost choked on my english muffin. And this was after she climbed up into my bed at about 7:30 and said "Mumma, I have a question." all matter of fact and oh, so grown up. "If there are spiders on the wall and they don't stay in the corner, and I don't like them and they scare me, will they bite me?"

It slays me just how much she sounds like a KID these days. My baby is almost gone.

Musical Dreaming

I like to sing.

I really like to sing folk songs and ballads, "Irish" pub songs, sea chanties, old-school torch songs,blues, and anything else that stays in that middle to low register where my voice really shines.

As I noted a couple posts ago, if I had the wherewithal, I'd love to be in an all-chicks "Irish" pub band (and I'd call it Mad Morrigan. There'd have to be three of us). I think to do that, however, I need to learn to play an instrument. My rhythm isn't bad and I could possibly learn to play the bodhran, with practice (of course). I don't know if I can play the bodhran and sing at the same time, though. I can dance and sing, walk and sing, type and sing...you get the idea. I've also been kicking around the idea of taking guitar lessons for a while, but I don't know if I'm "too old" to pick up something new like that. I haven't gotten any further than drooling over pretty guitars on that, though.

I also think that Kerwin and I (he sings too, a lovely bass/baritone) could make decent money singing together at weddings and events. We'd be a cute double act, plus we're both fairly talented - then I think that he only plays saxophone, and I play nothing. We'd need a band.

It all comes back to needing instruments. Anybody else that plays an instrument want to be in a pub band with me? If you're local I'd love to get together just to jam. I miss real singing (in the car doesn't really count).

The Scent of Awakening

This is my entry for Thordora's June Pulsate Olympics.

I walked into my mother's house today and smelled Paganism. My mother is Lutheran, and as far as I know holds no Pagan leanings - but the smell that wafted into my nostrils as I set my things down was unmistakably the smell of the small hole-in-the-wall shop where I conducted my spiritual awakening over the course of a couple of years. The shop is out of business now, and I'm not sure what, if anything, resides there now. The smell of the store (and my mother's house today) is the same as any new-agey or occult store that sells incense in a small space - exotic woods, musk, eucalyptus and who-knows-what-else all mixed together, but that smell will always remind me of Wings and the incredibly kind and patient people who worked there and answered my questions, let me spend entire afternoons picking their brains, and tolerated my endless browsing to only walk out with $5 worth of merchandise. There's a shop in the town where I now reside that smells similar - but they sell mostly beads and bohemian hippie clothes, so it's not quite the same.

That smell takes me back to when I still looked for the wonder in everything, and anything seemed possible. It was a time of transitions, leaving the trappings of childhood behind and figuring out what to take with me into adulthood. It's the smell of a few poor decisions mixed with a lot of great ones. It's comforting to smell, yet bittersweet - the reminders of those wonderful people who were so good to a girl on the verge of discovering herself, who reassured me that as long as I "checked my gut" and remembered "why my friends call me 'Mama Heather'", that everything would work out in the end.

It did. It has. It continues to. For the smell of awakening, for the time, talk, and wisdom you shared - thank you Dawn and Sherri, and all others whose names I cannot remember. Blessed be.

Success!

Minor and initial success, but hey, it's something. It's something so good that I am being naughty and sneaking on from work to blog about it.

I lost 7 pounds my first week on weight watchers. I know it will slow down soon, but it was awesome to hop on that scale and see that drop :) My pants fit better. I feel good.

Is anybody else who's doing WW kind of OCD about writing things down? It drives Kerwin insane that I'm always pulling out my little blue bag to jot down this point and that point and those two glasses of water.