I will miss the mature trees in our old yard and the birds they attracted. But now that means I have a good excuse for getting out to spend time at the local parks and trails. For everything there is a season...
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings." - Lewis Carroll "For now we see through a glass, dimly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" - 1 Corinthians 13:12
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Frosty
The week we started moving in December the roads were covered in ice and our yard had just enough snow for an Elsa-sized snowman. I know this is nothing compared to the blizzards back east - but it was quite unusual for us here in the southern Oregon!
We seemed to have more ice than snow, so Elsa had her first experience with icicles.
It was also the first time she experienced ear muffs (at least that she remembered), and I think that was her favorite part of all! She wore them almost constantly - including for baking Christmas cookies. I promise, our house was not that cold!
They are so cozy and stylish - why don't you try wearing them next time you're baking?
The girls also invited Gideon to experience the joy of ear muffs, but I don't he shared their enthusiasm.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Rosebud
The girls are thrilled, and Joel and I are inexpressibly overjoyed and relieved to announce that our new baby girl, due July 3, looks perfectly healthy. She wiggled constantly through the ultrasound at the specialty clinic in town, but we were still able to get very clear images considering her age. Her long bones (femur and humerus) indicate that she is actually a bit tall for her age, her kidneys are cyst-free and had no fluid at all (which is appropriate for her age), her heart and brain looked perfect for what they could see, and there was plenty of fluid around her (in which, as I mentioned, she is CONSTANTLY moving!)
We will have another ultrasound at the end of February to check on everything again after she grows a bit more, but the specialty doctor said he was "confident" that we wouldn't see any changes or anything new at that point considering how clear we were able to see everything this time. And even if we do find problems, whether the familiar issues Oliver struggled with or new and surprising ones, we feel so blessed and excited to be given this child.
Other than the conflicting and overwhelming emotions leading up to the ultrasound I have been feeling fine, though quite tired and craving candy and donuts like crazy (though the craving part is probably more from the emotions than the actual pregnancy!).
The girls ask almost daily how big the baby is and when she will be coming "out," and they have already named her "Rosebud," which is rather sweet but gives us motivation to decide on her real name soon! I think she will fit into the family perfectly - here she is with her hand to her forehead, already being dramatic:
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Moved
No, I have not given up writing and posting photos and I have not fallen off the planet - during November and December we sold the 1500 sq ft house we owned for 7 years and moved into a 750 sq ft duplex a mile down the road. We didn't widely publicize our move because one of the several reasons for selling our house was because of rumors that Joel's division at work was being sold or closed, but the official announcement about selling his division has now been made and thankfully we don't expect for him to need to start job hunting.
I made a website for our house to help market the property (t was a challenging photography project for me, and I was rather pleased with how it turned out! I think good real estate photography is actually pretty challenging, at least for my level of ability. You can see it by clicking HERE), and that project helped me emotionally detach from the house early on and view it more as merchandise we were trying to market. Even so, it has been a challenging mixture of emotions, fatigue, stress, and anticipation. I am a perfectionist, so showing the house 3-4 times a week meant I was cleaning and staging the house 3-4 times a week. We have been downsizing our possessions through donations, garage sales, craigslist, and gifts. This is a wonderfully freeing experience overall, but is still confusingly painful as I relinquish ownership of things that I am accustomed to having around me though I know I will be happy without them. Prepping the house for sale, maintaining it, and preparing to move have consumed much of my time and energy over the last few months, so I have felt torn between the time needed for housekeeping and time with the girls and time for private quiet and grief processing even more that average.
The distraction of selling the house has also helped me appreciate how much writing the blog has helped me process my experiences and feelings. I do not consider myself a writer (outside of the scientific papers I produced in school) and have never taken to journaling. I am an extrovert, and so I have found it immensely valuable to have friends around me (meaning both locally in town and here through my online sputterings) who want me to be honest about what I am thinking, feeling, and experiencing. I think that is why writing the blog is more effective for me than private journaling - for me the public nature of the blog holds me more accountable to being honest, whereas in a private journal I am more apt to play games with myself and become frustrated.
We moved a week before Christmas and settled in just in time to travel east to be Joel's family over Christmas. It was a delightful week with his family. Being in a completely different setting with so many other people to make decisions helped me slowly let go of the stress and pressures that had built up over the last few months. Plus, one of my Christmas presents from Joel was that he was mostly in charge of the girls for the week, which took some getting used to and was quite nice! Sorry, no Christmas photo collections - I decided to leave my camera at home and just enjoy the time without the distraction of my lens.
We are now home and happily settling in to our new living space. The whole transition itself was very smooth for Joel and me, the girls, and even our three cats (except for maybe Tabitha, our outdoor cat, who is still being transitioned in and out of the garage). I'll sure I'll be getting the camera out again soon an posting more regularly.
Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year!
I made a website for our house to help market the property (t was a challenging photography project for me, and I was rather pleased with how it turned out! I think good real estate photography is actually pretty challenging, at least for my level of ability. You can see it by clicking HERE), and that project helped me emotionally detach from the house early on and view it more as merchandise we were trying to market. Even so, it has been a challenging mixture of emotions, fatigue, stress, and anticipation. I am a perfectionist, so showing the house 3-4 times a week meant I was cleaning and staging the house 3-4 times a week. We have been downsizing our possessions through donations, garage sales, craigslist, and gifts. This is a wonderfully freeing experience overall, but is still confusingly painful as I relinquish ownership of things that I am accustomed to having around me though I know I will be happy without them. Prepping the house for sale, maintaining it, and preparing to move have consumed much of my time and energy over the last few months, so I have felt torn between the time needed for housekeeping and time with the girls and time for private quiet and grief processing even more that average.
The distraction of selling the house has also helped me appreciate how much writing the blog has helped me process my experiences and feelings. I do not consider myself a writer (outside of the scientific papers I produced in school) and have never taken to journaling. I am an extrovert, and so I have found it immensely valuable to have friends around me (meaning both locally in town and here through my online sputterings) who want me to be honest about what I am thinking, feeling, and experiencing. I think that is why writing the blog is more effective for me than private journaling - for me the public nature of the blog holds me more accountable to being honest, whereas in a private journal I am more apt to play games with myself and become frustrated.
We moved a week before Christmas and settled in just in time to travel east to be Joel's family over Christmas. It was a delightful week with his family. Being in a completely different setting with so many other people to make decisions helped me slowly let go of the stress and pressures that had built up over the last few months. Plus, one of my Christmas presents from Joel was that he was mostly in charge of the girls for the week, which took some getting used to and was quite nice! Sorry, no Christmas photo collections - I decided to leave my camera at home and just enjoy the time without the distraction of my lens.
We are now home and happily settling in to our new living space. The whole transition itself was very smooth for Joel and me, the girls, and even our three cats (except for maybe Tabitha, our outdoor cat, who is still being transitioned in and out of the garage). I'll sure I'll be getting the camera out again soon an posting more regularly.
Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year!
Saturday, November 2, 2013
All Saints' Day
I spent a lot of time talking to the girls this year about why we choose not to celebrate our culture's typical Halloween. They were incredibly intrigued with all the decorations and costumes, and eventually all the candy being marketed on every aisle. They dress up so often anyway, and are certainly not deprived of treats, so they understood that they were not missing out on those aspects. The big reason that we talked about is that, to us, it does not treat death appropriately. This idea came up a lot because for some reason the decorations in the grocery store and around town seemed especially focused on death and gore.
Elsa wanted to draw a picture of each person we were remembering, and she picked a flower especially for each one from our garden. We remembered Oliver:
My grandfather Myron, who died a week before Oliver,
Krupa, a little girl in India that I knew and loved who died about a month before Oliver:
and Mister Rogers, who did not die this year, but Elsa wanted to remember him too:
She set it all up - and even though she looks somber in these pictures she really enjoyed the whole evening - she was just concentrating!
We talked about what we remembered about and learned from each one. We sang "For All the Saints" with a congregation on YouTube (during which Elsa danced and joined in for the "Allelulia"s). We watched an episode of Mister Rogers. We offered thanksgiving to God for those we miss and prayed the All Saints' Day collect from the Book of Common Prayer, and then ate apple pie (sorry, no photo of the pie, but it was yummy!).
Death has been a frequent topic for us this year, so it was natural to continue our conversations about what death means, how we feel about it, and how we remember those who have died. On one hand, as Christians, we can laugh at "death" because it has no hold on us. On the other hand, life and death are sacred and we believe they should be respected and honored.
That led us to talking about All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day - Halloween comes from "All Hallows' Eve;" the eve of "All Hallows' Day," or All Saints' Day. November 1 and 2 are the days on which the western church remembers those who have died in the faith. My prayer book of the Daily Offices reminded me earlier this week that "although popular thinking tends to honor only the canonized saints, scripture names all Christians as 'Saints'," so I was already reflecting upon that when Elsa asked me if we could celebrate All Saints' Day. I remember one of the churches I attended in the past lighting candles and remembering all those in the congregation and their relatives who had died that year, but beyond that I had no other framework on which to base a celebration, so we made one up!
We decided to have candles, a picture of each person we were remembering and thanking God for, flowers, prayer, singing, and apple pie (Elsa's request)!
Elsa wanted to draw a picture of each person we were remembering, and she picked a flower especially for each one from our garden. We remembered Oliver:
My grandfather Myron, who died a week before Oliver,
Krupa, a little girl in India that I knew and loved who died about a month before Oliver:
and Mister Rogers, who did not die this year, but Elsa wanted to remember him too:
She set it all up - and even though she looks somber in these pictures she really enjoyed the whole evening - she was just concentrating!
We talked about what we remembered about and learned from each one. We sang "For All the Saints" with a congregation on YouTube (during which Elsa danced and joined in for the "Allelulia"s). We watched an episode of Mister Rogers. We offered thanksgiving to God for those we miss and prayed the All Saints' Day collect from the Book of Common Prayer, and then ate apple pie (sorry, no photo of the pie, but it was yummy!).
I cried some when we prayed and sang, and thanked God for a new family tradition, especially one developed by my five year old!
Oliver-Krupa Memorial Fund
When I mentioned Krupa in the previous post about All Saints' Day, I realized that I forgot to finish and publish this post explaining what we chose to do with Oliver's memorial funds. Better late than never, so here it is, and it will explain more why Krupa was and is dear to me.
To those who we knew send a gift, we thanked them with a note that read as follows:
"Thank you for donating to Margham in
honor of Oliver Michael Dunham. Margham is a non-profit mission
organization that supports local pastors, churches, and orphanages in
India, and was started by Oliver's grandfather, Darrell Dunham. A
few weeks before Oliver died, a young girl who lived in a Margham
orphanage named Krupa died from complications from AIDS. We have
decided to use the gifts from Oliver's memorial to create a special
“Oliver-Krupa” fund that will be set aside and used for special
and emergency medical needs of the children in the Margham
orphanages. We feel so blessed to have had access to so many medical
resources as we cared for Oliver, and your gift will be used to help
underprivileged Indian children in medical emergencies or with
serious medical conditions. Thank you so much. To learn more about
Margham please visit www.margham.org."
I remember Krupa as a quiet but bright child who loved to dance and lead singing during the daily worship at the children's home. I know her "family" at the children's home miss her dearly, but, together with them, I look forward to dancing with her one day before our Lord's throne.
To those who we knew send a gift, we thanked them with a note that read as follows:
"Thank you for donating to Margham in
honor of Oliver Michael Dunham. Margham is a non-profit mission
organization that supports local pastors, churches, and orphanages in
India, and was started by Oliver's grandfather, Darrell Dunham. A
few weeks before Oliver died, a young girl who lived in a Margham
orphanage named Krupa died from complications from AIDS. We have
decided to use the gifts from Oliver's memorial to create a special
“Oliver-Krupa” fund that will be set aside and used for special
and emergency medical needs of the children in the Margham
orphanages. We feel so blessed to have had access to so many medical
resources as we cared for Oliver, and your gift will be used to help
underprivileged Indian children in medical emergencies or with
serious medical conditions. Thank you so much. To learn more about
Margham please visit www.margham.org."I remember Krupa as a quiet but bright child who loved to dance and lead singing during the daily worship at the children's home. I know her "family" at the children's home miss her dearly, but, together with them, I look forward to dancing with her one day before our Lord's throne.
(Krupa is in the light yellow dress in the front row)
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