Zoralee on the move

Okay, this is a long post. I am sorry if it sounds like a Christmas letter in which I make my child out to be a superstar. She is, but I'm sorry if it's too obvious. Ha ha. Anyway, if you make it to the end of this post, you'll be rewarded with a booby photo...of sorts.

Just over 7 months ago now, I birthed my little Pumpin Buns. Before getting to know her, I would've guessed our offspring would be pretty chilled, of average energy levels, happy-go-lucky. I placed a whole lot more faith in general baby timetables. If you'd have said my baby might only quasi-laugh a handful of times in her first seven months of life, I'd have thought you were crazy. "But we love to laugh!" I'd have said, "And so will our baby!" Now timetables can eat my shorts. Zoralee smiles just fine, and she'll squeal and shriek with enough encouragement, but some babies have been laughing for months by now. Not Zoralee. She has other things to focus on than cheerfulness and merry-making. Namely, exercise and mobility. (?!)

From the very start (and I mean, on literal Day 1), she wanted to hold her head up. And she did it too, by George, for several seconds at a whack. We still held her head whenever she was against us, 'cuz that's what you're supposed to do with babies, but she never had that noodle neck flopping thing. I've no idea why, but I sometimes wonder if it was the way she was situated in the womb. At a couple weeks old, if you held her hands, she would try to pull herself up to a stand. I am not foolin' around.

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As soon as Zoralee was happy to lay on her stomach, say, around three months, she started maintaining the superman position for long stretches of time. Abdomen to the floor, arms and legs held outstretched and off the ground. This is hard to do as an adult! Of course, sucking one's toes is too. Zoralee didn't spend a whole lot of time rolling over. Some time, yes. But once she'd get onto her belly, she would push her arms down in a half push-up and hold. Downward dog, I think it is, in yoga terms.

Around six months, she started crawling and experimenting with standing pretty much within the same few days. My first indication that the crawling stage was going to pass quickly was when she crawled off our bed at nap time, waaay before I knew she could make that kind of forward progress. I had gone in to check on her and found an empty bed. I let loose with an explicative, and my eyes scoured the dimness to find her laying on the floor, chewing on the bassinet leg. You can bet I kicked myself good over that one. "Anticipate the next stage, oh Mother Of A Learning Baby!" My heart was pounding and hands shaking for 1/2 hour.

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Within a day or two of that, I watched her pull herself up inside the bassinet. Alrighty then! There went the bassinet, because I was paranoid she could somehow lift a leg up and whip herself over the edge. So, over the last few weeks as she has been coordinating opposite legs and arms (rather than scooching or haphazardly going forward), in the standing arena, she is letting go of the table edge with one hand. She also uses vertical edges to get herself up, like a door. I'm seeing rock-climbing in her future.

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Now her bed is a Thermarest camping mat on the floor. This works great, because I can co-sleep to get her down for naps and night time. Then I get into our bed, which we're fixing to take off the box and just have as a plain mattress on the floor for even better transitioning. When Zoralee wakes from a nap, she crawls off her mat and around the room looking for something to play with. We bought a baby monitor a few weeks ago, and it's handy.

Other fun Zoralee factoids:

• She bounces to music, and if there is no music, plain old rhythm'll do. Like, if you hit a pot with a spoon, because you're honestly trying to get food off the spoon, that's rhythm, and bouncing will ensue.

• She still fights sleep like the dickens, but three times now she has been content to lay down beside me without nursing and fall asleep. I nearly woke her back up to bestow upon her high praises and show her that this is exactly how she can love to mommy every day. She hates to lay still for a diaper change. Hates getting dressed or undressed.

• Z doesn't particularly love getting into her ergo-carrier, but once she's in, she is quite content and comfortable. I use it daily for outside chores around the place, inside while I'm cooking or cleaning, and whenever we go on walks or to public places, so pretty much all the time. She falls asleep in that a lot.

• Just today I discovered that she likes yerba mate tea. Can you beleive that? Jason says yerba mate tastes like it was made by letting water steep in a concoction of barnyard substances - hay, animal excrement, etc. I admit it's an acquired taste, and I wouldn't have imagined a baby who has tried such sweet delectables as strawberries (wee bits at a time to make sure of no allergies), pineapple, and chocolate to be okay with such a flavor. But she got really excited and kept wanting more tastes. As though this child needs any additional sources of energy. Jimminies.

Perhaps I'll end there for now. Anybody still reading this, besides our mothers and Rachel? Okay then, here is your reward:

a footstool booby

signs

Keeping on the lookout for signs from heaven isn't the hard part. It's when you get a sign, like a spider pointing at a specific word, that you really have to kick in with the question asking.

gardening is hard....ening

Well dagshnabit, a flock of pygmy grasshoppers has decimated our beet crop and our three variety of lettuces. First they got the claytonia, a very fragile lettuce, and we thought that's all they cared for. But a few days later, it was the black seeded simpson, and now they're working on the butterleaf. It's discouraging. I did re-plant beets, but the grasshoppers must lay in waiting, salivating, because they're attacking them as soon as they spring up. We were so looking forward to beets! Maybe ours wouldn't have been ready in time anyway though. I saw gigantic beets at the farmer's market last week, with greens that looked like bushes. They must've been, oh, roughly 3,000 times the size of ours.

The hopper population is of plague proportions. Don't try that sentence with numb lips. Our best defense against them seems to be keeping the garden area wet, but who wants to run the sprinkler 24 hours a day in one spot? Something seems wrong about that. The grasshoppers sometimes catch a northernly breeze, flying across the lawn in swarms, and we will lean on our hoes with weathered arms and watch the bugs with old farmer eyes and say bitterly under our breath, "Good riddance." And then we'll look down at our two remaining cabbage plants and five elephant garlics and say, "Looks like we'll be having a lot of cabbage and garlic. Or, wait. Looks like we'll be having a week's worth of cabbage and garlic."

The plague of hoppers has occured over the last couple weeks, and we're not hearing similar sentiments from other gardeners in the area. It is probably because we are surrounded by dry pasture land. Now today, we just discovered that our gate must've come open, because a deer ate our sugar snap pea plants down to 4 inch stalks of nothingness.

There is a time for admiring wildlife and a time for wanting to ring its neck.

After our first round of tomatoes sprouted but then died horrid deaths due to us purchasing "daylight" bulbs instead of "plant and aquarium" bulbs, we planted a bunch more maybe 6 weeks ago. Well, I am happy to report that those are healthy plants, ready to be transplanted into the garden. And actually, the seed success rate was such that we should have plenty of tomatoes. Should. Should. But not a lot else in the garden has gone as it "should." Our three mature tomato plants from Jese and Nikki are so far unscathed by critters. And our one zucchini plant and two winter squash plants are continuing to grow.

I also planted corn and carrots a couple of weeks ago, hoping for a late, hot summer. Yeah, I know the saying about corn, that it should be "knee high by the 4th of July." Well, ours was knee high...to a grasshopper, which, believe me, I had plenty of to measure by.

chicken down

A stray dog got one of our hens.
Booooo.

It happened within hours of us leaving for the family reunion. The neighbor kids saw two unfamiliar dogs in the area, so they ran over here in time to see one of them with a chicken in its mouth, dead. Just then the dogs' owner was driving through, hollering out the window for them. She felt so bad about the chicken and left her information in case we wanted her to replace it.

We'll never be able to replace that specific chicken, lady.

Okay, maybe we will. We still can't tell our hens apart much by looks - they are just too stinkin' similar - but some of them stand out by behavior. You know about Flight Risk, whom Jason chased with rocks and a stick to get her into the coop not long ago. She's the least sociable and usually the last one in at night. There are also two hens who stick together and like to graze and explore far past where everybody else is willing to go. There's another who Jason thinks has trouble seeing or flying. She seems to be lowest gal in the pecking order, and always roosts on the bottom rung at night while the others squish onto the top two rungs together. It's pretty sad. We think it's she who is laying eggs on the floor beneath the laying boxes. She also occasionally bumps into things, making us suspect blindness. Finally, our friendliest hen was one of the slowest to mature; we knew her first by her approachability, and also more recently by her short, pale pink waddles and combs. She greets us before anybody else does, follows us the farthest, and walks boldly up to the dogs to see what's going on. Heck, I'm going to go ahead and name her Friendly Bird right now.

So, which hen got killed? Well, our worst fear was that it was Friendly Bird. There's the pet lover in us, valuing human qualities. We could just see her running up to the stray dog and squawking out a hearty, "Welcome to the neighborhood!" Then, CHOMP. When Jason got home from work mid-week, he went to see which hen it was, and it was indeed one of the two or three least mature. We were so sad. But again, by looks alone, he couldn't tell precisely who. As time has gone on, it's clear that Friendly Bird is still here! None of the others I described above seem to be gone either, so we must've lost one of our lesser known hens.

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In other chicken news, Six Dolla' Roo is gaining confidence. Whereas before, he was a bit of a pansy rooster, he now attacks people's legs from behind while they're walking away. It's actually a little funny if you know it's coming. He was de-taloned, so it doesn't hurt. He flies into your legs and flaps about, and when you turn around and look at him, he just stands there looking back.

reunionizing with the family

The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people

you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.

~Kendall Hailey

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe,

to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother -

as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one

in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by

an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

~Pearl S. Buck

If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.

~Ashleigh Brilliant

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These three quotes were rattling around in my head during our family reunion last week. (I'd been searching for good quotes for a craft project I submitted for our auction.) Together, they sum up an extended family: a bunch of people you might not otherwise have befriended and yet whose existence informs your perceptions of yourself, your ancestors, your progeny. I studied quietly those cousins of my mom who were all raised together and were obvious influences on each other, wondering how a whole generation can love reading and pass books back and forth to each other by the sackful. My grandfather's siblings still have identical hand gestures and expressions after decades of living in different states.

Grandma (in white) and her three living sistersGrandpa and Zora

Aunt Nadine (Grandpa's sister) and me

That second quote is so relateable. One of the biggest joys of having a kid is introducing her to the greater family. Little Zoralee has gotten a year's worth of loving and manhandling over the past weeks. Wow. Whether she was perched at the table in her Sassy Seat for a meal or furthering her crawling skills on the lawn or being strolled or carried about, she elicited a "Heeeey Zoooraaa!" from every passerby, usually in a voice two octaves above normal pitch.

And now for some pics, although oddly enough, I didn't take many. Or, I didn't take many that were of people other than Zoralee. Fine. I am smitten.

the auction mid-week, featuring homemade and regional itemsgames

And now, some of my favorite Zoralee-centered moments:

When my dad made announcements at mealtimes, speaking loudly about when group photographs would be taken or where the sign up sheet was for sweeping the dining room or riding horses, Zoralee turned to him and grinned. Sometimes she talked back, sure as sure can be that Grandpa was addressing her individually. This ritual turned into quite a crowd pleaser.

It is especially endearing to see my brothers and boy cousins with Zoralee, protecting her from the wild animals and also small gravel bits that might make their way into her mouth. I dunno; you sort of expect the girls to sidle up to a baby (sorry about the stereotype, but hey), so when the guys just want to sit in her presence and watch her try to crawl - that's, as my aunt Lavonne said, "sweet and precious."

Zoralee and I (and I'm sure everybody) would reach a point every day of over-crowding, a limit to our sociability. One day, when she was waaay beyond that point, I took her back to the tent and we laid down to nurse. I thought she'd be konked out in 30 seconds, by the way she looked. She tends to break out in a rash on her face when she's overly tired, and this was the worst I'd ever seen it. But, after nursing, she looked up at me with love, and giddily cood her appreciation for being taken to a quiet place. She then proceeded to crawl around the tent for an hour soaking up the sound of nothing. It was perfect.

I've mentioned before that Zora is a mover. A wiggler. A squirmer. But one evening, for inexplicable reasons, she sat upon the grass very contentedly for twenty minutes, simply watching. She strained her neck to watch birds fly past, and I followed her gaze to a bee buzzing from clover to clover.

By mid-reunion, Zoralee looked like a real camper, with mosquito bites and random scratches and scrapes to her face and body, and filthy fingernails. I was so proud of her! A real outdoor girl. There's something about dirty fingernails that gets me high on life. Here's her first morning waking up in the tent.

This is getting long, so I'll wrap it up with a couple of other favorite moments, having nothing to do with Zoralee:

One day, I was in the main lodge playing cards with a group of the old timers. There were between 35 and 60 years between me and them. Two of my second cousins, who are young and trendy, came in to say goodbye to everybody. She is a gorgeous, professional dancer with wild hair and supermodel sunglasses. He is the handsome sporty type, with a fantastic build and spikey hair. As they walked out with hips swaggering like the show people they are, they both held up the peace sign and said, "Peace! Peace!" over their shoulders. It stood in delightful juxtaposition to this table full of old people sitting on wooden benches, their cards spread across a plastic tablecloth in a game of "Hand and Foot."

Playing music is just about as important to this family as eating. We ain't professionals, but we do love to play together. If somebody is sitting still for more than a few minutes, they are sure to pick up an instrument and commence, and passersbys will likely join in. It's great having the cousins come over, because we introduce each other to new songs and bands. And then we get to hear Grandpa Gene's old timey classics like "Deep Ellum Blues" and "Mama Don't Allow No Guitar Playin' Around Here." The best is when the non-musician audience isn't particularly paying attention and you can jam and experiment with no pressure to perform.

Zoralee and Aunt Melody dancing to the music

A group that was still around after the reunion played softball on July 4th. We had a real hoot, bad-mouthing each other and combining and twisting softball and baseball rules from around the country. It stank that two of our youngest players got injured within 10 minutes, but they recovered well. Softball was a big part of my growing up years, and it's weird how common of a sport it is in my extended family too, kids and adults alike.

If you must see more, my sister, Rachel, posted a bunch of totally different pics from our reunion on her blog at this link.

an old cartoon of Rachel's

Rachel drew this cartoon at the tender age of 8, and I thought it would be fun to post in light of her recent post about Cam. Did you know they met in Hawaii?! I found this tonight in the 6th issue of the "Special Delivery Paper," a weekly collection of stories and pictures we made for our parents for a couple of years during childhood.

It's a little hard to see. A woman is drowning and is saved by a man. She first says, "Help me" then "Oh, thank you" then "Oh, my hero." The intense final dialogue has the woman saying "Hawaii is great" and the man responding with, "I know."

eggs and our pubescent chickens

About 10 days ago, the hens began a 2-day squawking and cackling festival. They were LOUD. We knew something was up, and it turns out, someone was fixing to lay an egg. When she did, rather than use the laying boxes Jason had built, she decided a cozier spot was here, wedged between a pile of fencing, a prickly broom, and a paper sack.


Now then. That first paragraph might sound all cool and relaxed, but the truth is we were out of our minds with joy when we found this egg. Watching the chickens and Zoralee and more recently our plants grow this spring, we keep having these surges of surprise over the natural life process. "Things are doing what they're supposed to do!" we keep saying. "That's insane!" We don't know what we ever did to deserve chickens who actually lay eggs, but it's witnessing a small miracle every morning.

Here we are exploring and tenderly loving our first egg.

We had learned that as the chickens got sexually mature, their combs and waddles would grow and become bright red instead of pale pink, and sure enough, we'd been observing it for a couple of weeks in our chickens before the first egg came. Again, we were incredulous that what we'd been reading about actually happened. See here the comparison between two hens at different stages (photos taken on the same day):

On day 2, we got another single egg on pellets Jason had laid in the box. But the weirdest thing is that the inside of an egg (no shell) had fallen from a chicken while she roosted at night. It was in the poop box below. This whole thing has the feel of chickens going through puberty. Hormones are all weird, they're laying eggs evidently on accident at night. Just like a period. We are so proud of them. They are growing up.

So, Jason filled the laying boxes with hay and shaped nests to make them more inviting. We set the mature hens in the boxes, to show them how lovely they were. The next day, there was another single egg, and this time it was nestled into the hay in a box! The next day there were two eggs in one box, the next day three.

What you see below is one of our eggs on the right and an average-sized grocery store egg on the left. Ours are starting out small, as is typical. They will grow in size and keep that rich coloring, an indication of their good diet.

Yesterday, we got four eggs (Gosh, it's cool!!) and found one of these water balloon, shell-less eggs. Here's a photograph, though by today the moisture has started to seep out of the membrane. Evidently this happens occasionally while the hens' bodies are still adjusting to egg-making. We are NOT eating this thing; it's right out of Alien World.

As you can see, we're pleased as punch about our eggs. They're little packets of protein, dude, in a protective shell that our chickens push out as little love gifts to us! It's just nuts.

company

Our family reunion (for my maternal grandpa and grandma's families) starts Sunday afternoon, so people are starting to arrive from out of town. Yee-haw! One of the best parts of hanging out with relatives now is everyone meeting, fawning over, and commenting on the ever-expanding wardrobe (ever-expanding, in part, due to their bringing her things!) of the first baby we've had in our immediate and pretty immediate family in over a decade. That'd be Zoralee. Besides the joy of simply having a baby around, we're also reaping the health benefit of building our immunities by exposure to each other's germs via her ears. What did we ever do for fun and health before her?!

Zoralee doesn't hand out smiles willy-nilly. She is a very cautious girl and looks a person over real good before deciding on her excitement level. She has a long week of decisions ahead of her.

"Story Time With Zoralee"

(practicing for her syndicated talk show)

We also just got to spend two days with Cousin Autumn, from my dad's Alaska side of the fam. Gosh, it was good to see her! This is a girl with whom many of our travels and adventures and dreamings are intertwined. She is a kindred spirit in so many ways. Crud, we've plunged ourselves into glacially-fed rivers for the shock of it (stupid), spent days and nights and days and nights hiking through the Alaskan wilderness (rad), dug ditches for water lines in the sweltering Guatemalan heat (jewel in crown), dreamed of communal living, sustainability, building cob houses, and running hostels (coffee-induced highs). Can you imagine how thrilled we were to see her? Can you imagine what a drag it was to let her go this morning? Booooooo for that!

Luke and Rachel both think Zoralee looks quite a bit like her.

family look-alikes

And while I'm on the subject of family look-alikes, I'll post a pic of Jason's niece, Ashley, who I've personally seen the most of in Zoralee since she was born. This is Ashley's high school graduation three years ago.

Zoralee and Great-grandpa Gene seem to be a favorite family-wide comparison, especially the backs of their heads. (Note the hair ribbons in this shot.)

love you, Pops