Sunday at Chinese food lunch after church, there was a leftover fortune cookie that Mom suggested opening for the baby. Can you believe this?

sunstripes on bump

night and winter

Images of night and of winter have special appeal to me as the birth approaches. It's getting cold here in northwest Montana, though as of yet there's no snow. Winter is on the brink, just like my delivery. I know it will be dark and painful. I read and hear that many women who naturally labor reach a point of despair and hopelessness, like they absolutely can't go on; this emotional signpost lets everyone know the baby is about to emerge. I have been embracing this darkness, because for the most beautiful parts of life to happen, death or deep night must.

This is the field outside our window a few nights ago. Do you see the low layer of fog, and the way the moon lights up the foreground rocks?

The baby doesn't get his or her own room - just a wall in ours. You can't see it too well, but the big piece is black foam board that I decoupagued newspaper clippings onto in the shape of a moon. The black sky has dark blue swirls in it and tiny yellow beads for stars. The smaller pieces are tornout pages from a storybook decoupagued onto canvases. The story is called "Moon Mouse" and is about a little mouse whose mother introduces him to the wonders of the night!

Here are a few shots from this morning's thick frost.

give us this day our daily 17 vitamins

Right, so I am not big vitamin fan. Philosophically, I believe that everything I need should be coming in via food, water, and sunshine. Or, in the words of the band Rusted Root, "all I need is food and creative love." I know that in practical terms, our mass-produced food nowadays is crap, making supplements sometimes helpful. But still! Taking prenatals was a huge step for me. When I finally ran out of those a couple of weeks ago, I got a new brand and subsequently discovered that the daily dose of this kind is five pills! Jiiiimminies. Don't we have like atomic particle reduction technology or something? Can't you fit all the nutrients into one pill?

Because of slightly high blood pressure, I've been taking vitamin C (as well as walking and eating well). Vitamin Cs are chewable and thus almost like food. But then last week, my midwife instructed me to also begin with a hawthorne berry supplement to keep the blood pressure in check. The daily dose of that is NINE PILLS. Grand total = 17. This isn't counting the liquid calcium/magnesium supplement I add to yogurt or a smoothie or what-have-you each day. Then there's the raspberry leaf tea to keep ye olde uterus softened. And to top things off, next week I'll be at 35 out of 40 weeks along, so I'm to start in on evening primrose oil pills, which will ease my body toward labor.

Taking vitamins is my fulltime job, and my payment will be a bundle of joy. Speaking of which, it's only six weeks until my due date!

common political ground: helping others

I don't blog about politics, because the whole scene makes me wish I'd been born a simple water buffalo. I enjoy discussions, and I mull issues over long and hard, but if I tried to write about politics myself, I'd only say a bunch of stupid, inaccurate stuff. That being said, this entry is about politics only on the surface; what it's really about is trying to understand each other.

I've been struck lately by the common ground people of various political affiliations share, based on a number of conversations. Specifically, my family - parents, siblings, and spouses - have been emailing back and forth about the candidates at hand. Rachel compiled our whole discussion into a Word document, and it currently stands at 32 pages in pretty small font. We run the whole gammit as far as party loyalties, and between the nine of us, we're probably going to cancel out each others' votes in November.

One issue at the forefront of our discussion is that of social interventions. We seem to basically agree on helping people who truly cannot help themselves with necessities like food, shelter, and care; our faith and consciences call for it. The difference is that some of us (those leaning leftward) feel the ultimate authority for and funding of such endeavors belong to the federal government, while others of us (those leaning rightward) feel it is the duty of individuals, small groups, nonprofits, local communities.

And, that's it. That's pretty much what I wanted to say.

Do you see how those associated with the opposite party as yours are not necessarily evil or greedy or pansy-ish or whatever other labels we throw on each other, at least on this issue? Sure, if you listen to the loudest voices (like those on t.v. or the radio), you'll get a really bad impression of "the other team." But if you spend some time talking to real people who associate with one party or another, you just might find these gems of common ground. Like, A LOT OF US WANT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO TRULY CAN'T HELP THEMSELVES. Cool!

Of course, the hard part is reconciling everybody's ideas for precisely how to get that job done. Granted. But it's nice to pause every now and again to simply understand each other.

baby's first furniture pieces

Here's a dresser, specially painted to lure in tiny clothings and sockies. The photo may not show it too well, but it's a funky light green with white swirls and the occasional redish swirl that turned out pink. Let that be a lesson to you about mixing white and red paint. If we get a boy, there's a chance those pink swirls will be replaced.

The best part is that this dresser came from Brother Dave's bedroom closet, just upstairs, where he had innocently left it before heading to college. Only days ago, it was a dark red color. Thanks, Wavey! You are already so generous with your forthcoming niece or nephew.

Also, my mother, without trying, somehow collects chairs that rock (she owns no less than five at the moment), so she was able to spare one for the baby's spot in our room.

P.S. David, Mom let me have this dresser from your closet while you were away at college.

salad dressing recommendation

This stuff is really good. If anybody's in the mood for a salad dressing changeup, I highly recommend Brianna's Homestyle Ginger Mandarin dressing, especially if eaten with darker lettuces and greenery. Feta cheese, pine nuts, and apple or grape chunks are helpful too.

But mainly, this dressing. Wow.

a story of freedom

You know how doom and gloom, those dark tornadoes, unceasingly swirl about these days? In our own land to a degree, with the financial and political debacles, but more severely, the world over? Technology provides us the ability to hear real-time reports of famine, flood, earthquake, and genocide, and I oft wonder if the human psyche is meant to know about this tremendous suffering. For those of us without personal ties to displaced or impoverished people, there is very little we can do to help. And inability to act is very stressful.

So, with that in mind, an email I got today from my friend Stacy made my heart change directions for a small moment, and I decided maybe somebody else out there in blog-reading land could use the same bit of encouragement. Stacy is in her second year of work in India with International Justice Mission, an organization made up of lawyers, social workers, and other folks interested in human rights. Their work is specific to freeing people from literal bondage - kids in the sex trades, families and individuals enslaved in labor debt, etc. - and of bringing the perpetrators to justice. Some of those trapped in labor debt are spending their entire lives working to pay off a $2 debt that their grandfather incurred. NO KIDDING. Handily enough for the slave owners, the interest compounds faster than the worker can pay it off.

Well, Stacy sent a link today to an article on the IJM website about a recent raid. I haven't talked to her to know if she got to take part in this particular one herself, like she has in the past. Can you imagine something so heart-wrenching yet so fulfilling?! I mean, literally freeing slaves. Holy crap. Here's the story:

http://www.ijm.org/newsfromthefield/successfuloperationsatfourricemillsbringfreedomto25slavesinoneday

spregnancy at 32 weeks (out of 40)

I reckon it's about time to give an update on the spregnancy. The short of it is this: movement in and out of and around bed is comedic, tying shoes is darn near impossible, and I get winded climbing one flight of stairs. Shoot, I get winded getting out of the car. Who am I kidding? Also, all muscle tone has left the building. The whole body over - legs, arms, toes, eyelids -zero muscle tone exists anymore. And I still have two months! I just might turn to mush.

It was only a few weeks ago that I was at the chiropractor explaining to him a pain in my lower back. As happens, I couldn't get the pain to appear when I was actually in his office. I bent this way and that, twisted my legs around, stretched into awkward positions to reproduce the pain. I guess I was a little too animated, because he said, "Um, first off, stop with all the acrobatics." I'd like somebody to walk by now and tell me to stop with all the acrobatics. Instead, they'd probably say, "Hey, are you alive over there? Maybe you should move around a little more."

In the first trimester, when I felt tired, I simply laid down. I was my same old self, same shape, just tired. Now I'm tired but can't get comfortable and don't feel as refreshed by rest. Know what I mean? In fact, sleep has continued to be my chief complaint throughout it all. I'm also getting way less motivated mentally about the tasks on my "Crud To Do Before the Baby Comes" list. Now then, don't get me wrong; I have had a beautiful and fulfilling spregnancy, probably even considered easy, but at this point I am simply ready to have and meet the baby. Jason and I were talking about how funny birth is, like, "We're lonely. Let's create another companion." And then zippo-presto - a human being! Except, the zippo-presto part is taking forever.

My mom thinks I should go with what I feel each day and not worry about tasks until a moment of motivation. I tend to agree, because tasks go so slowly when you aren't feelin' it. But what if the motivation never comes, and Jason and I find ourselves sitting around with a diaper-less, name-less, dirty baby, all of us starving because I didn't stock enough backup meals in the freezer? It could happen. (I'd love to hear from any of you recent moms and what you did to consider yourselves "ready.")

But all of that is just me!

The baby, according to the midwives, is right on track for growth and is head down. The heartbeat is good and strong, and (s)he started hiccuping on schedule. Interestingly, in regard to movement, (s)he does sort of a one day on, one day off thing. (S)he'll be rolling around like a dog in horse doo all day, then very very quiet the next. A very noticable pattern is that if I am quite busy for a stretch of days, especially around other people, the baby lays low. Around the time of Rachel's wedding, it hardly made a motion for the main four days of preparation. It really worried me. But the day after the wedding, when all obligations were met and we were just chillin' with the wedding party, the baby sprung back into action.

So there! 32 weeks and counting down.

the last month in a long nutshell

In bulleted form with photos interspersed, this is a huge catch-up blog. You may have to take it in small doses over several days. Not that anyone would be ill-affected to remain uninformed about any of this, but hey, blogging is a luxury sport in the first place. So, I indulge. My one regret is not having the computer stamina to do a separate entry about each thing, with the thoughts and details that accompanied each. I don't know if it's the spregnancy or what, but I feel physically gross these days if I spend much time a'tall at the computer screen.

• We had visitors in mid-September for several days: Jeff and Kezia from Portland! Wow, was that fun. Kezia and I can usually chat non-stinkin'-stop about psychology and paradigms of thought and personal growth, but now with babies on the way (!!) we can also think about application to our very own offspring. We took it easy while the boys climbed around on mountains, shot the bow and arrows, rode horses, and so forth. Kezia is quite a woman just doing life things, but for work she's a play therapist for kids with emotional and behavioral maladies, and is a long-time nanny, which make her an incredible resource for understanding babies and other humankind. We're getting to know Jeff better via political discussions, shared ideas for living more sustainably, being passengers in his car, and picking his engineering brain for how the Hungry Horse Dam works exactly. That's a dam up the road, and I'll tell you, it's one thing to look it over as a garden variety citizen and simply be amazed. It's another to have someone who knows what's up tell you about the concrete that's still curing in the bottom of it after decades of time. Dam straight.

Little Pink Riding Hood eating an apple and simultaneously making an excellent pointobserving the dam over huckleberry milkshakes

• Jason's summer job in Glacier Park also ended in mid-September, and that evening, we moved all our crud from the Park apartment to our new home - the basement apartment of my folks' place. As we moved in, Jason said, "So what? Lots of our friends live with their parents. So what. This is no big deal." Funny thing, people in many cultures wouldn't understand that reference, because they wouldn't blink at living multi-generationally. But in our ridiculously individualistic culture, it takes some getting used to.

• The next day, Jason left with my dad, brother-in-law Cameron, two other guys, and a string of horses for a one-week elk hunting trip in the Scapegoat Wilderness. Here they are packing up and weighing each box.

• Meanwhile, I got to see two of my old high school buddies who were briefly in town, Nate and Gabe, and their families. I miss those characters. They are the ones I've blogged about before - always planning or carrying out shenanigans in their youth like train-hopping (which Gabe succeeded at), small airplane building and wrecking (which Nate succeeded at), sneaking into the chip mill by dark of night and rolling down chip mountains (which we all succeeded at) and crawling through the air vents at school to pop into an unsuspecting classroom (which Gabe succeeded at to a degree, but the ultimate and unlived plan involved wearing sombreros and popping into Spanish class). Here some of us are - me, Nate, his wife Nicole, and Gabe. Gabe's wife, Lori, had already left to get their kiddo to bed.

• That weekend, my cousin's husband, Brad, passed away in Anchorage. His death wasn't a complete shock, as he'd battled cancer for four years, but the manner of it was: he simply didn't recover from a surgery meant to prop up his remaining good lung. None of my immediate family could go up for the service (including Jason and Dad, who were in the boondocks out of phone contact). We scraped enough mileage together from Mom's and Jason's mileage plan accounts for me to go, and I'm so glad. The Alaska wing of my extended family means a great deal to me, and it hurts to see them lose someone. Brad's service was the kind we'd all wish for - very personal, with warm words spoken by his strong wife, three handsome sons, and all manner of family and longtime friends. He was a cowboy of the old style: traditional, not too wordy, a hard worker, a man concerned about doing the right thing.

Brad and Lonita's three boys, Caleb, Levi, and Dakota

• On the way up, I'd had a long layover in Seattle, and it just happened that my aunt and uncle and grandparents from my mom's side were coming to the airport anyway to pick up my cousin, Connor, arriving from a moose hunt in Alaska. Weird timing. They drove in early so that we could dine and chat and pass the time together. Here I am with Aunt Melody and Grandma Louise.

• Though it was a hard reason to be back in Anchorage, I so enjoyed getting to spend a couple days with friends and take in the crisp, colorful autumn that hasn't hit Montana yet. I struggled with guilt over not getting to see everyone, and those I did see, I hardly shot pics of, which is weird for me. I guess I was just soaking in their presence. Elisha sent me home with lots of clothes for later spregnancy and adorable baby sockies (and tried to send more, the crazy lady, but I had no space). Jess sent me with a bunch of canned stuff like jam, smoked salmon, and honey straight from their new bee hives. Only days after I got home, she shot a moose, so they're set on winter meat too. Jason says our new definition of subsistence is "living at Kevin and Jess's house."

me at 30 weeks, Sonya at 23, and Jess at 12

Chloe looking for ducks at the Potter Marsh boardwalkLilli in new boots caring for her baby
a freshly engaged-to-be-married Jannell Nic and Autumn being lovebirds

• The day I flew back to Montana was quite possibly the longest day on my life's record. Flying isn't too comfortable at seven months pregnant, and having a five-hour layover in the Seattle airport is even less so. To pass the layover time, I stretched shamelessly across three seats in a boarding area for a nap (it was nearly empty anyway), ate an amazing fish taco, read the latest Mother Earth News magazine, and eavesdropped into some delicious conversations. My fave conversation was the guy whose friend offered him M&Ms. "No thanks," he said. "I'd have some if they were dark chocolate M&Ms. I just LOVE dark chocolate M&Ms. I don't eat M&Ms ever, unless they're dark chocolate. You know, you can get those in dark chocolate." I about stood up and said, "Buddy, either stop talking about dark chocolate M&Ms, or get off your picky ass and go find me some. By now, they're all I can think about. Jimminy crickets!"

• I had a slight fatigue and hormone induced emotional breakdown when Jason picked me up at the airport and got me home around 1 am the next day. It's pretty pathetic; I don't know how I'd make it as a military wife, or as a sloper wife, whose husband works up on the oil fields of Alaska. I know people who do each, and they must be made of steel. I just really like Jason, and I really like me and Jason together in the same location. It's not so much fun being apart, although admittedly I accomplish more tasks when he's gone. But tasks are totally over-rated.

• We had a week of getting settled, making morning fires in the wood stove, Jason hunting for meat and hunting for work, and things being relatively calm. Here's Jason shoeing a horse, and then my Pops and him leading everybody back to the corral one morning when the whole herd had gotten out of the fences the night before and wound up in someone's field 1/2 mile away.

• And finally, toward the end of last week, we got a phone call asking if Jason would come up to Anchorage and help remodel some burned up apartment units. So, as of yesterday, that's where he is and is slated to be there for a couple of weeks at least.
  
  

Otherwise, aint much going on here...

brotherhood

All day, since your haircut in the morning,
you have looked like a painting, even more than usual.
We are in the wind, planting the maples.
We meet an older man who seems to know
I miss my dad.
And he smiles through the limbs.
We talk easily with him
until the rain begins.
This is the brotherhood of man.
- 1st verse of "Brotherhood of Man" by The Innocence Mission


These are some events over the month that have me thinking of the brotherhood of man, and more specifically, of strangers.

• A jovial older gentleman in the Super 1 grocery store said to his shopping companions and to all within earshot, "Oh, I can't buy green bananas anymore. At my age I don't know if I'll still be around by the time they ripen."

• Garage sales in general are one of the most brotherhoodliest of all experiences to me. Sure, there can be some less than desirable price negotiating, but otherwise they're rad. There's a vulnerability in laying out all your crap for other people to see, right? Even if it's crap you're done with and that, somehow, no longer defines you. I bought for $5 a simple trunk to be our coffee table from a lady who'd used it to tote her possessions from one end of California to the other when she went to college. At the next house, I bought for $1 the most adorable little body suit in the world for our baby. It has a bum hatch that the mother whose baby had outgrown it made sure I'd seen. Nothing says humanity/we're-all-in-this-together like a bum hatch.

• I listened as Jason and Bill, a fellow Biology-lover and 70-year old Interpretive Ranger in the Park, had the following conversation about the Latin names of plants:

Bill: Gawd, I love names that just roll off the tongue like Vaccinium globulare.
Jason: and Erythronium gradiflorum
Bill: Pinus contorta and Epilobium angustifolium
Jason: Oh! You know they changed that last one to Chamerion angustifolium?
Bill: Yes, those buggars! Can you believe it?! I was heartsick!

• I saw a young gal on the side of the road, cigarette in hand, eyes red from a long night, or crying, or both. One of us was disheveled of clothing and crumpled of spirit, and the other had an open vehicle and an open day. We found ourselves traveling together to a nearby town, talking of our enjoyment of camping and also of common bygone experiences in the state of Arizona. It's tough to say which was the helper and which was the helpee. We all need the chance to be in each role, to be co-habitators of an experience. Maybe the problems come when we find ourselves always in one role or the other. I wonder if this is a bit of what the apostle Paul meant when he talked of becoming all things to all men. On this journey of aiding one another toward wholeness, of spurring each other on toward love and good works, we have to be willing to assume the role that both parties need at that moment. As badly as she needed a ride, I needed to embrace someone from outside of my tiny world.

• A young highway patrolman was killed while in pursuit of someone not far from the Park. A man and woman in another vehicle were also killed, so that the only one who lived was the unknown fleeing driver who had caused the two cars to collide. Since my dad does chaplaincy work with the Whitefish Police Department, he was at the patrolman’s funeral, and that night around the supper table recounted his experience. What seems to have touched him the most was simply the presence of nearly 1,000 law enforcement officials from multiple agencies and all of the surrounding states, as well as the Canadian Mounted Police. It was such a show of camaraderie in the face of apparent meaningless tragedy - to his widow, to his parents and comrades, to each other.
  
  At the end of the graveside service, which immediately followed the funeral, everyone turned up their handheld radios. Across the waves came a dispatcher’s voice:
  
  “Status Check, Zero Three One.”
  [Silence.]
  “Status Check, Zero Three One.”
  [Silence.]
  “Zero Three One, you are released from duty. Go now to your Heavenly Father.”
  
  And my dad could hardly get through the telling of it. Why go through that ritual, I ask? Why call forth a dead man on the radio, knowing full well he ain’t answering? For the sake of the living, to be sure - both those who had and hadn’t previously heard the live, appropriate response to Zero Three One’s status check. But what does it do for us? Maybe nothing more than serve as a tangible way to acknowledge in each others’ presence the sense of loss at hearing no response. To listen together to the gap, the empty air space when one of us goes.