mothers' day gratitude

Mothers' Day made me feel very grateful this year.  We went for a nice bike ride along Lake Washington on the first Bicycle Sunday of the year.

Some things I appreciate:

• my healthy and happy kids
• Jack for so many reasons
• my parents and in-laws who help us out sooo much, have such good relationships with our kids and hold back the criticism they must harbor for our messy house and whatever ways they think we're parenting wrong.
• work, in a way.  I've had some tough days since going back post-Dd, but for the most part I feel valued and I appreciate the 5 months I took off and 80% schedule I've had for a few months now.  I think it will matter more when they are older but I recently remembered that I want my kids to know that I do skilled and interesting work outside of parenting.
• our home, which remains a work in process but brings me joy
• parts of myself.  At the moment this includes my body which can handle as many vegetables as I can consume, has no allergies, and is making all the milk for Dd.  Although postpartum mental health issues can come up even after the first few months, I am feeling good, thankfully.
• my kindle, which is usually on airplane mode with an endless seeming supply of Outlander novels to consume

three firsts for Dd!

In the last week Dd has had three exciting firsts.  He went swimming, splashing in his great uncles' lovely backyard pool for his first swim, just like D did.  Then he went to a Mariner's game, in the newly named T-mobile park, no less. Lastly he slept in his own room last night!  I never thought we'd make it to seven months with him in our room, but we did, because for a long time moving him down to a different floor of our house felt too far.  He slept well on his own though and so did we, especially for the last few hours of the morning, when he is prone to light sleep.

pumpkin cake recipe

We made a tried and true pumpkin cake for D's 5th birthday.  Frosting is quite important to five-year-olds, it seems, so we made a blue cream cheese frosting, but usually we make the cake with no topping, or maybe a tiny sprinkle of powdered sugar.

1) preheat oven to 350, grease two loaf pans or large baking dish (like pictured)2) in large bowl combine flour through cloves3) in medium bowl (mixer bowl) blend sugar, oil, and eggs  and then stir in pumpkin4) slowly blend wet in to dry, adding water along the way5) bake at 350 for 90 minutes (for loaf pans), or about 60 for larger, more shallow pan6) cool in loaf pans for 10 minutes before removing

3 1/2 c all purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
3 c white sugar
1 c oil  (we used olive and was fine)
4 eggs
2/3 c water
2 c solid pack pumpkin puree (more than one 8 oz can)

baby gate!

Jack just built a baby gate I've been anticipating for years!  We had the contractors build a little cut out at the very top of the shelf that makes the wall of our stairwell and Jack recently build the gate.  Yes, it needs a latch, which might be the hard part and yes, we'll also use a temporary gate between the the third floor and the stairs, but I'm still quite happy about it.  I look forward to being able to access the third floor bathroom without going through a gate sometimes.

Once we considered the fact that the metal railings of the stairs have horizontal bars and could therefore be climbed like a ladder, we realized that this gate is not the gate-to-solve-all-problems.  I am a happy customer however.  We like how it looks and think it will slow down a kid at many developmental stages.

house plant roll call

When Jack said recently that our bathroom Boston fern would look better if it had companion plants, I took it to heart and tapped in to my desire cultivate more house plants.

But first, I'm sad to report that our Meyer lemon tree succumbed to something at the beginning of the year, after 1.5 years with us.  It smelled so good and we made lemonade once or twice.  I'd consider getting another, if we had a better idea of what went wrong.

Before I get to the new plants, here's a picture of our aloe, which was actually sun burned from being in the kitchen.  It looks so much better now.  Yes, having a sunny kitchen is kind of a nice problem.  The other senior members of the house hold plants are the fern I mentioned earlier, some spider plants for the cats to occasionally munch on and an absolutely easy going rubber plant that was a house warming gift.

Now for the newcomers, whose names I will mostly not remember unless I document them here. 

Though they are not yet in their ideal pots, we welcomed a trio of sansevieria trifasciata (mother in law's tongue, from IKEA).   I've been dreaming of plants here since we got the coat rack up two years ago.  The two story open space around the entry gets eastern light  Did you notice the young black cat who wishes we would take him for lazy cat walks?  

In the bathroom, the fern's new friends are a purple waffle plant and a pothos 'N Joy' (the variegated one on the bottom shelf) .   In the kitchen we have a trio of succulents, called echevaria afterglow (red), sedeveria (jet beads, the small green one) and crassula (curly green, large green one).

Not quite in the house, we have a pair of perennials in a pot together. The smaller flowers are a Touran white saxifraga and then there's a hellebora, by the door, ah...  whose full name is shooting star lenten rose (heleboro shooting star).

The stairwell is one of our favorite features of the house, and it has a lot of diffuse light from the skylights and the transparent panels between the stairs and the second and third floor rooms.  We have a lemon button fern and then this little tree is a dracaena (marginata sunray)

happy half birthday, Dd!

Boston bound baby (second time for Dd)

When D was just over five months, the three of us traveled to a wedding in Montreal.  It was a good trip, which we wrote about in this post: montreal.  At exactly the same age Dd and my mom were nice enough to accompany me to my company’s internal research conference in Boston, which I was eager to attend this year.  It’s an annual event but I hadn’t been since D was 10 months old, what with building the house, being stressed out and then being pregnant.    With D I managed to store up enough milk to be away from him for five whole days, but it was tough and ten months is twice as old as Dd’s current five months.   I’m lucky my wonderful mom was able watch him in the hotel for me. 

I would have missed Dd dearly if I had left him behind, but my reasons were practical, as much as sentimental.   Had I left him, Jack would have needed almost as much help from family to handle both him and D and he would have fallen behind on work.  Moreover I would have had to spend so much time pumping during the conference, it would have been pretty miserable. 
I’d say it all went pretty well, and I was happy to learn about new projects I’ll be working on and to meet face-to-face with several people I have worked with for years but had never met.

Now I'm ready a normal week back at work.

Dd is wearing that hat we got for D in Montreal.

country count

With our recent trip to Portugal I was inspired to total up the number of countries we have each visited so far.  

Together, Jack and I have been to 19 countries.

• USA
• Canada
• Costa Rica
• Iceland
• France 
• Italy
• Austria
• Hungary
• Romania
• Turkey
• Tunisia
• Morocco
• Israel
• Jordan
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• Hong Kong
• United Kingdom
• Portugal

Without me, Jack has been to Thailand and without him I've been to:

• Antigua
• Germany
• Belarus
• Russia
• Switzerland
• Czech Republic
• Ireland

So Jack is at 20 and I'm at 26 countries.   I don't know what Dd has been doing with his time but he's only been to two countries in his five months and D is slacking by only going to three in his first five years.   I don't think we'll ever catch up to my globe trotting friend, Gabrielle, who has visited 51 countries, and worked or studied in quite a few of them.   http://gabakin.blogspot.com/2018/10/51-comme-le-pastis.html

Dd's first foods

In four short years the advice on feeding babies has changed enough that we started solids with Dd just after four months of age, rather than at six months like we did with D.  There are still lots of sources that suggest "exclusively breast feeding for six months," but the emerging research on allergies indicates that fewer allergies result when babies are exposed to common allergens early and often.  

From https://www.foodallergy.org/life-with-food-allergies/food-allergy-101/facts-and-statistics:

- The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention reports that the prevalence of food allergy in children increased by 50 percent between 1997 and 2011.

- Between 1997 and 2008, the prevalence of peanut or tree nut allergy appears to have more than tripled in U.S. children.

The advice given to parents in the late 90s to introduce allergens later clearly didn't work.

Dd's first food was peanut powder mixed in breast milk.  Thankfully all went well.  Now he has also readily eaten peas, carrots, green beans, broccoli and apple sauce.  He's also sucked on an orange slice and been exposed to egg whites (another common allergen) though the texture was tricky.

Things are looking good for having a food allergy free family.  

Interestingly, he is also way better at eating that we remember D being at first.  He doesn't gag or push it out of his mouth the way D often did at first.  He's also been incredibly interested in food.  We speculate that he has watched us eat substantially more often than D had by this point because we have a consistent dinner time before he goes to bed and we sit around a dining table looking at each other.  When D was a baby we sometimes ate after his bedtime and when we did we were lined up in a row in our tiny galley kitchen without the benefit of a table.   The difference really is notable.  

Wish us luck in taking advantage of his open minded palate and making Dd in to a pretty good eater like D is!

Azores hike 6

Lomba d'el rei - abbreviated.
What was supposed to be a 2.8 mile loop turned out to be a 2.5 mile out-and-back because rains had swollen the creek we were supposed to easily cross at the bottom of the ravine / rocky beach.  Even without the kids we weren't crossing it that day.  We really were quite lucky with the weather during our trip.

Azores hike 5

Lomba da Fazenda

Azores hike 4

Lagoa Furnas, Pico do Ferro

Azores hike 3

Cha Gorreana

Azores hike 2

Atalho dos Vermelhos

Azores hike 1

Despite everyone waking up at 11am today due to jet lag, we got our first hike in the Azores in today: Serra Devassa, which was only about 3 miles.  

Yesterday was rainy (with thunderstorms) and we were way too tired after the red-eye flight here, anyway.