Shiloh's Birthday!

When Shiloh was born, I intended to have Matt plant his placenta in the yard
the same day - just as we did with Allegra. But since our boy surprised us by arriving
two weeks before we thought he would, I did not have a plant ready...
And because I had some trouble bouncing back after the birth, we went to the hospital
anyway, and took the placenta along in case anyone there would want to examine it.
They didn't care one way or the other about it, so Shannon, my trusty and fearless midwife
brought it home for me and put it in the freezer.
A year later, it still sat there, untouched and mostly forgotten.

And so although Shiloh's birth was a good one,
and although I was thrilled with my cute and clever baby boy,
I struggled with disappointment for a long time.
I was disappointed that my birth wasn't as *amazing* this time as it was last time.
I was disappointed that I lost a lot of blood and had a really tough recovery for many weeks.
I was disappointed that I felt so weak, struggled with fainting and had to go to the hospital after my home birth.

In celebration of Shiloh's first birthday
and
of my recovery from all his birth brought me, emotionally and physically,
I invited my many wonderful friends to help me
plant Shi's placenta.
For closure.
For the support of women who understand the depth of a mother's emotions.
For room in the freezer - because really, at this point, what else are we going to do with it??

Here's Shiloh and I starting to dig the hole!
Eli is tending the bag - faintly labeled "placenta!" (You rock, Shannon!!)
The tall black-eyed susan is the plant that will grow over the placenta, not more than 12 feet
from the spot Shiloh was born.


Many of the kids were really interested in the placenta itself.
This process brought up a lot of "where is my placenta?" thoughts
as well as started some children thinking about what their mamas might do
with placentas for their future siblings.


Here's some more of the group that attended!
We also had snacks and played in the sprinkler - it was a really fun day!
We are truly blessed with many, many wonderful friends
- and not just any friends - the kind of friends
who will really stick by you and turn out at a placenta planting party!!

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The mark of a 3 year old...

Something unexpected we've noticed has been that as soon as our children hit 3, they have started singing epic ballads about their life situations. Allegra was right on time and started singing her ballads just two weeks before her birthday back in June. The songs are generally free-form, non-sequitur, and endearing. Most frequently these ballads take place while traveling in the car.

Sunday after church, Allegra was in full song and these were some of her lyrics:

I love mommy and daddy
We love Jesus
We go to church for Jesus
Jesus had a cross

I love my mommy
I am in her heart
She loves me
I am in her heart

Shiloh wishes he had hair
He has no hair
He has no hair
But he wishes he had hair
He wishes he were a grown up
LIKE MEEEEE!

Standing corrected again

Okay, so this morning his name is EEeesh. Again. I guess this is why we don't let 3 year olds name real children. =)

A lotus bag for Nancy!!

My friend Nancy is considering having a lotus birth - which is a newer practice in the gentle birth movement in which parents choose not to cut the cord, rather to keep the placenta attached to the baby until the cord falls off. You can read more about lotus birth here at the Labor of Love site. So I spent a little time this morning making this placenta bag for her to use if she decides to do the lotus birth! The bag is a very soft merino wool that a dear friend gave me in the form of a sweater she had shrunk. It was rather small for me to make a diaper cover from but perfect for this project! The bag has an oval bottom and slightly angled sides to make it easy to get the placenta in and out when needed. Then I sewed a bias binding around the top which was leftover from a project I made in college and threaded burgundy ribbon through it for a drawstring.

I stand corrected

It seems this is happening more and more as time marches on... yesterday I wrote about Allegra's baby Eesh. Well, today the baby's name is Ish with a short I rather than a prolonged long E. Just so you know when you see him.

In other news, I am trying a cheese spread recipe made with kefir. I'll let you know if it is fabulous.

Smoothie Revisions!

I've made some updates to our smoothie regimen! In my quest for healthy stuff to feed my kids, I've stumbled upon Kefir, an ancient cultured milk beverage, similar to yogurt but with additional benefits AND easier to make, plus it's much, much cheaper than buying yogurt!!! A great blog on making kefir can be found here along with recipes and other fun stuff. My new smoothie contains all the ingredients in the above picture: A quart of kefir, two banans, a cup of orange juice, about 1/4 cup of raw honey, two heaping tablespoons of Green Magma powder, a handful of strawberries, and 6 or so ice cubes.

Here's the smoothie just before mixing - I guess you'd call it chunky at this point, not smoothie. It blends up to a nice even green and is a thinner consistency than my previous, yogurt-based recipe.

The taste testers agree: smoothies rock!

Fun with the SNAP PRESS!

Okay, so I got this cool snap press to make some diapers for Shiloh. I still have to make the diapers... got to get on that... but in the meantime, look at the cool stuff I can make for the kids! Allegra was playing with this Cabbage Patch doll today that was mine when I was little. The doll only has a couple of outfits and they are all pink. Allegra wanted the doll to be her baby boy, whose name is Eesh. (Yes, that's right, we say it, "EEEEEsh.") Anyway, in a matter of 20 minutes, I made Eesh two blue polar fleece diapers with purple snaps - two, of course, so she can change him and wash the other one up because he is a frequent pooper - and then I whipped up a little matching shirt. Then I made a diaper for Cymbre's very special monkey, Henry. Cymbre chose green snaps which also look nice on the blue fleece. This diaper is complete with tail vent. Then Eli wanted something for Pingu but a diaper just didn't seem like the thing for a penguin. So I made him a little vest to keep him warm.

Shiloh is 11 months!

Here's my sweet guy. 11 MONTHS! Now that's he's eating some table food every day, he's back in the habit of having a nice poo each morning. He loves to sit on his little toilet and play with a toy or look at a book. It's a nice time for us to be together before the other kids get up.

Shiloh has been such a wonderful little baby companion that I find I am dreading toddlerhood more than ever before. Perhaps it's just that I don't know if there will be more babies in my future. Perhaps it's the fact that toddlerhood is never my forte' as a mom. Or perhaps it's just that the fourth time around I really can see the bittersweet juxtoposition of baby morphing into big kid. The excitement of seeing him grow and develop is, as always, dizzying, but the plain and simple truth that this time will never come again brings me to tears.

Our dear friends from afar!!

We had a wonderful visit from some of our very dearest friends last week all the way from Wisconsin! Beth, Lily and Grayson stopped by for two fun-filled days and even attended our Grand Rapids Natural Parenting group with us. We haven't seen these guys much because they moved away and we just don't tracel much anymore! Shiloh and Grayson are just about 6 weeks apart and just seemed like two peas in a pod! Lily made herself right at home with our three big kids! We miss you guys already!!!

Allegra is 3!

For Allegra's birthday, she wanted to go to the Frederick Meijer Gardens.
It was a perfect day for it so off we went to play with everyone's favorite: the boats!

Here's Cymbre literally dripping wet and beaming with the joy of it! Our beautiful birthday girl truly had a blast as well!

Fun at the ZOO!

We spent a few hours at the zoo today. This has been a frequent destination for our family this spring and summer. Our favorite animals this year are the wallabies, the great northern pelicans, and the lions. I'm trying to give the kids the names of the animals in German and Spanish when I can, which adds a little dimension to our visits. We were also fascinated over the last two months by the dozen baby ducks growing up in the moat area around the spider monkey mountain, but I don't believe they are official zoo ducks.


Here you see Cymbre, Eli and Shiloh looking at the waterfowl with Daddy. Allegra was in the stroller but later we tied her on Daddy's back, where she fell blissfully asleep. Cute too, don't you think??


For the first time ever, we took the ubiquitous picture with Mr. John Ball that *everyone* takes when they first get to the John Ball Zoo. Now we have one too.

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Crazy consumption

The Story of Stuff

Many of my friends know how I agonize over the topic of consumption. Sometimes when I need clothes, I'll go to a department store and just lament over all the people who grew the fibers for the clothes, who sewed the clothes, who shipped the clothes halfway across the world - all for probably not enough money to feed their families. And so I often leave empty-handed and proceed to shop at a fair trade store with organic fibers and conscionable choices... and although I would like to, I can't really afford much of anything there... and so I usually leave empty handed. For all this ethical dilemma, the only real solution I can come up with is to only buy what I absolutely *NEED* - which can also be hard in our consumer-driven culture, especially when I am just a flawed Mommy-person who can't actually make perfect decisions all the time, even if there were perfect decisions to make. Should you wonder what on earth I'm talking about, watch The Story of Stuff.

So now it's MAY!

Suddenly it's May! There are flowers everywhere and green grass and leaves. Did I miss something or was spring spectacularly sudden this year? Our spring veggies are doing great and will be ready for some harvesting perhaps as early as next week. I am inordinately excited to shop the Fulton Street Farmer's Markettomorrow for its opening weekend. Asparagus and rhubarb, here I come. I'm hoping to score some locally started organic tomato and herb plants too.

We have weathered our spring performances. Cymbre's dance recital, _Journey to Freedom_ was magnificent, as was her first school musical, _The Tale of Three Trees_. Yes, we're still homeschoolers but our dayschool at church was thoughtful and generous enough to invite her to join in the all-school musical. It was a joyous experience for her and I'm so thankful for the opportunity to be part of it.

Eli is still in love with ants, worms and roly-poly bugs. Allegra is still very unpredictable. Everyone is enjoying more time outside and hoping to start our hiking regimen next week. We're watching birds and wildlife and learning about plants and flowers too.

Shiloh now has his bottom front teeth and his top left tooth is just poking its way through today, I think. He is a full-fledged crawler now and revels in getting into all the tiny toys and free-range paper that the kids leave around. He also makes a sport of chasing after me. He ate a little bit of mashed banana today and seemed to really enjoy it. And he calls me "mama" which is somehow more special than it's ever been before.

More to come!

The End of an Era

This week we mourned the passing of Vicki the Fish. Many of you who are parents can relate to the trauma caused in households of small children when a family pet dies, even as mundane a pet as a goldfish. This fish, however, has been a remarkable pet for two reasons: first, this fish was at least 14 years old. Second, this is the last fish whose presence has frequently given us reason to tell this story, which has grown in these years to legend-status in our home:

When Matt and I were in our junior year of high school at Michigan Lutheran Seminary, the decorating theme chosen for the Junior-Senior Banquet was supposed to reflect an "oriental" mood. To accomplish this, the dedicated banquet committee chose to furnish the tables with goldfish housed delicately in ivy bowls. Surely it was unanticipated that as the tables were excused to go through the buffet line, pranksters from other tables took to skewering these live decorations with the toothpicks from the appetizers so that the students would return to the grisly sight of their run-through and now deceased fish. (Who ever thought up high school, anyway??)

Matt saw that this was going on and wanted to protect the fish at their table from an untimely end. He took the fish in its well-appointed ivy bowl through the buffet line and kept it outside with him during the fire alarm portion of dinner. (Anyone else remember that? I think I was in the buffet line and we decided to ignore it...) At the conclusion of the dinner, Matt mooched a plastic cup from one of the cafeteria ladies to further house his charge and at the end of the night he took the fish safely home in the cup holder of his mom's Miata. (Other versions of the legend have this being a plastic baggie carried home in the ashtray - no one is really sure anymore) Then, some weeks later, he and his mom bought three friends for the banquet fish. Vicki (so named by Cymbre when she was 2 and named *everything* Vicki) was the last of these friends; the banquet fish and the other two friends having died at various points in the last 10 or so years.

And so ends an era. Cymbre has finally stopped crying and now wants a new fish that looks like Vicki... and I am celebrating here one man's desire to save a helpless creature from forces bigger than himself.

SPRING!

I have been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It is a sort of memoir about her family's undertaking a "local food project" and all that it entailed. Not only has it been a fabulous read, thoughtful and practical, it's really got me fired up about gardening this year.

After last year's disappointments and difficulties (between the drought and my pregnancy I really didn't grow much of anything - other than the baby, that is) I feel a renewed vigor to grow food again. But more than that, I'm feeling a desperate yearning to have a real spot of land and be somewhat more solid and sustainable in this shifting and wild world. However, since we have tied ourselves to this place, I shall be content with my small garden plots and avail myself of local farms and our fabulous farmer's market to as great an extent as I possibly can.

Today the weather was so lovely that I weeded half of my veggie bed. I was happy to see my chives poking up in their little corner and some swiss chard sprouting out of the stalks of last year's plants! I plan to seed lots of early spring veggies tomorrow.

My new sling!!

I love slings. That may be obvious. I find carrying my babies to be a satisfying as well as practical way to keep everyone happy.

Last week I finished a sling that I have been wanting to make since I was expecting Allegra (in 2005) - the Mei Tai. This is an Asian-style baby carrier featuring a soft body (seat area) and waist straps as well as shoulder straps (which I made waaay too long, incidentally). I am very pleased to find
it quite comfortable for both front and back carries - and just in time for Shiloh's
glorious spring and summer as a baby, during which much yard and garden work needs to be accomplished.

I was very proud of my handiwork on this sling and in my impatience to get it posted, I turned over the camera to my apprentice. These pictures were taken by Cymbre and are her first published shots. =) Note how neither Shiloh nor I have our heads cut off. That's what I call progress!