today is one of those days remind you that spring is on its way. it’s sort of cloudy and cold–typically february–but the morning was ushered in with the singing of birds. what kind, i don’t know. i’m not a birder, but it sort of made me want to find out. for about five seconds. then i resumed with reality. there is also a kind of slant to the sunlight bouncing off the flurrying clouds that reminds me more of april showers than january snow.

funny, i wrote that last bit yesterday afternoon, and today (feb 24), we’re in the midst of a snow “storm” of sorts–it’s supposed to snow all day… spring can be so fickle!

seb is sitting next to me in his high chair trying to put a grape back on its stem…he is obviously delirious and in need of a nap. he points to the stem, and i say “stem.” then he points to the grape, and i say, “grape.” he doesn’t repeat very much, although he is beginning to try. “g,” he says. i’m happy it’s more than a grunt. “yeah, grape!” my days are full of this–labeling seb’s world with spoken words hoping that soon he’ll grasp the concept that he too needs to use this form of communication. it’s a good thing i love words…

as he moves closer to the terrible twos, it’s getting a little more frustrating to me (and him to an extent) that he can’t tell me things. so far, i have been the one working to break the code of his grunting, pointing, signing (that he makes up on his own now) and jibberish.

shifting this responsibility (responsibility! for a two year old?) to him is going to be tricky, to say the least, since he’s used to me anticipating his every need, and the battle of wills begins to comlicate the process. if he’s having these issues with talking, i can’t even imagine what potty training is going to be like. and the thought of changing diapers for ANOTHER two years makes me a little nauseous.

so this is the latest speed bump as we circle the parking lot of parenting. and as some parking lots are, speed bumps abound, so we’re definitely not on the fast track.

Posted on February 23rd, 2005

Posted on January 24th, 2005

our living room has somehow exploded into a mess of primary colors: blue, red, mainly yellow have intruded upon our subtle tones of green and brown (it sounds uglier than it is, believe me). it’s all seba’s fault. not really. it’s all his grandparents’ fault. here are some pictures of seb on christmas day…

first “bike”!

first railroad!

first boat!

over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go….

seb’s favorite thing to do at the home is play with all of great grandpa’s locomotion aids–since great grandpa was using his wheelchair, seb took off with the walking stick–runaway! runaway!

great grandma mcmillan

great grandma hemphill

great grandpa hemphill

Posted on January 22nd, 2005

the christmas tree has exited the house. i might say, “finally.” last week when temps were in the 60s and it felt more like may than january, i began thinking that the tree had filled its full christmas potential. the lights just weren’t doing it for me anymore, and the tree was better defined as a gigantic peice of firestarter. i began to fear leaving the lights on when i left the house lest i come back to a smokey skeleton of a brick house.

so today i embarked on the heinous task with such a tumult of feeling: oh, to have my living room back again. the joy! the task did not, at first, take on the prevailing modifier. taking down the ornaments went quickly and smoothly as i had only placed them on the visible side of the tree. likewise, the bead-garlands pulled away from the branches swimmingly. it was the lights (the lights, for crying out loud!) that threw me into a frenzy of christmas tree-hating that i only moments ago was able to lay to rest.

i did manage to tear the lights out of the tree’s vice-like grasp without loss of life or limb. however, my living room floor took on the characteristics of a soft, needle covered forest floor. i might add that even sebastien noticed this, and, before brian took him away from the house so that i could recover some sort of normalcy to our carpet, was trudging through the pine needles like he was on a rocky mountain path. he laughed aloud at the “crunch, crunch, crunch” harkening from his feet.

at last, i vacuumed away the last remnants of christmas, the orange-piney-not-so-goodness blasting from the machine into my poor, over stimulated olfactory nerve. a month ago, i didn’t think this possible, but MAN, am i sick of that smell!

in seb’s words, *fweeee*!

Posted on January 17th, 2005

is the month of janveer. that’s january folks. and if you live in pittsburgh, pa, you know what i mean. it has been cloudy for two weeks straight, and it’s starting to make me weary. the brightest it has been seems like dusk to me, with the charcoal clouds hanging low. and winter is just getting started.

i’ve decided to keep my therapeutic christmas tree up through this month. the extra lights and prettiness help seb and i through the dreary days. seb is as attached to the therapy tree as me–he insists on turning on the lights as soon as we come downstairs in the morning. thank goodness for seb so i have an excuse to keep it up!

friends of ours came to town for the holidays. they are newly-weds (gag, choke) and brought pictures to astound us with from their honeymoon in the canadian rockies. the canadian rockies somehow put the us rockies to shame. so now i have mountains on my mind and no plan to get a dose.

one optimistic thought brings me some relief: the days are getting longer again.

stay tuned for some pics of christmas presents and seb…

Posted on January 8th, 2005

these days i get a nosefull of the orange-piney goodness of our douglas fir christmas tree when i walk in our front door. the smell takes me back to days-gone-by of my childhood: we always had a real tree for christmas. i don’t recall that we ever, as a family, went so far as cutting down our own, but we definitely didn’t taint our winter holidays with a fake tree. although my mother did allow for as much tinsel as we could possibly drape on the needly boughs.

my parents began this tradition before i can remember remembering and carried it on in perpetuity through all the many stages of my life: adolescent angst, college angst, first job angst, getting married angst. the christmas tree was a balm to my soul, so to speak, a little bit of holiday aroma therapy. it wasn’t until a few years ago that my mother finally admitted to NOT enjoying putting up a christmas tree (or more like transforming the entire house into a winter wonderland) anymore, and kindly requested that i go get my own.

so now i carry on this holiday tradition of having a real christmas tree (since last year anyway), and i have learned that along with the beauty and comfort and peace of the tree and lights comes WORK(!). work well worth it for the enjoyment sebastien is beginning to experience and that which i continue to experience (at my age even!) especially after a long morning or afternoon of battling kamikaze parents on a mission at the toy store wielding large carts and looks to kill. as a matter of fact, i wonder sometimes what i would do without my christmas tree hide-away. aside from not cleaning up green, holiday kitty puke every morning.

in light of the holiday and the glowing tree in my living room, we have had a year of many blessings. seb is growing and developing like mad. although not outright talking yet, he has increased the number of different sounds he gibber-gabbers from da-da-da to ahgahrah and doyama…. and yes, he even says mama and daddy now. i really can’t wait until he can actually use the english language to communicate so i can know what he is thinking and talking about. he has so much to say!

he has taken a keen interest in all things kitchen. if brian and i aren’t in the kitchen cooking or doing something cooking related, seb gets very upset. when we are in the kitchen, seb now joins us, standing up on a chair testing our knowledge of what is IS allowed to touch compared to what he is NOT allowed to touch. he is starting to learn the subtleties of using the microwave (no seb, do NOT turn on the microwave with nothing in it… no, seb, do NOT turn on the microwave with a metal utensil in it.). and if we ever have trouble finding the pots and pans where they should be in the cupboard, we just have to find seb “cooking” in the living room. maybe he’ll be a chef when he grows up.

seb spends a great deal of time reading (like his mama) and listening to music and trying to “fix” his things with wheels (like his daddy). he has developed a fanatical obsession with bicycles since brian has several in the basement and rides one to work each morning. the pedaling hand sign for bike has become synonymous with daddy. seb loves touching the wheels and the frame and spinning the pedals. maybe he’ll be the next lance armstrong.

climbing is becoming a much more practical concept for seb. he has mastered climbing up and down the stairs at home and grandma and grandpa’s (*shew* i don’t have to carry him anymore!). most recently seb “sent” our little kitchen step ladder, chanting “uuuuh” on the way up and “daaaah” on the way down. if brian and i get our christmas wish, we’ll be building a mini climbing wall in our basement, and seb will be able to hone his rock climbing skills. maybe he’ll be the next chris sharma.

Posted on December 24th, 2004

today, in the wee hours of the morning, a deep hacking cough coming from seb’s room, seb’s crib, seb’s mouth woke me up with a start. i sat up and exited my warm flannel sheets, quilt and down comforter, my bare legs momentarily covered with goose bumps from the chilliness of our nighttime house. i walked to his room and to his crib and watched as he struggled with breathing and wakefulness. he wasn’t happy about either. he tried to stifle his cough, but when he cried instead, the cough came jutting up out of his lungs. i filled up his vaporizer to start the steamy potion that was to be helping seb breathe, and he stood up in his crib, pressing his hands together, his sign language for me to sing to him. i obliged him in the dim glow of his night light. i sang one version of psalm 23 that i know well, but forgot half of the words in my grogginess. i hummed most of it instead. it was a relief to sing something besides the first verse of “jelly man kelly,” the only song seb had wanted to hear for the last 48 hours. brian eventually got out of bed too, and administered some cold medicine to the sick baby. seb pressed the fingertips of both hands together asking for “more.” brian gave him water saying, “no more medicine seb, one dose is all you get.” seb went back into his crib easily enough with his dog-in-a-doghouse musical thing tinkling “how much is that doggy in the window,” and i tip-toed back to bed.

poor seb, on this 18 month anniversary of his birthday! he is suffering it with great equinimity though, now quietly sitting in his elmo chair watching “baby neptune.” some moments i wonder whether he is really sick at all. children deal with sickness much better than adults. then again, if all we had to do was play, maybe we’d be less aware of sickness too.

Posted on November 12th, 2004

so a little more talk about our trip to the new last week… let me back up a bit. brian and i had convinced ourselves (well, i know i had, and it seemed to me that brian had too) when seb was all brand new and shiny that climbing routes with ropes and gear and packs, etc., was going to be way too complicated for our already baby-complex lives, so we decided to put off going to the new river gorge for a while. early this summer, we decided we wanted to take a climbing trip that would involve camping and not flying to keep it cheap. in august, we thought we’d go south, but decided it would be too humid and yuck and far. in sept, we thought we’d go to the boston area and visit family and friends on the way, but decided that would be too buggy and yuck and far. so at least to get rid of the too far factor, we settled on going to the new in october, thinking we’d mainly boulder there and maybe climb routes, ropes and all, one day. well, it turned out that we spent two “days” climbing routes, and it would have been three had we not spent THAT day bushwacking some non-existent trail to find the crappiest rock in the whole gorge (bubba city sucks! never climb there!). i found (and maybe brian did too) that gearing up to do some long(er) climbs wasn’t any more complicated than bouldering. it was so good to be back on a rope. at summersville, one area near the new brian and i had almost completely climbed out, i felt at home and a cozy warmth enveloped me as i climbed routes that will never lose their familiarity, taking a moment at the top to look out over the lake and fall colors below me. it was so GOOD to be back! even if i was just climbing the easy routes or toproping. and i met with friends we hadn’t seen in two years at least, and made new ones i hope to see again and again. so much of climbing tends to be about these people who i don’t appreciate enough until i’m separated from them. and they met seb! confirming our suspicions that he IS the cutest kid ever. EVER!

now we’re home and it’s sort of lonely after having all those people around. so in the quiet, while seb is taking a nap and brian is still at work, i sit and daydream about going back to the new, tying into the sharp-end of a rope, and climbing up and up and up.

Posted on October 28th, 2004

silliness

bettiness

most of these pics are from hawks nest at the new river gorge. we didn’t have as many photo ops the other days, and friend kathleen was photo-happy since she wasn’t climbing the rest of the day…

Posted on October 25th, 2004

at least in the weblog sense… i’ve been so busy writing essays for class (wahoo!) that i have neglected my narrative of seb-happenings. class has reached a crossroads into writing a long essay from now until semester-end, and i have decided to write about motherhood issues–pregnancy, childbirth–and then flesh out a bigger political issue from my personal experiences. should be interesting. so far, i have only written 2-3 pages essays just to explore different ideas and memories. my instructor teaches at chatham and some sort of high school for young gifted people, and she also is an accomplished essayist, poet and editor. she recently edited an anthology of essays and poetry on pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. anyway, on to seb…

seb is a born climber–not only rocks, but gates and stairs and chairs intrigue him too. we were walking in bloomfield the other day and came upon a ramp guarded by a steel railing, and seb scampered to it directly, grabbed the railing and hiked his feet up onto the cement ramp and hung there. a woman walking by asked his age, and when i told her, she exclaimed at his climbing skills. “i know!” i replied with equal enthusiasm. he’s a genius! he likes to “scare” me when i’m at the computer in the dining room: he runs around to the opposite side of the table, crouches down and then pops his little face up hollering, “aaaagh!” which always dissolves into laughter at how clever he realizes he is. and i giggle right along with him.

a not fun and exciting thing we recently went through with seb (because i need to have a well-rounded narrative here) is his habit of not eating. the past few weeks he has been getting molars, so he’s been off his feed a bit because of that, but i’m also convinced that he’s not eating just because i want him to so badly. brian and i swore up an down to eachother p.s. (pre seb) that we would never fight with him about eating or mealtime after witnessing countless episodes of horror that my sisters have had trying to get their kids to eat. however, the pediatrician is convinced we are starving poor seb, and has also made me feel fairly guilty for not trying hard enough to broaden his toddler-food-loving horizons, so against my better judgement it has become a fight. a fight that i lose most of the time. it is the one thing that has made me completely lose my temper with him, and it sucks! so at the beginning of last week, i remade my pact with myself and brian that eating is a battle i refuse to fight. if seb only eats cheese for the next 5 years, so be it.

Posted on October 13th, 2004