six years ago tomorrow, may 12, around the noon hour, sebastien entered the world in one of the most chaotic days of my life. and since then, things have never been the same. and i’m happy about that. oh, wait, this is not about me… we’re happy about that. brian and i.  in fact, for me (oh, i can’t help it, it IS all about me) as the years go by, that day of chaos fades into the blur. an important day, yes, but just one day, and how great have the rest of the days been since then?

in truth, seb is one of the coolest people i know. and now on the eve of his sixth birthday, i’m thinking about him and the new things about him that i’d like to share on his special day with the family, the friends that read my musings. and anybody out there who does not fall under one of these labels, back off! it’s none of your business! (haha)

seb has a loose tooth. the front tooth that was broken when he was two while he and i played a game that sent him crashing face-first into the sidewalk. soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the gray reminder of that sad day.

seb knows how to read. i’d like to take credit for this, but truly, seb does most things on his own that he wants to do. i only snuck some phonics-stuff to him when he wasn’t looking. today, he read the word ‘friend’ without even sounding it out, and i was impressed. that looks like a hard word! (strangely, then he got hung up on ‘funny’.) he must have felt in his little 5.95-year-old heart what the word was because he has really been into friends lately. who are my friends, mommy? how many friends do i have, mommy?

seb is a budding artist. after a couple of years of me biting my nails that the boy would never draw a picture in his life that wasn’t all circles, seb has begun a creating spree. rockets. cars. astronauts. tanks. guns. flowers. designs. scotch tape sculptures. a wellspring has been tapped.

none of these things are outstanding, but they do well to cement him into the world of being six. and i thank God every day that he is normal! and i’m so excited to see what the next year will bring him (and us, by default).

so join me in saying, HAPPY 6TH BIRTHDAY, SEBA!

Posted on May 12th, 2009

there has been a new addition to our family recently. and no, no, i’m not with child. no, no, not me. it’s a volkswagon  eurovan weekender! the short of the long is that it’s a small-ish van (no, no, no, NOT a minivan) with camping capabilities–the top pops up and has a bed. the boys can sleep up there, while brian and i sleep on the bed in the bottom, back of the van. it’s nice to be together, but separated during sleep. no more will seb grit his teeth in my ear! no more will oren suck his thumb in my other ear! and neither of them can kick me! it is also our only car now instead of the ford focus, so that opens up a whole other world of transportation of the urban-kind too. carpooling! large loads of things from home depot!

this past weekend we took said van out for our first camping trip in it to coopers rock state park outside of morgantown, wv. just for a quick overnight, saturday night and a day of bouldering sunday. we did everything right. we left early enough to get to the campground well before bedtime and dark. we even got stuck in traffic getting out of the ‘burgh and still arrived in good time. take it from me, there is nothing worse than getting to the campground in the dark, past bedtime, with two little kids in tow. or one for that matter. as i was saying, we did everything right. we got there, got a nice spot close to the bathrooms, ate dinner. our friends arrived with their four year old son, and all the boys were running around having a grand ol’ time. there was even a mini camp fire (though unfortunately no marshmallows–ok, so maybe we didn’t do EVERYTHING right)! bedtime came and everyone was ready for it. there was no gnashing of teeth or anything. we get in bed, everyone in the whole campground eventually gets in bed and all is quiet.

all is quiet until the dude right next to us calls his girlfriend on the phone. all is quiet, and then the guy calls his lady, and talks on the phone for what, a few minutes? a half hour maybe? NO! in fact, the guy stays on the phone FOR THREE HOURS. and did i mention that he was in the spot right next to us? and did i mention that because of the unseasonable heat we had the back of our van open, facing him? and did i mention that i’m a chicken and so is brian, so we never told the guy to go sit in his car or anything FOR THREE HOURS? even though it sounded like he was sitting there right next to us having this conversation on the phone? oh wait, and i think i forgot to say that this was not some teenager on the phone to his girl. this was a middle-aged man, camping with this three kids, 10 years old and under. he came with his kids, he put them into bed in the tent at their site, and not five minutes later, the man calls his girlfriend to talk about how he wants to introduce her to the kids without telling them that she’s his girlfriend. i don’t know for sure, but i don’t think that it takes a rocket scientist to know that tents are not soundproof, and that kids don’t go to sleep right away, and that at least one of his kids heard at least part of his THREE HOUR LONG conversation. oh, and the other thing i forgot to say about this guy is that he’s a professor, and this detail is very important to note before reading the NEXT THING THAT HAPPENED.

okay, so finally after THREE HOURS, the professor gets off the phone and goes to bed, and we are in the midst of some other kind of angst at that point, the kind that involves three year olds screaming about snot in their nose and the super-bad cough that is keeping them awake. but once that is over, we finally notice that the professor is not on the phone anymore, and we breathe a sigh of relief. brian finally goes to sleep. i begin to drift off and i am almost there when the raccoons come out. they sound like gremlins rolling through the leaves past our van headed straight for the professors picnic table, where he left out all his food in plastic shopping bags. in fact i’m willing to bet that the entire next hour or so could have been the sound effects directly from the first gremlins movie with the rummaging through bags and the ripping open of potato chips and the loud and very fast nibbling that took place. even the occasional growl between the two or three that were sitting there partaking of this guys’ food. so finally the professor gets up and shoos them away by whispering “hey, hey you, go away” and hitting the side of his tent waking all his kids up, and waving around his flashlight. it was not scary to the raccoons, and i could imagine them sitting there on the picnic table blankly staring a the professor. he did get out of the tent eventually, at which point, they ran away. away, away, foul raccoons!

you might think that i encountered peace at this point. that there was nothing left to happen. but you would be wrong. things don’t happen in twos, people. they happen in threes. you may also think that this professor was a smart man, but i think you are wrong again. you may imagine that he put away his food, removing it from the pinic table and putting it in his car or something. but no, you are wrong AGAIN. he left it out, just as he had the first time, and the raccoons did not stay away. they came back, and i believe, from the sounds of it, that they brought some family and friends. and this did not wake the professor up so the noise went on another good hour, until either i finally passed out from dillerium, or the raccoons left. so i got some sleep say, from 4 am until, oh, 6 am when the crows began beckoning to eachother that the sun would soon be coming up.

did i forget to mention that the van was comfortable?

Posted on April 27th, 2009

so i went dark for a while, here, but not in real life. in real life, i have been writing my pants off for the past few months to finish my thesis. and it’s finally done! all 154 pages of it. i’ll post the table of contents here just because having a table of contents is pretty cool:

Mommy’s Doing Pull-Ups in the Basement Again: A Rock Climber’s Reflections on Motherhood and a Mother’s Meditations on Rock Climbing

Table of Contents

Introduction.........................................................iv

The Girl in the Tree..................................................1

Harness...............................................................5

The Legend of a Rock Climber Girlfriend...............................7

Rope.................................................................40

Born to Climb........................................................42

Chalk................................................................56

Fall.................................................................58

Conversation I.......................................................87

Packing List I: Why We Went Camping All The Time Before We Had Kids..89

Packing List II: What It Takes To Go Camping With Children and Why We

Hardly Ever Go Anymore,or, Motel Anyone?.............................90

Trespasser...........................................................94

Three...............................................................118

Bouldering..........................................................123

Conversation II.....................................................125

Boys on the Rocks...................................................126

Bibliography........................................................141

isn’t that pretty? maybe it’s just me. i do have a thing for tables of contents.

all that is left for me in terms of getting my MFA is reading for five minutes the night before graduation. and, i have decided not to walk for graduation because it just seems like a silly rite of passage for me at this point in my life. plus, they hand me a folder that doesn’t even have my diploma in it AND i have to give the folder back! it just seems like it’s only for the photo-op, which i’d rather avoid anyway. and if my family gets grumpy at me for it, i have ordered the tassle and the other who-zee-whats-it, thing-a-ma-jig that shows i have a masters. i can get pictures with those things anyway.

so what’s next? no razzle-dazzle career in writing for me, that’s for sure. i may be pursuing publication of parts of my thesis, or maybe i’ll try to get a book deal (typing that just makes me chuckle because it seems so unlikely!) for it, but mainly now i can homeschool the boys, the anklebiters, instead of just saying that i am. and of course, i’ll be writing on the side. if writing my thesis has taught me anything it’s that it is better to write a tiny little bit every day even if it’s crap rather than to only do it every once in a while (we’ll see how that goes!). maybe i’ll even update this little blog every once in a while.

Posted on April 27th, 2009

oren turned 3 on december 12 while we were away in florida (please see home page for slide show)! woo hoo!

i just turned in around 70 pages of work to my thesis advisor which may end up being half of my thesis! yes!

brian still has a job in light of the country’s increase in unemployment and he still likes it a lot!

seb wants to learn how to swim so he can work at sea world with the whales but not until he’s 10!

oren is still potty trained and has not yet tried to use pee or poop as a weapon! woo!

santa clause is coming to town! (even though we might not be able to see him!)

Posted on December 20th, 2008

well, oren, our little baby, is potty trained. a lot goes into the meaning of potty trained though, so i should clarify. he is not wearing diapers during the day, and he is wearing plastic covered training pants at night. he has had some accidents, one of which involved no. 2. he has not successfully pooped on the potty, so we’re still not sure where we stand with that end of things. weeks and week after seb was trained, he still required us to put a pull-up on him to go no. 2. so i’m trying to be relaxed and open minded about the state of my almost-three-year-old’s potty habits after a mere four days. but now that he’s in underwear, i can’t go back! so that, in my definition, is potty trained. oh! and, brian was the trainer this go! and he deserves a big pat on the back for that.

 “i a big BOY!” oren yells at us, and i’m beginning to agree with him.

Posted on December 1st, 2008

i’m still thinking a lot about our california climbing trip we recently returned from. i’m still not keen on being pittsburgh-bound. i’m sure it’s annoying for everyone to hear about my discontent, but at this time of year especially, it is so very strong and real! the shortening days and fallback from daylight saving time have thrown us back to early darkness, and i’m already counting the days until sometime in february when we’ll notice the daylight lengthening and we can look toward spring. is it just me, or does it get harder every year? this year, i’m steeping in my thesis, and i need to be mentally able to jump in and out of it at any moment–that’s what the writing life is like with kids: spontaneous start, spontaneous stop. i’m not on my game as often as i’d like to be, and i’m going to blame it on the weather. and i have even forgotten to mention that sunny days in pittsburgh are already few and far between–and anytime we’re supposed to have a sunny day, it only means that the sun will show it’s face from maybe noon to three, and the rest of the time the sky is gray from actual clouds or haze due to the temps and the rivers and hills or something. here ends my yearly diatribe on wanting to move away from pittsburgh. i’ll try to wait until next year to talk about it again, but i can’t promise anything.

so anyway, traveling with the kids– the beginnig of my journal for the trip was a meditation on something that wendell berry wrote in a book about the red rive gorge in kentucky. he writes how our bodies travel around in cars and airplanes at these super-fast speeds and that our minds can’t catch up, resulting in a sort of depression. i’ll quote him because i don’t think i said that very well:

 We seem to grant our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported… Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds; and the transition from foot travel to motor travel in terms of evolutionary time has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or glos over– and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.

and then this is what i wrote in my bishop journal:

and so the trip begins on the plane, and i hope we can keep these ideas in mind when it comes to the kids, that they are feeling this sense of confusion, and loss, and of being a stranger in a strange place.

we are flying somewhere over ohio or illinois and i have to pee , and i’m in the window seat. beside me kathy holds a sleeping mckenna–she [mckenna] is feeling the  desperation more than the rest of us. even seb and oren understand that we’re flying in an airplane to get to california. by day’s end, we’ll be in a hotel  near vegas, and hopefully all will be well, travel-wise.

i need to remember our past trips to bishop. the last one was almost exactly five years ago with 5-month-old sebastien. he flew well, and we received a standing ovation from the old people going [to vegas] to gamble. i wasn’t strong that trip, and we were frustrated by the weather–a cold front came through with 60 mph winds, so being outside with seb was like torture. well, i think that was when we were realizing that climbing with babies wasn’t optional, but it wasn’t easy. i wonder what this trip will be like–easy? moderate? after climbing with babies for years, i don’t think it will ever seem hard again.  but i guess i shouldn’t count my chickens before they hatch. we have been in an uproar for about a month now, with all the family stuff [family reunion at the end of sept] and then sickness and then schedule changes. we are already so far from routine that it will either make or break this trip. maybe it will make it easier to continue to be off routine.

matt c. was with us on our last trip. i can’t believe he put up with us and our baby. i wonder what really went through his head as he tip-toed about the room with us after seb was in bed at 7 pm. i vaguely remember watching “friends” in his room with the door closed maybe drinking beer. we still had a good time…

i think the other significant thing about the two trips (this one and the one before when seb was a baby), at least, what made me connect them together, was that we stayed in the same motel in the exact same room both times. room 15 at the bishop village inn. this time it worked great for us because seb and oren got their own room and they could go to bed at their bedtime while the rest of us did whatever. it didn’t work so well for jason and kathy because they had to either go to bed at mckenna’s bedtime or have meckenna go to bed at their bedtime. next time, we’re hoping that all the kids can be in one room and we’ll all be in another. haha.

oh well, there are some more california thoughts. i have a 4 yr old and a 5 yr old demanding i read to them (not really), so i should go pay attn to them.

Posted on November 12th, 2008

i don’t want to do laundry. i don’t want to clean the california dirt out of our clothes.

Posted on October 30th, 2008

we returned to pittsburgh late saturday night/early sunday morning after a 7-day jaunt to bishop, california. because of our late arrival (home at 12:45a) and the time difference, the boys and i woke up sunday morning after 10 am. oh dear, it’s going to be a long journey back to real time and life. seb and oren are doing their best to get into a routine, though, and were immediately bickering over their toys in the living room.

it’s like we have been through a time warp, the reality of the trip just a memory now, subject to my whimsically forgettable mind. when my fingertips regrow their skin and the bruises from climbing fade, the trip might go with them. did we really go? did we really climb six out of seven days on boulders strewn at the feet of the sierra nevadas? did we really just spend almost eight days with our friends jason and kathy and their daughter mckenna? did we really, just on friday, say goodbye to our friends paul and april and their dog morgan and make plans to see them at christmas time? when my tan arms and face pale to pastey white, will i also forget that the weather every day was 80 degrees and sunshine?

we did. all these things happened, and we have pictures to prove it. though our camera suffers from the same forgetfulness that i do, and it lost some of the pictures we took. they just vanished into thin air. i’m not much of a picture-taker myself, which explains why there are so many photos of me compared to brian. i’m beginning to realize the importance of picture-taking and video-recording on trips like these. it’s not just an ego boost (hey, look at what i did!); it helps to remind us that it happened and remember the details that easily slip our minds. so does writing about it. i attempted to keep a journal of the trip, and i think i did an okay job this time compared to other trip journaling. so i’ll be able to revisit that too, and perhaps share some entries here. like this one from sunday, october 19, first full day of climbing:

there is a lot of stuff (boulders) for the boys to climb around on. seb climbed as much as we did, i think. even oren can scramble around. and of course there is the dirt–the dirt we tried so hard to keep seb out of when he was a baby. they were rolling around in it, digging holes, etc. i think we’re going to have to loosen the reigns on seb climbing a bit. brian and i are both fearful that he’s going to get really hurt, but he has such a sense of caution, i don’t think he’ll get reckless.

we left seb go a bit and do what he wanted climbing-wise as long as it wasn’t too tall. the one rule for him that we stuck to was, “if you don’t think you’ll be able to get down, don’t climb up.” so we watched him, and oren to some extent, climb little mini boulder problems. we watched them climb to the top and hear them say, “did you see that? did you see what i just did?” and at the end of the day when i asked seb what his favorite part of the day was, he usually said, “the climbing.”* this warms the cockles of my mama-climber’s heart.

i hope to be posting more about the trip throughout this week because there are many more things to tell.

*we asked oren this question too, and he would answer the same as seb. monkey see, monkey do.

Posted on October 26th, 2008

as promised, this is the start of my reading list for my thesis:

Bond, Marybeth and Pamela Michael, Eds. A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart. Travelers’ Tales, Inc.: San Fransisco, 1998. (collection of personal essays, motherhood and travel)

David, Steph.  High Infatuation. The Mountaineer Books: Seattle, WA, 2007. (climbing)

*Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. Harper & Row: New York, 1987. (memoir)

*Erdrich, Louise. The Blue Jay’s Dance. Harper Collins Publishers: New York, 1995. (motherhood memoir)

Franklin, Sarah, Ed. How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel. Seal Press: Berkley, CA, 2008. (collection of essays, motherhood and travel)

*Galvin, James. The Meadow. Henry Holt and Company: New York, 1992. (fiction, but mostly true, about a place in wyoming and its people)

Gore, Ariel. The Mother Trip. Seal Press: Emeryville, CA, 2000. (motherhood memoir/self-help)

*Kooser, Ted. Local Wonders. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, NE, 2002. (memoir)

Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions. Randome House, Inc.: New York, 1993. (motherhood memoir)

*Marquart, Debra. The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Counterpoint: New York, 2006. (memoir)

*Miller, Donald. Through Painted Deserts. Thomas Nelson, Inc.: Nashville, 2005. (travel writing/Christian memoir)

*Ray, Janisse. The Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home. Milkweed Editions: Minneapolis, 2003. (nature writing/memoir)

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 1976. (motherhood manifesto)

*Rosenthal, Amy Krouse. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. Crown Publishers: New York, 2005. (memoir of sorts, atypical)

*Sanders, Scott Russell. Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journey. Beacon Press: Boston, 1998. (memoir/nature writing)

Steingraber, Sandra. Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. Berkley Publishing Group: New York, 2001. (memoir/ecologist’s view on pregnancy, childbirth, infancy)

*Winner, Lauren. Girl Meets God. Random House, Inc.: New York, 2003. (conversion story/Christian memoir)

*my personal favorites–contains moments of incredibly beautiful writing.

KEEP SCROLLING! there are some other new additions below….

Posted on September 6th, 2008

“it’s so impressing for some people and their kids to go swimming every day. it’s impressing because i’ve never seen anyone and their kids swim all day.”

“it is so familiar that oren doesn’t share his lamb. i ask him every moment, and he always says no.”

and i quote.

Posted on September 6th, 2008