This boy I love...

is two years old today. He loves his Daddy, his sister, puppies, cars, the letter 'G', Elmo, coloring, sliding by himself at the park, horses, dancing when no one is looking, his grandparents, bananas, books, and his blue blanket. He is also fond of me in a sweet, consuming way that I never would have been able to imagine when I first held him on this date 730 days ago. He has a gentle, tender spirit. He wants to please us and is extremely sensitive to tone, making discipline a fairly straightforward endeavor at this point. He is not fond of having his picture taken and while he is generally a smiley little fellow, it is very hard to capture. The only other things that displease him in any consistent way are having his sleeves pushed up and not having food instantaneously appear at the very moment he decides he is hungry.

His favored place of repose:
His favored playmate:

I am thankful beyond measure for this son I adore. Happy second birthday Hudson John.

8 days a week

Helena Jane is right at this moment doing the splits in my uterus. Looks weird, feels extremely uncomfortable. So, eight days until D-Day. I've been having some contractions in the evenings but they are mild and without pattern. The wave of utter exhaustion that hits at around 5:15 pm is fairly incapacitating, which is unfortunate timing all around, considering that is really the part of our day when I am least expendable.

Harper has for a while now been uncomfortable with the idea of extinction. Specifically in reference to dinosaurs. So after we saw the dinosaur bones at the museum last week she began to work out a little revisionist history. It goes something like this:

Joshua the dinosaur is NOT extinct. Joshua the dinosaur lives in Colorado.
In the woods of Colorado. He doesn't bite. In fact, he's rather friendly.
He doesn't eat robins and stuff. He doesn't eat THOSE kinds of birds.
He eats crows. He's a farm animal.

At that point in the story I had to stop transcribing because the pasta was boiling over, but the important conclusion was that Joshua the Dinosaur is NOT just bones. He has skin and muscles and he is decidedly still alive right this minute. In the woods of Colorado. Eating up those crows.

Frankenblanket

This is not a political post about politics in Minnesota. Although that IS wacky, right? It seems like if anything should preempt a person from running for public office, it should be a stint on Saturday Night Live. Alas. I wanted to show you a picture but I'm on the husband's computer and can't figure out how to find the one I'm looking for. The picture I wanted to show you is of Harper's Special Blanket. It is green and she began to favor it very particularly when she was around 7 months old, precisely the point at which it begin to unravel. By the minute. I actually tried to replace it soon thereafter and, of course, she would have nothing to do with the identical, ravel-free replacement. Special Green Blanket is now approximately 1/8th its original size and we spend a few minutes just about every evening trimming off yarn straggles so they don't strangle her in her sleep. Because this is how Special Green Blanket spends his nights: wrapped around her neck like a scarf. I've been promising for awhile now to somehow fix SGB so that he would stop this unraveling nonsense, and Harper decided to hold me to it today. So I let her pick the thread color (red, and yes I just used thread instead of yarn--did you think I'd really have yarn lying around?) and got to work. Harper sat on my (almost nonexistent) lap and lovingly caressed SGB while I attempted some semblance of a running whip stitch? I just made that up--I have no idea what stitch I used and it looks really terrible. But Harper seems pleased and perhaps the remaining three inches of SGB will be with us a few more months.

The husband had to leave really early this morning and forgot his phone. Which I thought for sure would prompt me to go into immediate labor and deliver Helena Jane on the bathroom floor with only Harper and Hudson to assist. Nope.

My recommendation for the new Surgeon General

Helena Jane shows no signs of womb departure.

Sometimes reading the editorial section of the newspaper is just exhausting. I enjoy Charles Krauthammer because he always seems sensible and erudite without being inflammatory. Of course I love William Safire. But the rest I kind of skim and roll my eyes (I'm talking about you, Ellen Goodman). Much to my delight was this little gem in the Letters to the Editor of yesterday's Houston Chronicle:

Are you hooked on smoking? How about chewing tobacco? I know about your addiction. Trust me, I'm a Cub Scout. Well, in my opinion, just stop! Put down the cigar. Stop chewing. I know you'll shake a lot, but you'll get used to it. If you're going to die, it's better to die later than now. Now, as for beer, wine, and alcohol, a little's OK. But gallons a day! You're way off. Stop. Cough medicine and all medicine: if you need some, get a fair amount. Teens and a few adults take too much. Do you know what this could do to you? You could die or send your heart racing.
If you don't do any of these, you're excellent! But if you do, my point is to stop doing all of this craziness. I hope the best for you. Best of luck.
--Daniel McCree, age 9, Spring

A wee sage is Daniel. I like how he just keeps saying, "Stop." I had been writing a post in my head about how many of our health problems as a nation are almost completely preventable. And I was going to pen a screed complaining about my skyrocketing insurance premiums paying for someone else's terrible lifestyle choices. Daniel is right. Just stop. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity--it's pretty straightforward. We don't need billions of dollars in pharmaceutical research so we can alleviate symptoms. We need to make better choices. Stop ingesting junk and stop sitting on our collective bottom and move around more. It really is pretty much that simple. The diseases for which we really don't know the cause are quite rare. This is where the money should be going. When I worked at M.D. Anderson I was in the cafeteria one day and there on the refrigerator case full of Odwalla juice was a big sign warning all patients to check with their doctors before drinking Odwalla because there could be ingredients (mango puree? spirulina??) that could interfere with treatment. I looked around incredulously to see if the Chick Fil-a station had a similar sign. Nope. The grill where you could get a greasy hamburger and french fries? Nope. The desserts? Nope. The baked potato bar with big vats of butter and cheese and sour cream? Nope. The endcap with Little Debbies? Uh, nope. It's an epidemic of willful ignorance. Stop, indeed.

Pregnant pause

The funny thing about the last few weeks of pregnancy is that there's obvious anticipation and impatience waiting to finally meet the little person and to not feel so, what's the right word? inhabited? but there's also the realization that things are as easy as they are going to be for a long while and I should really just enjoy it. The husband has been getting up with Hudson in the mornings for a while now and it is so wonderful to be able to take my time getting my creaky bones out of bed. The husband is much better with mornings than I am, generally. He's peppy and alert and purposeful.

No segue. Too tired. Topic #2: Finding clothes for my kids is an ongoing frustration. I have these rules. I like things that are soft and stretchy because it just makes playing so much more comfortable. I want the soft and stretchy clothes to be inexpensive, but I also want to be able to wash them more than 4 times before they start to look faded and yucky. I do not like characters, or words, or emblems, or garish prints on these soft, stretchy clothes. This, it turns out, is the most challenging rule. The gods of kid's clothing design apparently have mandated that All Clothes For Children Must Be Emblazoned With Something. A princess, a dump truck, a clever turn of phrase, free advertising...and, on the topic of advertising, I find it appalling that so many clothes for little girls are just miniature versions of tarty looking teen designs. Every time I complain the husband calmly says I should do something about it. Except I can't sew. Or draw a pattern. Nor do I have an ounce of entrepreneurial spirit in my weary, whiny bones. Last week I went to go buy a couple of new things for the baby with some Christmas money and there's a brand I love called Kissy Kissy--it meets all of my qualifications except that it's bordering on obscenely expensive in my frugal world. Even on sale. I bought two things anyway. Frivolity has its place perhaps. And I'll find someone to give them to when she outgrows them in approximately five minutes. Almost the entireity of Hudson's wardrobe for the past year was given to us by our good friend Joseph, who is Harper's age. I do love recycled clothes. Especially when they abide by the rules. I think I shall go take a nap now.

Nope

My due date is one month from today and I realize that blogging lulls at this point will cause many wonderings of "has she?" So I'll try to do better. We unveiled the new kitchen here on Christmas morning and it was received with an encouraging amount of enthusiasm. We then headed to Port Neches had a good few days at my parents' house where the gift giving continued. The husband and I even went to a movie. What we'd planned to see wasn't playing anymore and we settled on "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which was so long and almost pointlessly meandering that I began to actually ache with wanting the credits to roll. AND some parent had brought their consumptive? croupy? tuberculosis-y? toddler with them (because apparently it's more important to go see a 3 hour movie on opening day than it is to actually stay home with your sick kid) and approximately every 4 minutes the poor child would launch into a wet hacking spasm of coughing which would turn the husband (who is an unapologetic germaphobe) into a writhing Howard Hughes. If I didn't know it was physiologically impossible, I'd say he held his breath through the entire 3 hours. I think he gave some serious thought to actually drinking the bottle of Purell in his pocket at one point. It was an interesting case study in group dynamics that after each of the child's episodes, several adults in the packed theater would then have spasmodic coughing episodes of their very own. Plus the theater there at the Central Mall still smells strongly of hurricane mold and other olfactory detritus. So, a fun date night for us!

I think the nesting is just about complete around here. I even washed crib sheets today and have the suitcase out and ready to pack. If Helena Jane is anything like her siblings she will show up precisely 5 days past her actual due date, but I don't want to assume.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see

Fetal test sheds light but stirs ethical debate.

It's a headline on the front page of the Houston Chronicle today. Let's see if I can choose a favorite quote: (emphases mine)

"Advocates say the test uncovers tragic conditions, allowing couples to terminate the pregnancy and spare themselves the emotionally and financially exhausting ordeal of caring for a severely disabled child."

or,
"As long as the information is reliable, a pregnant woman has a right to know as much as possible about the kind of parenting she'd face."

or,
"They (ethicists) debate whether it's a 'good or bad eugenics,' noting that before Adolf Hitler gave it a bad name, eugenics was science's hope for a better future, the answer to economic inequities and social ills."

and, then, this:
"Eighty to 95 percent of women who receive a Down Syndrome diagnosis after such screening abort, according to studies cited by the National Down Syndrome Society."

I acknowledge that I am an emotional pregnant woman. That I spent a chunk of the morning thinking about Mary in a dirty stable. That I wept through a short video at church showing me a cesspool in Sierra Leone where mothers had no choice but to get water for their children. Then rejoiced over the simple miracle of what can happen when a few people here chose to forgo expensive Christmas presents to instead build wells spouting clean water. Then heard on the radio a story Amy Grant told about singing "Breath of Heaven"while looking at the face of Cindy Parseghian, who sat in the front row and whose three kids were living with and, then, dying of a rare genetic disorder called Niemann-Pick disease. Then while I'm reading this article I have the t.v. on and there on Extreme Makeover Home Edition was this amazing family with two sweet daughters with the genetic disorder spinal muscular atrophy, which has also stricken Hannah, the beautiful daughter of my friends Lee and Eric. Can you get your head around it? Because I can't. But I know the difference between a cesspool and living water.