fourteen thousand days

355: family portrait project year 3: april

That's us in our Land Rover. Except without the Land Rover. Isn't it a sweet truck? We always thought the stadium seating was great for the kids.  It even has these little windows in the roof back there to make you feel like you are not trapped in the back back.

We can't even go pet it lovingly or sit in it and pretend it's not broken because it's in Spokane, dead. We'll get a storage space for it while we wait for a new engine to be shipped over from Great Britain. I plan to phone the Queen straight away and ask that she please hurry the fuck up.

I have fond memories of test driving it thirteen years ago in Boston while I was 6 months pregnant. The dealer let us take the car without an escort, and I squealed the tires and hopped the curb as I left the lot. There was some cackling and dash slapping. It felt very Ferris.

"Relax. I'm a professional!"

It was mine for a few years, me stepping up into it to heave my babies into their seats like the squat and short person I am. But I loved it. I loved driving it, though when we had the third baby I needed something else and Rick got the Rover full time. Land Rovers aren't known for fitting three car seats adjacent. Or for keeping their oil in.

We've been a lot of places with it. About 170,000 miles of places. That's probably $42,000 in gas. Rick has had a thousand off road adventures in it with a group of people who we will always call friends. When we bought it, we fully expected to have it for at least 40 years. After a crappy bout of really bad mechanic work two years ago we are ready to forge ahead and try to save the truck. Because fifth engine's a charm, right?

For the picture, I told the kids, "You don't even have to look happy for this one". And that is some serious Oscar material right there.

See for yourself:

328 family portrait project year 3: march

This is us on the Oregon Coast right before a total family meltdown. There was another picture after the initial explosion but I like to preserve the illusion you understand.

296 family portrait project year 3: february

I know I've done a living room picture before, but this is where we were during the entire month of February. Between the girls being really sick when the weather was nice and the weather being really yucky when everyone was well, there was a whole lot of Just Dance, and our latest obsession, re-watching all our episodes of Avatar.

We are completely addicted to this show. All of us love it. We haven't watched it in years because Ellery was too young for some of the content, but now she's firebending anything that moves. So watch out.

I've been trying to be more mindful of our family rhythms this last year, keeping in mind that everything is cyclical, good and bad. It sounds so obvious, but it's not easy when you're in the thick of it. Winter is not our family's best season. We don't get snow here, and we don't usually feel like driving 4 hours round trip to be in the snow, so there's a lot of languishing, sleeping in, and getting cabin fever.  The sun has been mostly gone for months by February, and the backyard has so much slime and muck and standing water that no one is interested in stepping out.

This time of year our dining room is one of the coldest rooms in the house, so we have taken to having our dinner picnic style on the living room floor almost every night. We turn on the fire, turn on some Avatar, and cozy up. I know the importance of actual tables and not watching tv while eating, and during other family "seasons" we talk around the table or I read out loud during dinner, but this year I am approaching each month as it is for us. Just as we don't enforce a 9 pm bedtime for the kids in the middle of summer, I'm not going to be insisting on making it into the dining room every night in the dead of winter. I know that as the days get longer and warmer we will move back into those routines. Also we're running out of Avatar episodes.

265: family portrait project year 3 january

We've started our third year of our monthly pictures. I noticed that for the last three months we were just lined up in a row, convicts in a firing line. I was hoping for something different, but our location was a hurried decision and it wasn't easy, and my concentration was on not landing on my rear .

We were driving across the state, out in the middle of nowhere, in 15 degree cold with unbelievably thick freezing fog, and I saw a power station with the sun glowing through the fog in such a surreal way.  Because the camera was so far away from us I had to really run to get there on time. Through the icy snow. Without falling (though that would have made a great shot). My favorite part was my family cheering me on wildly.

234: family portrait project month 24

As soon as everyone woke up this morning I announced the agenda: make letters from tissue paper and gift boxes, get dressed, and drive out to the state park. Quick. No one argued. I love that we've been doing this for so long that no one complains anymore. Actually, no one even asks any questions anymore. Garrett was hesitant at first because he thought we were going to take the letters and stand on a corner somewhere to wave Happy New Year to people. 

Uh, no.

I asked everyone if they want to keep doing the monthly picture, and it's a unanimous yes. But it's not a baby anymore, so we have to stop telling its age in months now. Come January it will have to be Year 3, month 1.

I am ready for 2012. I'm ready to kick my own rear. I'm tired of wanting things to change, coming to the precipice and looking down into the chasm, but not really stepping over the edge. I spent 2011 making baby steps. 2012, I'm stepping over the edge. Hopefully by putting it here I won't be able to procrastinate or give up as easily. I don't want to be back here on day 599 writing about how I didn't change anything.

 

Our Family Portrait Project from the beginning:

Happy New Year!

203: family portrait project month 23

Wheeeee! We are almost to the two year mark of doing this, and I have to say I LOVE looking at the folder I have for these pictures and seeing them all together.

Thanksgiving weekend was all that it should be: family, food, lots of board games, washing each dish at least 8 times in one day, big kids staying up way too late, a little far-flung-family drama, and gravy. Our family visited for 5 days and played so much with the kids, which gave me time to cook and take care of the kitchen and house, but it also made me feel a little sad that I didn't make time to sit down and play more. Christmas, though, we will be home just by ourselves, and I plan to take more time out for them over the whole winter break.

I don't know why it doesn't occur to us to travel for Thanksgiving. The kids have only a 2 day school week, so it would be easy enough to miss those days and have a full week. It could be a new tradition. Hm, where could we go....

Hawaii? That sounds nice.

December 1st is always my Freak Out Day. I adjust the intensity of my freak out according to how much I have done for Christmas by the 1st. This year isn't so bad, but I am in the middle of making SIX quilts for six children with my friend, three for her kids and three for mine. We are nowhere near where we thought we'd be by now.  They won't be officially quilted, though; just tied. And they're not full bed size. But still. It's hard to make them with Ellery here and not in preschool. She's onto us. 

Today I dragged out the Christmas decorations and as of right now they are all sitting in boxes in the living room.  I like to put them up, but I also really like to put them away on Dec 26. I was thinking today, why is it that I can only take a month of the stockings and such around the house, but I never have trouble dealing with the candleholders that sit there the other 11 months?

Pulling the stockings out of the box, Ellery and I both looked down at them and sighed. We don't love our assigned stockings. For years I'd used a green knitted one that matched a set I bought when Garrett was 2 and Brenna was a baby. I had bought a 5th one then, just in case.  When Ellery came along, it was hers, until she got old enough to realize that it was the exact stocking that Rick uses, and in gray and burgundy, masculine colors she didn't dig at all. So I switched with her last year, giving her my beloved avocado green one and sucking it up with the boy one.

She loves Brenna's and can't have it. I love the one I gave to her. Yes, we've had these forever, and yes, they are special, but dang it, she likes pink and I like green.  Tradition is nice, but every year this bugs me. So I broke down and cruised etsy for a while until I found two really cute stockings made from cashmere sweaters. One is pink and white and the other is green and white. Mmmmm. 

But the best part of today, and all month for that matter, was the annual trip to a Christmas tree farm to pick a tree. We walked to and fro saying lighthearted Goldilocks phrases like, "oh, this one is tooooo short" and "oh, this one is toooooo tall", swinging the hacksaw, jumping over stumps, admiring the mushrooms, and maybe someone even broke out in a little song.

We swore we wouldn't get a giant tree this year. In the past, we've come home with leviathans so wide that we completely lost the use of that room for 5 weeks.

"No bigger than me," Rick said. Over and over, like a chant. A Christmas chant.

But really, any tree that was his size looked scrawny and sad. A baby tree. Who could kill a baby?

"What about this one? Put Ellery on your shoulders like you do in the living room and let's see."

He complied, and the tree that I thought would be 8 feet tall was revealed to be a 14 footer.

"No bigger than me."

I found a beautiful tree, only about a foot taller than Rick, not too wide around the base, not too bare. 

"Well, this one would be nice, but it's covered in black mildew."

"Are you sure it's mildew and not just something sprayed on the tree?"

"Either way..."

Every pretty tree had the powdery mildew. Every ugly tree was healthy and had, no lie, a four to six foot tall single spire shooting off the top. All the older trees were like that, recovering from the two years of cold, wet weather Oregon has suffered. Giving up on the promise of ambient summer heat and just giving everything they've got to reaching the actual surface of the sun.

We could have cut the spire off, but I didn't think our star topper would fit around the remaining 6 inch diameter stump.

"What about this one?"

"No bigger than me."

"What about this one? It's exactly the right height."

"It's dead."

You know how it is, out in the open, you think a tree is of a normal Christmas size until you get it into your living room and you feel like Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole. The kids' hands were numb, their feet wooden clubs, and everyone hungry and tired. The sun was setting. We thought of turning around, but the kids were pretty sad about that idea, so I thought, certainly I can find something, anything, here.

The genius solution I came up with was to pick one of the bigger, prettier, mildew-free trees and cut the base off. Genius I say! It's like taking the best part of a 14 foot tree, the pretty top, and ending up with a sweet little 7 footer. Well, after hacking two feet off the top, too. So we did that. And brought the tree home. And it looked absolutely ridiculous.

Even with all the trimming, it scraped the ceiling and bent over, the spire gouging evergreen smear marks across the orange peel texture that I am quite positive will not come off.  Taking three more feet off the bottom would make it fit in the room (with room for the star of course), but that would only leave a cylindrical middle section with no discernible top or bottom, save for the star. A bottle brush, top to bottom. God's bottle brush, right in our living room.

I was near tears. We paid $40 for this tree, and I wanted to make it work. I wanted not to hate it, because nature is imperfect and the tree was sacrificed, and even Brenna joked that Christmas isn't about perfection but love instead. But my house seriously felt like a recreated forest. I saw something moving on a branch and thought, oh, how cute, there's the usual tiny Christmas tree spider that always seems to make it inside. We let them live at the top happily because they're so tiny. But it moved again and I saw that it wasn't a micro spider but a large live thing crawling, crawling on the tree.

It was a yellow jacket.

That was pretty much it. I wasn't willing to later be surprised by a confused nest of starlings looking for their mama or a raccoon/cat fight at 2 am, so I admitted my defeat and asked Rick to take the tree back outside.

He spent another hour cutting it into pieces small enough to fit inside our 64 gallon yard waste bin, which I imagine is now stuffed.

I wish I had been able to laugh about it more, but the frostbitten noses of my children and the visual repeating in my head of the two 20 dollar bills dropping into the box made that difficult. Then again, $40 is a pretty good deal for a belly laugh, and I feel I really missed a prime opportunity.

Tomorrow is December 1st, so let the freak out begin.

174

Family portrait project month 22

Mad Scientist, The Scarecrow, the Bride of Frankenstein's Monster, light-up jack o lantern, and Robert Smith.

This may be my favorite so far.

Rick and I decided to dress up at the 11th hour. When I had my head upside down to coat every strand of hair in laquer while rubbing it all into knots, I had pleasant flashbacks to getting ready for school every morning in 1988. I'll tell you, today's spray waxes and creme pomades are crap for making your hair stick up. I begged Rick to run to the grocery store and get me some old fashioned hair spray in a can.

On Halloween afternoon I went to Whole Foods and the employees were dressed up. Most had kitty ears or a mask of some sort, but our cashier looked professionally done, right out of a movie. She was a bald, pointy eared, snow white vampire. It was amazing. She must have spent hours and hours doing it. I was gobsmacked at her fortitude. But then I recalled the half day I spent cutting pieces of packing tape and wrapping up each cut end of each chicken wire hexagon on that giant pumpkin and I knew we were of the same tribe.

Garrett almost didn't dress up and go trick or treating this year. I tried not to express my despair at this too overtly, but the crying fit I pitched on the kitchen floor might have given my feelings away. In the end, he chose a persona he had done before, the Mad Scientist, only this time he wanted a two headed animal experiement to carry around.

At the thrift store, he chose an old Build A Bear and two Sanrio pink bunny things that smell like strawberry shortcake dolls. It was a bit shocking to the girls to see me slicing the bear's head off, and when I remembered that every Build A Bear has a heart stuffed down inside it, the kids all screamed with joy/horror as I dug it out and held it up like a sacrificial prize. The moment was infinitely more delicious when we all saw the words printed on the tiny, dead heart which read "I love you".

Brenna chose an awesome costume this year from the Martha Stewart halloween issue. This is the first time she has chosen to be something Halloweenish so I was really excited. When she was 2, I dressed her as a little devil with a cape and stuffed red sequined horns. They fit her personality so well that after Halloween I sewed the horns to her regular red winter coat that she wore until spring. When we were out, people loved them, because all 2 year olds should have tiny little horns on their clothing.

The biggest expense was the makeup. I wanted her to have real, quality make up for her lips and eyes. I was not prepared for how amazing and grown up she would look. And that shade of lip stain is so perfect on her. I could never pull that off. I've always been jealous of her full lips, but it wasn't until tonight that I knew for sure that someday, when we are walking together 10 or 15 years from now, people will say, why is that poor beautiful young lady being followed by a troll? Get the troll!

Ellery wanted to be a "light-up pumpkin" like she saw Lola do in a Halloween episoide of Charlie and Lola. This is a cartoon. Make believe. I studied how Lola did it, hoping to gain some real instructional material, but what Lola did was move her giant orange paper Japanese lantern from her ceiling to over her head.

I eventually made a chicken wire form and covered it with fabric. Her "candle" is one of those push-lights you can hang anywhere, velcroed to an elastic band. Chicken wire is so hard to work with. I had no idea. After the first day my hands felt like I worked in a razor blade and lemon juice factory.
Oh, but it was worth it.

Rick wore the Scarecrow mask I made him years ago when the Batman movie came out. I should have given him a little vial of baby powder to throw in strangers' faces as we walked. People would have REALLY loved that.

When I started putting makeup on, Brenna had this look on her face that betrayed a fear that Mom might try to upstage her a little. I said, honey, don't worry; I promise you will look so much prettier. Because actually, I'm dressing up as a man.
Anyone who didn't catch who I was probably just thought I was a junkie. I told one woman I was Robert Smith and she said, "Oh yeah! From The Smiths!" Uh...

Every year I swear that I am not getting sucked in to making elaborate costumes from scratch, or I swear that I'll make the kids put something together from their own stuff if they can't find one they like in a store. Every year around October 30th I start really freaking out and making long lists of each detail that still needs finishing, because Garrett's birthday is 2 days after Halloween and it's always hectic to make sure all those ducks are in a row. And every October 31st I declare this Halloween to be the last all-homemade costume halloween ever.

But once it's all done and it's 6 o'clock and I see the kids in the costumes they wanted or designed themselves, I know that I do this not because I want to be a "perfect" mom or because I don't want to disappoint the kids, but because dressing up is something our family does year round and we can't help it. Halloween is up there on our priority list, the way other more important things are up on other families' priority lists. We take it seriously, like the Whole Foods Vampire, just without her time and budget. Other things definitely fall by the wayside during Halloween week, like clean clothes and dinner. And that's fine. They can eat in November.

142

Family portrait project month 21

We did our May picture on Rick's 40th birthday, and I had the same idea for this month's picture for my birthday. But it was a hard day, because that was when I realized our kitty needed to leave this life. So instead, here we are in our yard, in front of the big lilac bush we planted over him.

The small bush to the right of Garrett is also a lilac. The kids gave it to me for Mother's Day 2006. It doesn't look like a 5 year old lilac because we have nearly killed it four times. We planted it in our yard in Washington, and then potted it up to bring to Oregon. It struggled to survive in various places until we finally seemed to hit on a spot it likes. This year it grew some new branches and a lot of leaves. Only one flower this year, though.

The big lilac was already here when we bought the house, and was really full, but it was being slowly crowded out in shade by bigger, uglier neighbor trees. This year it made a lot of flowers but lost a lot of leaves and branches and now looks bare and sad. I'm hoping that by putting it next to the other lilac, they will stop being so ridiculous and the two of them can start behaving and earning their keep.

Losing our oldest cat was more than losing a beloved pet. It's very much a marker of our lives moving into a new era. When we adopted him from a friend, we were 23, babies, about to celebrate our first anniversary, and had recently moved into our first apartment without roomates. He was there for our second Christmas. We worked together at our minimum wage jobs on Pike's Peak, both of us shlepping fudge and shot glasses to Japanese and Appalachian tourists. Mornings were early; we had to drive to the bottom of the mountain, get into the big Suburban with fellow employees, and go another hour to the top. Before long, though, our driver was making it in 40 minutes in a twisty, hair-raising cliff-hugging bolt. Usually, we were gone from our apartment for about 12 hours a day, and we felt sorry for Felix, so we got a second kitty friend.

We have been together for more than 19 years, and during all but a little over a year of that, we have had Felix the Cat. Before kids, before real jobs, before becoming homeowners, before even growing up, we had Felix. He was the symbol of us deciding to be a family.

Life is marching along.

I remember recently sitting still for a moment and just feeling, everyone is here. All three kids are still kids, all the cats are here, my kids' childhood pets that they will remember. A very full house. No one had died yet. No one had gone to college yet. But now, we are one less, Garrett's voice is changing dramatically, our baby is in preschool, our ages no longer begin with 3s, and it's probably time for my first mammogram.

Yesterday I sat in the sun with my youngest and we played UNO. I didn't have to change her diaper, or wipe snot from her nose. Young Couple/Young Kids Life is over and something new is here. I know it will be good, but change is hard. I'll lose a few branches and leaves in the shock, but I know, there will be flowers.

112

family portrait project month 20

I'm not sure I have a lot to say about August. We're preparing for school, gearing up for birthdays, completing house projects, moving furniture around to make the house work better, measuring kid feet and being amazed, deciding what needs to be done and what can be abandoned, waiting for our tomatoes to ripen, and generally wondering what will be accidentally forgotten. Because something will be. Regular family stuff. Good stuff.

It feels like fall all of a sudden. The temperature isn't different, and it's sunny, but there is something on the breeze. It caught me by surprise a few days ago as we stepped out of a store. I love it because fall was always my favorite season before we moved to the pacific northwest. It also makes me feel panicky because I know fall in Oregon is mostly cloudy and rainy, and the "classic" crisp, blue fall sweater days are rare. Can't take anything for granted here. Except rain.

Summer didn't arrive until about four weeks ago, and it's already waning, so we are soaking it in minute by minute. We spend a lot of nights watching the kids play in the street after dark, at 10 and 11 oclock, chalk drawing or riding bikes with the neighbor kids.

School starts in five days. No one needed crayons this year. I think this is a first. Brenna has left elementary and the middle school doesn't call for crayons. Ellery's preschool asked for markers, but apparently they supply the crayons. I will manage, since I know my crayon days will return for Kindergarten.

I hope Garrett and Brenna feel that they had a good summer. I tried to put in a little more time with their friends than I usually do. We didn't go on a long distance trip, for the first time in many years. It was a lot of nothing. Just what summer should be for kids, I think. It doesn't give you much material for that first English class What I Did Over The Summer essay, but then I'd rather read an essay about planting tomatoes, playing with slugs, designing a trap alarm for bedroom doors, and drawing chalk outlines of shadows in the streetlights more than a vacation essay any day.

81

family portrait project month 19

Has it really been nineteen months since Tara and I were talking about our lack of all-family group photos and she came up with this idea? I can't say it enough: the passage of time watching children grow is fascinating and terrifying all at once. No one explains your own mortality to you quite like a child.

For almost twelve of those months I have been in weekly therapy, and I sometimes go back to month one and look at myself then, thinking how much I have changed and how much I still need to change. Have I filled the past nineteen months with living intentionally, spending time with my kids, nurturing my marriage, building up my relationships? It has been a difficut year for us, full of emotional and mental work on top of all manner of regular life teaching us that we are never in control. Let go, let go.

Let go.

We are right about in the middle of our summer break. Six more weeks of vacation from school and routine. So far, I think I've struck a good balance between having fun things to do and having a lot of open time for the kids to relearn how to not be bored. They declared boredom a few times the first two weeks. Now I never hear it.

We have been tending flowers and two tomato plants, named by Brenna to be Cora and Benji. We are making cement mosaic stepping stones. We made the decision to stay in Oregon for at least the next seven years, so that opened us up for some deeper yard work and home improvement. Also, I feel able to decorate approriately for each room, although this made it necessary for us to make some hard decisions to let go of a few big pieces of sentimental furniture that don't fit here. Let go, let go. 

Once they were gone, though, the space in the garage gave us the impetus to clean it out even more. For the first time since we've had garages, ours finally feels like a working garage instead of a storage unit. I can not believe the amount of internal energy this gives me every time I open the door.

When we started this portrait project, Garrett had just turned 12 and was struggling through 6th grade, learning hard lessons from losing classwork and homework, forgetting assignments, being disorganized, and needing me to walk him through his binder each and every afternoon. It was a tough year. Now he is anticipating his 14th birthday and moving into 8th grade, having developed his own messy yet effective (for him) system, and one day, when 7th grade was still new, he said to me, "Mom, just let me do it. I can do it." And he can. I haven't seen the inside of his binder since that day. He transcended the incessant pinballing of thoughts inside his mind enough to earn a high GPA, and I had worried that it would take a few more years. He has matured so much, and worked so hard.

Brenna was 10 and not even halfway through 4th grade. She was shy, quiet, and easily embarrassed in class. Now she is ready to start middle school, a girl who competed in the spelling bee, ran for mayor of a mock-up class town, and volunteered to give a speech to the entire 5th grade and all the parents at the end-of-year ceremony. She did this all on her own, just by deciding that she needed to. For her to self improve, intentionally, at this age just astounds me. She had a wonderful teacher this year who inspired her to grow, more than any teacher before. Grow she did. She will be 12 in another month. A young lady.

Ellery had just turned 3. In fact, it was two days after her birthday that we took our first month's picture. She still nursed at night and wore diapers. She was my baby. My little shadow. Now she is 4 1/2 and excited about preschool. She is moving into Kid World where she knows her brother and sister reside. She is still my shadow. She is the most difficult and needy of all three of our kids. She has always been this way, from the very first day she was born. Yet a few days ago, she came to me very sad and distressed after a fight with her big brother. She thought that Garrett said she had lied about something. I pulled her on my lap, and after a long hug, she told me in careful, quiet sentences that she had not lied. Tears were in her eyes and her voice was shaky.  She was not a baby or a toddler throwing a tantrum for not getting her way; she was a person whose feelings were deeply hurt by someone she loves. She is growing also, inside and outside and sideways. Whenever she says to me, "I can do it!" I do not argue.

She still throws tantrums for not getting her way. Garrett still forgets important things. Brenna still pouts the same way she did then. All three of them have altercations all day long that make me crazy and have me questioning the effectiveness of my parenting. But they are so, so different. Nineteen months different. Almost two years. We are different, too, in the way that we parent them, and in the way that we relate to each other.

I hope to keep this going. There have been a number of months where I flew in under the wire on the very last day. There have been months where I have been stretched and battered and felt like quitting because it seemed like an insignificant stress to add to my other stresses. But I am glad I didn't quit. The big kids look forward to the pictures now and add their ideas.

How long will we be able to continue this? I hope for a long time.