Sunday: a day of rest

This morning started out promising. I began coming to consciousness in my bed to the sounds of three happy, laughing children. They awaken each morning almost like a programmed clock, within minutes of the same time. I don't know how long Van has been awake when Josie and Delia begin to make noise from their cribs, but as soon as they do he goes into their room and climbs into one of their beds. At his entrance they all begin to bounce and chirp, "Hi" to each other and laugh (or on some less cheerful mornings, they cry at his invasion and try to get him to climb back out of whichever crib he has decided to empty of all contents).

Today started out with cheerful chattering and laughing, but by the time the little band had made its way to the kitchen for breakfast, the crying started. Sad, personal, wounded crying at every step. Wrong dress, wrong book, wrong look, wrong diaper, done eating, not done eating. You name it, it was the cause of back-arching, kicking, eyes full of giant pain-filled tears, and wailing. 

Every once in a while it would subside for a few minutes. But the quiet only lasted long enough for the betrayal or dissatisfaction to move efficiently from one little body to the next. Out of the blue, the previously pleasant looking child would suddenly, as if possessed, respond to some minor offense by crying or throwing his or her little body on the ground.

We only made it through part of church, and as I came home I wondered to myself if it really was that much better to even go to church if I left feeling so defeated and deflated. I mean, I don't need the scores of well-meaning widows to tell me I'm getting bigger and bigger. I know it when my pregnant body is on the floor trying to pull one of my children out from under the church pew for the fiftieth time, or when I'm carrying two of my flailing children through the hall of the crowded church. It should be a not-so-silent warning to move out of my way. But there are always those same few folks who think they can brighten the day or lighten my squirming burden by stopping me to chat and see how things are going.

Today it felt obvious. Things were not going well. It was one of those days when I hear those same words that I hear every time I choose to go out in public, "Wow, you have your hands full!" and I just want to hide under a rock. But now that they are all sleeping peacefully, there are a few things I will remember and cherish about today.

1. Taking Van to primary (the childrens' meeting at church) and seeing his little face light up when the piano started playing "Choose the Right". Then watching as he participated in the actions and the marching and the popping out of his chair whenever he heard the word "right". 

2. Hearing Delia's insistent little voice naming every object she saw and repeating it until someone confirmed her genius.

3. Sitting in the girls' dark bedroom holding them in my lap. They didn't nap well. They cried off and on through the whole thing. And when I finally went in to find them still tired and splotchy-faced, they sat on my lap and just laid on my chest. I kissed their heads over and over and whispered into their wispy hair how much I loved them. To which Josie looked up into my eyes and put her pudgy little hand on my cheek and just  held it there for a while. 

It was a rough day for all of us. I know their cries are little distress signals. I try to receive and decipher them and treat them with the gentleness and love they are asking for. Tonight I'm filled with gratitude that tomorrow is a new day and that I have the chance to recharge a little before it starts. 

Josie has an announcement to make

It's a BOY!

I think we've got just about all the girl we can handle around here.

With these two little beauties.

We are thrilled beyond words (hence the short post) to welcome another little boy into our family. Vanny has been predicting it all along.

And although I have decided not to make any final decisions about numbers while I am hormonally altered, this rounds out our little family quite nicely.

Equality

After writing the last post, I started reading backwards through some of the entries on this blog. Each one brought back memories of the event or situation that had prompted the post. It actually made me wish I could find make more time to write. It's an important way for me to process and catalog my experiences right now. Every day moves so quickly and slowly at the same time, and the contradiction makes it blurry in retrospect.

One thing I realized (again) is that many times I write about Van. I don't mean to. It's interesting because my sweet girls occupy much of my time each day. They are growing and changing so much every day that sometimes they wake up and seem older than they were a few hours before. They are learning the influence they have on the world (me) with their words and their cries and their tantrums. Van's requests are simple and consistent.

"Mama, did I want some apple juice in my Lightning McQueen cup?"
"Mama, did I want to listen to dancing music?"
and lately
"Mama, did you want to play with me in my room?"
To which the answer is always, "Yes!"

I am going to make a concerted effort to diversify my subject matter, but the last two weeks have been a relief from an issue weighing on my heart and mind for a long long time.

Van has been unique his whole life. He hit his developmental milestones, but strangely. He skipped some like pointing, clapping, and later jumping. His pediatrician once said, "I have never heard a child with intonation like his." Vanny was less than one but would speak in full sentences of jargon. His nonsense words sounded so convincingly like language that people would often look to me to translate as if I could understand.

As Josie and Delia began to develop their communication skills (both verbal and non-verbal), concerns we had with Van deepened. We recognized the significance that Delia could follow my point and retrieve a specific object, but Vanny could not. He seemed to grow increasingly frustrated with his inability to express himself, and his requests and conversation seemed limited to a template of sentences that he would rearrange to fit his need. It's been almost a year since we started seriously considering the possibility of Autism.

When I mentioned my concern, many people would say, "He's such a good boy. He plays so well on his own. He seems to speak so clearly. Kids develop so differently, and you know boys just do things at their own pace."

He does play well on his own. But he can't relate to kids his age. He doesn't know how to join in games or even really parallel play. Kids at the park often come up and ask me why he won't talk to them.

After many appointments with Dr.'s who were completely unhelpful and uninterested in anything but the bills we received, and after many nights of taking turns in tears worrying about how we could help Van live a full and meaningful life, GK and I finally feel like we're making headway.

As the daughter of two public school teachers I know the complaints about the public school system. But luckily for Van, our school district has provided unbelievably thorough evaluations and testing. Meetings with Psychologists, Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Speech Therapists and Special Education Specialists.

After two weeks of Early Intervention Preschool, I'm seeing parts of Van I wondered if I ever would. I honestly go to bed at night wondering if I'm imagining things or if he really could be making as much progress as I observe.

Rites of Passage: I

I have come to this blog a million times since August with the intention of writing. With the idea of recording and sharing what was going on in our lives. A lot has been happening.

Since perhaps the very day of the last post, I'm pregnant. So that explains, perhaps, why a new post never actually occurred. Autumn came and we temporarily stopped gallavanting all over the Western United States, and moved across town. Halloween came and went, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and New Years, and new teeth, and new toys, and a new... well you get the idea.

In spite of all of that change and experience and life, I could never jump in mid-flow, mid-nausea and get back on track. But today all that changed. Today marked a rite of passage that has come sooner than I thought it would.

Today was Vanny's first day of school.

I imagined the picture of him standing in front of our front door with his new school clothes and his new backpack grinning at the camera in his excitement. You know, the picture I've seen of every other kid on his or her first day of school. But I knew I'd never see it. Not from my boy who hates cameras.

So after a first day of school lunch at In-N-Out, we went to his classroom and I tried to capture a bit of the experience. (Partly for GK who is out of town on business, and partly to stop time for just an instant).

His cute teacher Johana took a picture of us when he suddenly got nervous, then tried to escape to the playground.

But once inside, after finding his own hook for his own backpack... He decided the classroom was as good as any playground!

Vanny is such a special boy. He is tender-hearted and curious, he loves music and people. Over the past few days we've tried to help him get excited about the prospect of school. I'm sure it will be a bit overwhelming, but I'm looking forward to seeing what he learns.

At least for today, 2:30 can't come fast enough.

*Post script: Observations on revisiting this post. 
First and most important: Van has passed the stage when going to bed with wet hair is easily solved.
Second: That leg coming out of the open car door is Mimi (GK's mom) here to save us all while GK is out of town.
Third: Vanny's backpack turned out very cute. It's even cuter than I imagined when I started out. 
Fourth: Thanks mama for the sweater. He was proud to wear it on his first day!

From Where I Sat: For Posterity

I've been told that I embellish stories. Like earlier this week when I told someone that GK is deathly afraid of being bored, and so he takes four books to the grocery store. It was an exaggeration-- though not by much.

But the story of our wedding needs no additional flourishes. It was a work of art. Or a piece or work. Or a little of both.

But first a little background:

We'd met by a modern miracle-- the online internet machine (one we don't recommend without a fair word of caution). We'd lived in Provo at the same time for several years. We attended the same concerts and lectures and plays. I acted in plays with his roommate, he hung out with my friends from the dance program. The circles intersected in a million ways, and yet, we never met.

While I was in graduate school in Denver, my brother Andrew thought I wasn't being social enough (well really, he just didn't like my last boyfriend) and he told me I should check out LDS Linkup. It really was more like a Mormon Facebook anyway, not just a "dating service".

One night, while babysitting for a friend, I got online after her kids were asleep and set up a profile. No picture, no real details, just enough to have access to the site. I began scrolling through pictures of profiles. I may have opened a couple of them just out of curiosity, but I only sent one message. To GK.

I wrote something like:
I've never done this before, but it looks like you like cool music...


And then more than slightly embarrassed, I logged off and thought, "That was weird". To my surprise, GK responded (just to be kind) and said:
Don't worry about it we're all on here. 


In my next email, I mentioned Faria Beach, my only real exposure California. As it happens, he had grown up surfing there, and had actually been there that morning.

And that's just the way it seemed to go. One conversation led naturally to the next, and our connection and curiosity grew stronger and more committed. Emails turned to phone calls turned to a decision to meet face to face. That's when he planned his trip to Denver.

We hadn't known each other long before we knew we'd like to know each other longer. I'd say it took about an hour- or less. We had two days together that weekend. Living in different states, we began to plan the summer so we could live in the same city and get to know each other a little.

Well a little time and many hours on the phone passed, we saw each other for the second time. This time involved roses and a ring on a cliff overlooking the ocean at Point Dume in Malibu. We knew it was fast, and to many seemed reckless, but ironically it felt settled, and deliberate.

Our third meeting face to face was when GK came to Denver to move me and my things to Santa Clarita for the summer. By then, it felt as if we had known each other forever. And yet, it was that deep familiarity that sometimes brought confusion, because in reality we were still strangers.

The week leading up to our wedding we spent with my family in Salt Lake. We worked on the yard, where the reception would be, GK did some work for his uncle, I worked on last minute details with my mom. And as the week progressed, GK began to get nervous. I'll let him describe his thought process and how the whole thing developed, but by the morning of our wedding he was a mess.

I could tell, by the tone of his voice, when I talked to him on the phone that morning that he was unsettled. I hoped that meeting him in the lobby of the temple would resolve it. But as he took my hand, nothing changed.

We separated and got into our wedding clothes. We sat together and spoke with the man who would officiate the wedding while our families gathered in the Sealing Room next door. When everyone had arrived and was seated, we entered the small room filled with immediate family and close friends, and knelt down at the altar facing each other. There's no procession or fanfare in a temple sealing. It's just simple and to the point.

The room was situated so that if I looked beyond GK, all my family and friends sat watching and smiling. And his family sat behind me. Having spent the summer in California, much of my family had only met GK a couple of times. Some had expressed concern at the rapidity of things, but ultimately had given their support.

We knelt, holding hands across the altar and the sweet old man began the ceremony. He came to the part where GK is supposed to respond, and there was a pause. I looked at GK, he looked at me and just waited. The silence was long and after a few moments, the sealer said, "Do you need to take a minute outside in the hall?"

GK let out a huge sigh, "Yes," and he bolted from the room. Bolted. I stayed where I was, looking into the faces of my family, knowing they were concerned and probably a little confused. My brother Andrew admitted later that he was thinking through a contingency plan. He decided, "We'll still have the party, we'll just change the playlist."

For some reason, I didn't feel any panic. It didn't seem strange or scary. I didn't wonder if he'd come back. In the relatively short time I'd known him, I knew that GK was a man of integrity. I knew that he took his promises and commitments very seriously, and I knew that marriage to me was the biggest one he'd ever made.

I let GK have a quiet moment in the hall. (Well, quiet except for the cute old ladies working at the temple who brought him soda crackers and apple juice, thinking he had just forgotten to eat.) Then, I went out to join him. I held his hand and just waited.  My respiratory therapist-cousin came out and kindly told GK that if he kept breathing like he was, he would pass out. He followed her advice, and after a few more moments, he looked at me and said, "Okay, let's do this," and he stood up and led me back into the room.

The old man started the ceremony again from the beginning. When he reached the same point, GK answered the question and dropped his head to the altar with a deep sigh of relief that the whole group, no doubt, felt. I held onto his hand and answered as well, knowing that from that moment on, we were bound together forever.

As a child, as I had imagined my wedding, I thought of movies I'd seen. I imagined gazing into my husband's eyes. I imagined swelling music, and weepy ladies with gloves and flowered hats. But movies rarely capture the fullness of reality. They certainly couldn't capture the richness of my life now.

So much has happened over the past five years. We've lived three lifetimes, and weathered our share of heartache. Three children, three states, two masters' degrees, five hospital stays later, that moment of decision, when we both said yes to this life, set the stage for miracle after miracle.

Who knows if every year of our life together will be as full of change and experience as each of the first five has been. But I wouldn't have it any other way as long as I can share it all with my best friend.

Mama

Happy birthday lady! You've accomplished a lot this year. Don't worry, you can slow down whenever you're ready.

Perhaps it's having my own babies, that makes me realize how lucky I am to have such a kind-hearted, creative, spunky, tender mama. Cause I'm starting to realize it's a tricky business.

I love you. I'm glad to be yours.

3

I don't know why it feels so momentous, but all day long I've wanted to shout out to everyone passing by, "My boy is three!"

Van's birthday last year consisted of Dr. visits, pain meds and cast signing parties.

 But this year was so different:

 This year started out with a homemade birthday donut.

 Followed by a birthday adventure taking the bus with Honey (GK) to see his first movie in a theater: Cars 2

Cruising around town waiting for the bus to come.

Then later, a birthday dinner date with Mama to the Farmer's Market where we listened to music, played on the slides, and got some kettle corn.

At this rate, being three is bound to be better than being two.

I have to admit that in spite of wanting to announce the significance of the day, I felt a little nostalgic today. For some reason, three seems awfully old, and my boy seems mighty tall.

That sweet blue-eyed baby is slipping through my fingers and his independent, creative, willful counterpart is claiming a spot in my heart.